The New Economics of Labour Migration theory, recognizes family participation in migration decisions as a strategy for moving out of poverty, thus signaling potential welfare linkages between migrants and family members left behind. The current study investigates the impact of migration on welfare of migrant sending households in rural Zimbabwe using cross-sectional data. The study employed a Counterfactual approach and utilized two stage Heckman selection model to control for selection bias. The results indicated that on average, migration impacts household welfare positively but the welfare gains are not evenly distributed among households. Overall, the welfare of households with migrants would have been 5 percentage points lower if migrant members had stayed at home. Based on the findings, the main recommendation is that policy makers need to consider the removal of de facto and de jure migration restrictions.

When filing for personal bankruptcy, an individual can, in almost all cases, claim an exemption for retirement assets.  Using the Survey of Consumer Finances from 2007 and 2010, we test the theory that highly educated or financially sophisticated households allocate more resources to retirement assets under conditions of higher probability of filing for personal bankruptcy.  This hypothesis stems from the concept of asset sheltering, in which an individual will demonstrate a preference for assets that are exempt from a particular risk. To address our hypothesis, we run a Heckman model on the Survey of Consumer Finances data.  Our results provide evidence to match our theory for only highly educated or financially sophisticated individuals, conditional on owning retirement assets.  That is, we observe highly educated and financially sophisticated households allocate more resources to retirement accounts when they are at higher risk for bankruptcy.  Other characteristic groups do not demonstrate a similarly strong relationship between the probability of filing for bankruptcy and the level of retirement assets. / Master of Science

This thesis examines the effect of foreign nationality on the outcomes of criminal process in the Czech Republic. Foreign citizens are overrepresented by 2% compared to their share in population in all stages of the criminal process, suggesting possible discrimination by domestic authorities. Using rich case level datasets from 2005 to 2015 observed gaps are decomposed to part explained by a difference in the objective characteristics of the cases and unexplained part, suggesting possible inequality of treatment. Foreigner gaps in probability of charge, probability of conviction, probability of imprisonment, length of the sentence and probability of release from prison on parole are decomposed. Majority of observed disparities in the outcomes can be attributed to higher involvement of foreigners in more serious crimes compared to nationals. Unexplained disparities remain in probability of imprisonment and probability of release on parole, suggesting possible unequal treatment in these two outcomes.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-08T14:44:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 410234 bytes, checksum: 4c23c2bea4eb7899dddb30c83bd1fbeb (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-09-28 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The Construction Industry has gained prominence on the national scene due to its ability to generate employment, and absorb much of the disqualified labor. On that perspective, this research aims to measure the quality of formal employment and quantify the impact of schooling on income of Construction Industry workers in the states of Northeast Brazil. In order to do that, there will be built two independent, however related, essays. The first proposes the implementation of a Quality Index of Formal Employment - IQEF in order to monitor the behavior of the quality of employment in the formal labor market in this sector. The second essay aims to investigate the return of schooling in relation to the worker's salary. It will be adopted Mincer s yield equations (1974) and two estimation procedures based on empirical models. The first aims to exclude possible bias problem with selectivity and sample and was estimated based on the Heckman Model, considering that the salary depends not only on the labor supply and wages offered by the market contracted, but also on the implicit reservation wage of the agent. The second model uses Quantilic Regression technique which allows to analyze the contemporary association between the dependent variable (salary) with the explanatory variables (education and other individual characteristics) in different quantiles of the conditional distribution. The main characteristics found on this study are that, despite the growth in the number of workers, the Construction Industry did not show an evolution in the quality of formal employment in the northeastern states and that schooling has a positive and significant impact on estimates of all states the Northeast to the Heckman model. The technique of quantilic regression showed that both for workers with higher wages as for workers with lower wages the return to education is higher than the return of workers with wages close to the average. / O setor da Construção Civil vem ganhando destaque no cenário nacional devido a sua capacidade de geração de emprego, além de absorver uma boa parte da mão de obra pouco qualificada. Nessa perspectiva, esta pesquisa objetiva mensurar a qualidade do emprego formal e quantificar o impacto da escolaridade sobre o rendimento dos trabalhadores do setor da Construção Civil nos estados do Nordeste brasileiro. Para tanto, serão construídos dois ensaios independentes, porém, relacionados. O primeiro propõe a aplicação de um Índice de Qualidade do Emprego Formal - IQEF, visando acompanhar o comportamento da qualidade do emprego no mercado de trabalho formal deste setor. No segundo ensaio busca-se investigar o retorno da escolaridade em relação ao salário do trabalhador. Para tal, serão adotadas as equações de rendimento de Mincer (1974) e dois processos de estimação baseados em modelos empíricos. O primeiro busca excluir possível problema de viés com seletividade amostral e foi estimado baseado no Modelo de Heckman, considerando que o salário dependa não apenas da oferta de trabalho oferecida pelo mercado e o salário contratado, mas também do salário de reserva implícito do agente. O segundo modelo utiliza a técnica de Regressão Quantílica a qual permite analisar a associação contemporânea entre a variável dependente (salário) com as variáveis explicativas (escolaridade e outras características individuais) nos diversos quantis da distribuição condicional. As principais características encontradas nesta pesquisa são que, apesar do crescimento no número de trabalhadores, o setor da Construção Civil não apresentou uma evolução na qualidade do emprego formal nos estados nordestinos e que a escolaridade tem um impacto positivo e significativo nas estimações de todos os estados do Nordeste para o Modelo de Heckman. A técnica de Regressão Quantílica mostrou que tanto para os trabalhadores com salários mais altos quanto para os trabalhadores com os salários mais baixos o retorno da educação é superior do que o retorno dos trabalhadores com salário próximo à média.

There are many different types of non-alcoholic beverages (NAB) available in the United States today compared to a decade ago. Additionally, the needs of beverage consumers have evolved over the years centering attention on functionality and health dimensions. These trends in volume of consumption are a testament to the growth in the NAB industry. Our study pertains to ten NAB categories. We developed and employed a unique cross-sectional and time-series data set based on Nielsen Homescan data associated with household purchases of NAB from 1998 through 2003. First, we considered demographic and economic profiling of the consumption of NAB in a two-stage model. Race, region, age and presence of children and gender of household head were the most important factors affecting the choice and level of consumption. Second, we used expectation-prediction success tables, calibration, resolution, the Brier score and the Yates partition of the Brier score to measure the accuracy of predictions generated from qualitative choice models used to model the purchase decision of NAB by U.S. households. The Yates partition of the Brier score outperformed all other measures. Third, we modeled demand interrelationships, dynamics and habits of NAB consumption estimating own-price, cross-price and expenditure elasticities. The Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System, the synthetic Barten model and the State Adjustment Model were used. Soft drinks were substitutes and fruit juices were complements for most of non-alcoholic beverages. Investigation of a proposed tax on sugar-sweetened beverages revealed the importance of centering attention not only to direct effects but also to indirect effects of taxes on beverage consumption. Finally, we investigated factors affecting nutritional contributions derived from consumption of NAB. Also, we ascertained the impact of the USDA year 2000 Dietary Guidelines for Americans associated with the consumption of NAB. Significant factors affecting caloric and nutrient intake from NAB were price, employment status of household head, region, race, presence of children and the gender of household food manager. Furthermore, we found that USDA nutrition intervention program was successful in reducing caloric and caffeine intake from consumption of NAB. The away-from-home intake of beverages and potential impacts of NAB advertising are not captured in our work. In future work, we plan to address these limitations.

This dissertation is composed of three articles describing novel approaches for analysis and modeling using multivariate skew-normal and skew-t distributions in econometrics and environmetrics. In the first article we introduce the Heckman selection-t model. Sample selection arises often as a result of the partial observability of the outcome of interest in a study. In the presence of sample selection, the observed data do not represent a random sample from the population, even after controlling for explanatory variables. Heckman introduced a sample-selection model to analyze such data and proposed a full maximum likelihood estimation method under the assumption of normality. The method was criticized in the literature because of its sensitivity to the normality assumption. In practice, data, such as income or expenditure data, often violate the normality assumption because of heavier tails. We first establish a new link between sample-selection models and recently studied families of extended skew-elliptical distributions. This then allows us to introduce a selection-t model, which models the error distribution using a Student’s t distribution. We study its properties and investigate the finite-sample performance of the maximum likelihood estimators for this model. We compare the performance of the selection-t model to the Heckman selection model and apply it to analyze ambulatory expenditures. In the second article we introduce a family of multivariate log-skew-elliptical distributions, extending the list of multivariate distributions with positive support. We investigate their probabilistic properties such as stochastic representations, marginal and conditional distributions, and existence of moments, as well as inferential properties. We demonstrate, for example, that as for the log-t distribution, the positive moments of the log-skew-t distribution do not exist. Our emphasis is on two special cases, the log-skew-normal and log-skew-t distributions, which we use to analyze U.S. precipitation data. Many commonly used statistical methods assume that data are normally distributed. This assumption is often violated in practice which prompted the development of more flexible distributions. In the third article we describe two such multivariate distributions, the skew-normal and the skew-t, and present commands for fitting univariate and multivariate skew-normal and skew-t regressions in the statistical software package Stata.