published_or_final_version / Economics and Finance / Master / Master of Economics

Chapter one of this thesis examines one of the largest primary school construction program, INPRES SD, in late 1970s in Indonesia. Using the variation across regions in the number of schools constructed and the variation across birth cohorts, I show that in densely populated areas, primary school construction did not affect primary school attainment rate. More surprisingly, the program decreased secondary school attainment rate for both men and women due to a crowding out of teacher resources. Chapter two of this thesis examines how education distribution affects the marriage market, in particular, female marriage age. I first develop a two-to-one dimensional matching model with transferable utility in an OLG framework, in which the marital surplus allows complementarity between men's education and both characteristics of women: education and youth, to understand how female marriage age is affected by others' education.I then use INPRES SD as a quasi-natural experiment and find that a woman marries earlier and the spousal age gap increases when fewer women in her birth cohort graduate from secondary school and the education distribution of their potential husbands does not change.The empirical finding suggests that men's education and women's young age are complementary in generating the marital surplus in the current setting. Chapter three of this thesis examines how hukou system affects the marriage market in China. I build a bidimensional matching model in which individuals are determined by a continuous attribute (that indicates social economic status) and a discrete attribute (hukou status, either rural or urban). Urban hukou is more valuable for men than women since it's more likely for a woman to move to her husband's location upon marriage in a patrilocal society. The model gives predictions on the matching patterns which are validated using the China 2000 0.095% sample census.

Wong, Tak Yuen. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 29-30). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Literature Review --- p.6 / Chapter 3 --- The Roommate Problem --- p.8 / Chapter 4 --- The Existence of Stable Matchings --- p.11 / Chapter 5 --- Random Paths to Stability --- p.22 / Chapter 6 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.28

Huang Chong. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 31-32). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Empirical Strategy --- p.4 / Chapter 3 --- Data --- p.6 / Chapter 4 --- Empirical Results --- p.8 / Chapter 5 --- Potential Biases of Within-twins Estimates and Solutions --- p.10 / Chapter 5.1 --- Potential Biases --- p.10 / Chapter 5.2 --- Remaining Mating Effect in Within-twins Estimation --- p.13 / Chapter 6 --- Further Analysis --- p.14 / Chapter 6.1 --- Difference between Sexes --- p.14 / Chapter 6.2 --- Longer Hours or Better Paid? --- p.16 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusion --- p.17 / Appendix A Effect of Spousal Social Status --- p.19 / Appendix B Stronger cross-productivity when a couple work in same occupation? --- p.21 / Tables --- p.23 / References --- p.31

This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first chapter, I investigate the effect of long-term income shocks that affect only one side of the marriage market in India. The asymmetric shock is due to two factors - (1) a jobs-based affirmative action program that affects the occupations and wages of a group of castes that were historically against, with a strict upper age limit on eligibility and, (2) a social norm that determines which member works outside the household. The program results in a differential positive income shock for young men in the treated group. The income shock is found to affect the marriage market in several ways. First, there is no effect on the marriage rate of treated men. However, conditional on marriage, treated men pair up with spouses that have higher educational attainment, are taller, and have a higher BMI. They are also more likely to marry outside their own community. Second, treated women are overall less likely to marry, and their choice of spouse is unaffected conditional on marriage. Finally, controlling for observables, treated husbands are found to have greater decision making power within the households that are formed. There is no significant effect for treated wives. A structural model of the marriage market based on Choo and Siow (2006) is used to investigate the aggregate marital welfare effects of the policy. The estimates find that up to 80% of the benefit of the affirmative action policy accrues to men within the treated group. These findings suggest that (1) a larger share of the welfare gains from affirmative action policies accrue to the household member that actually receives them, and (2) that the marriage market is one mechanism through which the distribution operates, in addition to the intra-household bargaining process that is standard in the literature. In the second chapter (joint with Ashna Arora, Rakesh Banerjee and Siddharth Hari), we study the political economy of public service delivery. Local governments in developing countries play a crucial role in the provision of local public goods and the functioning of social welfare programs. This chapter investigates the relationship between the size of elected local government councils and public service delivery. We use a natural experiment from India, where the number of politicians at the village level is an increasing, discontinuous function of village population. We set up a regression discontinuity design to study the impact of a larger elected council on the targeting of welfare schemes as well as the allocation of private benefits by politicians to themselves. We find that larger councils improve access to a large scale workfare program, especially for traditionally disadvantaged communities. We also find that increasing the number of council members increases appropriation of private benefits by the council head but not by ordinary members. These results have implications for policy design. In the third chapter (joint with Ritam Chaurey), we investigate the relative effects of manager supervision on different types of labor. Across a large cross section of firms, we find that managers spend more time in supervisory roles when a larger share of contract labor is employed. This finding is then established causally using a differencein- differences approach, exploiting variations in labor regulations across Indian states and rainfall-driven demand shocks. Using the causal approach, we find that (i) there is no significant change in total management input in response to short run demand shocks, suggesting that the institutional factors of the market for managers has larger search/firing costs than that for industrial workers. However, (ii) managers are observed to spend more time in supervisory roles when relatively more contract labor is employed in response to demand shocks. Contrary to the literature, we also find that (iii) there is no productivity change when there is an influx of contract labor. These findings suggest that there are complementarities between manager supervision and contract labor input, even relative to other types of labor, and that the manner of deployment of management capital within a firm is endogenous, conditional on the total amount.These findings could account for one of the features that is widely observed in empirical studies - firms in regions with strong employee protections have lower steady state productivities.

This dissertation examines how matching -- in marriage markets and labor markets -- can change under certain market circumstances and under different information provisions. The first two chapters analyze marriage market, with a particular focus on the impacts of cross-border marriage in marriage markets. Given the severely male-biased sex ratios in many Asian countries including China and India, demands for foreign brides are expected to grow in the near future. In the first chapter, I theoretically investigate the impacts of cross-border marriage on marital patterns and surplus division of couples. I use a frictionless transferable utility matching framework to analyze how cross-border marriage affects matching patterns and marital shares for couples. In the second chapter, I test the model's predictions, focusing on Taiwan (a wealthier side with male biased sex ratios) and Vietnam (a poorer side with balanced sex ratios in the marriage market). I find that cross-border marriages are predominantly made up of Taiwanese men and Vietnamese women; Taiwanese men are selected from the middle level of the socioeconomic status distribution, and Vietnamese women are positively selected. Moreover, cross-border marriage significantly affects men and women who stay in their own countries without engaging in cross-border marriage, by altering marriage rate, matching partners, and intra-household allocations within the households. My results suggest that changes in trade and immigration policies can have far-reaching implications on marital outcomes and women's bargaining power. The third chapter investigates job and jobseeker matching in labor market. Specifically, it explores whether inaccurate expectations of job seekers about their competitiveness contribute to poor job matching in developing countries. We utilize the largest online job portal in the Middle East and North Africa region to evaluate the effect of an intervention providing information about own competitiveness to job applicants. Providing information about the relative fit of an applicant's background for a particular job causes job seekers to apply for jobs that are better matches given their background. The effects of information are the largest among entry-level workers with higher levels of education, who generally face the highest unemployment rates in the region. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that changes over time in demand for skills in the job market may lead to inaccurate expectations that hinder labor market matching. Improving the efficiency of online job search may be particularly welfare-enhancing in the Middle East and North Africa region given that the young, highly-educated subpopulation that faces the greatest labor market hurdles also has the highest level of internet connectedness.

This thesis consists of a short introduction and three self-contained chapters. Chapter 1 develops a model of intra-household specialization and human capital formation for couples, taking into account of assortative sorting on income potentials in the marriage market. I assume people are matching on potential wage growth rates which differ across individuals and are realized through actual work experiences. The model is estimated by a simulated minimum distance estimator with PSID data from 1968 to 2011. I find there is strong positive assortative matching on wage growth rates, which helps explain the correlated wage growth residuals of married couples. If matching is switched to random, there will be more variation in household specialization arrangements and higher observed wage growth rates. The estimated elasticity of substitution between market goods and home production is approximately 0.37. Husband's time and wife's time turn out to be complements in the home production function. Chapter 2 studies a marriage market with two-sided information asymmetry in which the gains from marriage are stochastic. Contracts specify divisions of ex-post realized marital surplus. I first study a game in which one side of the matching market offers contracts, and then study a social planner's problem, finding necessary and sufficient conditions for a truthful direct revelation mechanism to achieve matching efficiency. These conditions become more stringent as the number of agents in the matching market increases. Chapter 3 examines the relationship between women's preference towards marriage and her marital outcomes. I propose using the mother's marital status as a proxy for her daughter's ex-ante preference towards marriage. Using 1980 and 2008 U.S. Census data, I estimate the impact of women's preference towards marriage and their educational attainments on their probability of getting married, and with Heckman correction, the impact on their husbands' earnings conditional on being married.

Chow Shing Yuk. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-66). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2: --- Literature Review --- p.4 / Chapter 2.1 --- First-Generation Studies --- p.4 / Chapter 2.2 --- Second-Generation Studies --- p.5 / Chapter 2.3 --- Third-Generation Studies --- p.7 / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Empirical Methodology --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1 --- Fixed Effect Estimation --- p.13 / Chapter 3.2 --- Within-twin Differencing --- p.14 / Chapter 3.3 --- Adjustment for Measurement Errors --- p.15 / Chapter 3.4 --- Value of Within-twin Differencing --- p.16 / Chapter Chapter 4: --- Data Descriptions --- p.29 / Chapter 4.1 --- Twins Data --- p.29 / Chapter 4.2 --- Non-twins Data --- p.32 / Chapter Chapter 5: --- Empirical Results --- p.35 / Chapter 5.1 --- Cross Sectional Results: Twins Sample --- p.35 / Chapter 5.2 --- Within-twin Differencing --- p.42 / Chapter 5.3 --- Cross Sectional Results: Non-twins Sample --- p.45 / Chapter 5.4 --- Female Results --- p.48 / Chapter Chapter 6: --- Conclusion --- p.50 / Tables --- p.52 / Appendix l: Some Other Thoughts on Marriage Premium --- p.60 / References --- p.64

by Lee Pik-shuen. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-62). / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS --- p.i / ABSTRACT --- p.ii / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iv / LIST OF TABLES --- p.vi / Chapter / Chapter I. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Chapter II. --- LITERATURE REVIEW --- p.4 / Chapter 2.1 --- Marriage Pay Differentials --- p.4 / Chapter 2.2 --- Age at Marriage and Earnings --- p.11 / Chapter III. --- MARRIAGE AND EARNINGS --- p.16 / Chapter 3.1 --- A Simple Analysis of Marital Status in Hong Kong --- p.17 / Chapter 3.2 --- Regression Analysis for Marriage Effects on Earnings --- p.20 / Chapter 3.3 --- Regression Analysis for Cross-productivity Effects on Earnings --- p.29 / Chapter 3.4 --- Cross-productivity Effects upon Earnings for Couples Working in the Same Industry vs. Couples Working in Different Industries --- p.33 / Chapter 3.5 --- Further Analysis of Couples Working in the Same Industry: Cross- Productivity Effects on Earnings for Managerial Class Couples vs. Non-managerial Class Couples --- p.37 / Chapter 3.6 --- Cross-productivity Effects upon Earnings for Couples Working in the Same Field vs. Couples Workingin Different Fields --- p.41 / Chapter 3.7 --- Further Analysis of Couples Working in the Same Field: Cross-Productivity Effects on Earnings for Managerial Class Couples vs. Non-managerial Class Couples --- p.43 / Chapter IV. --- WAGE AND AGE AT MARRIAGE --- p.48 / Chapter 4.1 --- Regression Analysis of Wage Effect on Age at Marriage --- p.48 / Chapter 4.2 --- Regression Analysis of Marriage Duration Effects on Wage Rate --- p.51 / Chapter 4.3 --- Regression Analysis of Marriage Effect on Wives' Labor Supply --- p.54 / Chapter V. --- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS --- p.58 / REFERENCES --- p.61 / TABLES --- p.63

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