Is avocado toast the reason that I am still living with my parents? In other words, does the consumption of avocado toast, or more specifically eating out in general, have any impact on one’s ability to be a homeowner. In May of 2017, an Australian real estate developer by the name of Tim Gurner was asked to provide advice to young people who could not afford to purchase a home. He responded by saying, “when I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” (Victor, 2017). While the claim may appear to be laughable at first glance, this is not the first time that statements such as this have been made. The United States Census Bureau tells us that annual homeownership rates for individuals under the age of 35 has been on the steady decline. Additionally, per Goldman Sachs, it is known that the percentage of adults age 18-31 that were married and living in their own homes has decreased from 56% in 1968 to 23% in 2012. This paper assesses and compares the spending habits of different generations, working to discern if there are notable differences particularly between Millennials and other generations. Data sets from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) and Zillow between the years 2000-2013 were examined. Although there is not data on avocado toast specifically, it is possible to broaden the hypothesis to examine the expenditures on the consumption of meals prepared away from home. For the purpose of this study, I take Tim Gurner’s statement and apply it more broadly to the idea of spending money on the experience of eating out. The results show that the consumption of avocado toast, defined as money spent on meals prepared away from home, does not have an impact on whether an individual owns a home, nor is it an indicator as to whether they will be renters or living with their parents. Rather, the results indicate that owning a home leads to consuming more avocado toast. This means that although it is commonly perceived that Millennials are consumers as opposed to savers, their inability to afford home ownership does not have any direct connection to their spending habits on avocado toast, and more broadly, eating out in general.

Venture capital finances high-risk, high-return projects. In addition to financing, venture capitalists provide advice and expertise in management, commercialization, and development that enhance the value, success, and marketability of projects. Venture capitalists also have skills in selecting projects with potentially high returns. The first chapter investigates the contracting relationship between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in a setting where the venture capitalist and entrepreneur contribute intangible assets (advice and effort) to a project that are non-contractible and non-verifiable. In general, in the private market equilibrium, advice provided by the venture capitalist and the number of projects funded are lower than the social optimum. Government tax and investment policies may alleviate these market failures. The impact of a capital gains tax, a tax on entrepreneur’s revenue, an investment subsidy to venture capitalists, and government run project enhancing programs are evaluated. Finally, we analyze the effects of a government venture capital firm competing with private venture capital. The second chapter focuses on competition in venture capital markets. We model a three-stage game of fund raising, investment in innovative projects and input of advice and effort, where fund raising is used as an entry deterrence mechanism. We examine the impacts of taxes and subsidies on venture capital market structure. We find that a tax on venture capitalist revenue and a tax on entrepreneur revenue increase the likelihood of entry deterrence and reduce the number of projects funded in equilibrium. A subsidy on investment reduces the likelihood of entry deterrence and increases the number of projects funded. The third chapter examines the venture capitalist's choice of investment in project selection skills and investment in managerial advice. We model, separately, a private venture capitalist and a labour-sponsored venture capitalist (LSVCC) with different objectives. A LSVCC is a special type of venture capitalist fund that is sponsored by a labour union. The private venture capitalist maximizes its expected profits, while the LSVCC maximizes a weighted function of expected profits and returns to labour. Consistent with empirical evidence, the quality of projects, determined by project selection skills and managerial advice, is higher for the private venture capitalist.

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Thesis advisor: Arthur Lewbel / The dissertation consists of three essays on different aspects of the collective household models in the household economics literature. The first essay estimates a collective household model for evaluating the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) among older households. I use longitudinal Homescan data to identify SNAP-eligible food. I find that husbands have relatively stronger preferences for food than wives, and that household demand is affected by bargaining power (i.e., control over resources) within households. Failure to account for this difference in preferences and control leads to underestimates of older couples' total food demand, and of their implied response (at both intensive and extensive margins) to a counterfactual experiment of replacing SNAP with a cash transfer program. I find that most eligible older households spend more on SNAP-eligible food than would be allowed by their SNAP benefits. Their spending patterns suggest that their poor diet is mainly due to low income rather than tastes. Overall these findings imply that a SNAP comparable cash transfer can be an effective tool to achieve the goals of the SNAP program. The second essay is joint work with my advisor Arthur Lewbel. We first prove identification of coefficients in a class of semiparametric models. We then apply these results to identify collective household consumption models. We extend the existing literature by proving point identification, rather than the weaker generic identification, of all the features of a collective household (including price effects). Moreover, we do so in a model where goods can be partly shared, and allowing children to have their own preferences, without observing child specific goods. We estimate the model using Japanese consumption data, where we find new results regarding the sharing and division of goods among husbands, wives, and children. The third essay is a joint paper with Tomoki Fujii. We study the intra-household inequality in resource allocation and bargaining within Japanese couples without children. We exploit a unique Japanese dataset in which individual private expenditures, savings, and time use information are available. From the data, we find that on average, the husband enjoys 1.5 times more purely private expenditures than the wife. However, the data only provides resource allocation on purely private expenditures, while 68 percent of household expenditures are devoted to the family, i.e., joint expenditures. We refer to the collective household literature in order to recover the unobserved sharing of total household expenditures, including both private and public goods. We find that the model-predicted sharing pattern is moderately consistent with the individual expenditure data. However, the intra-household inequality would be underestimated if we only use the sharing in purely private expenditures from the data. We find that Japanese wives are relatively disadvantaged to their husbands, no matter in purely private expenditures, total household expenditures, or gains from marriage. The findings in this paper provides certain external validity in terms of the collective household model of consumption, which we argue should be widely adopted in analyzing individual welfare in multi-person households. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

In the study of Oregon politics, the importance of developments in the early twentieth century have been largely overlooked by popular historians. As a result, many have lost the perspective of the sweeping reforms that reformers presented to Oregon's electorate. Another complicating factor is that voters dealing with the issues during the period had such disparaging attitudes towards some of the reforms, that no thought was given to preserving their memory for future generations. In addition, the personal papers of W. S. U'Ren, Oregon's leading reformer, are not available. This makes perspective even more difficult. Therefore, the research problem is basically attempting to place all the proposed reforms in perspective with one another and arriving at an idea of exactly what the reformers had in mind. The data used for the thesis, W. S. U'Ren and the Fight For Gov­ernment Reform and the Single Tax: 1908-1912, was found in the personal papers of George Chamberlain, in newspapers, pamphlets, other theses, and official Oregon State publications. George Chamberlain's papers are found in the Oregon Historical Society, and provide valuable in-sight into the election year of 1908. The use of newspapers presented a problem, because many of them were antagonistic toward U'Ren's efforts. To balance the view, the Oregon City Courier was closely scrutinized because it was the most objective in dealing with reformer's proposals. Pamphlets were found in the Multnomah County Library, the Oregon Historical Society Library, and in the Oregon State Library. They provided insights into the thinking of both reformers and counter­-reformers. Both the pamphlets and the newspapers, especially the Courier, aided in sensing the mood of people. The Oregon Grange yielded information on the mood of farmers, an important part of the electorate, through records of state Grange sessions. The theses, found in the Oregon Historical Society, that contained interviews with people who worked with U'Ren were the most valuable. Records of the legislature and the tax commission, found in the Oregon State Library, were of importance in gaining a view of the opposition to reform. W. S. U'Ren presented reforms which, if carried out, would have greatly altered Oregon government and economy. In studying them, they appear to be workable, while placing more power in the hands of the people. Whether they actually would work is impossible to know. The study does point to a sweeping program that the reformers had in mind that would have given every individual the opportunity to develop to the highest possible point, while eliminating crime and poverty. The inference is given that if Oregon adopted all the tax and governmental reforms that the reformers presented, the entire nation would follow the example. At that time, there was a widespread belief that as Oregon went, so went the nation. Oregon's electorate only went part of the way with W. S. U'Ren and his supporters. The greatest factor in this is that money and corruption persuaded Oregon's farmers that the reforms would make them slaves to the government. This was simply not the objective of the reformers. In fact, the opposite was true. They wanted to free farmers from control by business and government.

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The following Market Analysis is an analysis of the Franklin Boulevard Redevelopment Project Area. The analysis is divided into the following four sections: ♦ Planning Context ♦ Real Estate Market Conditions ♦ Emerging Market Opportunities & Case Studies ♦ Conclusion The report serves as an opportunity to aide stakeholders of the Franklin Boulevard Redevelopment Project Area. Stakeholders include residents, business owners, the City of Sacramento, County of Sacramento, Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency (SHRA), and the North Franklin District Business Association (NFDBA). The stakeholders are continually searching for data and creative examples of how to transform the area into a premier “urban” destination in the Sacramento Region.

This paper explores the concept of well-being both in theoretical and practical applications. When it comes to well-being policy, it is apparent that the government’s goal ought to be to maximize the well-being of the citizens within that particular society. In order to do so effectively, there must be a foundational understanding both of the concept of well-being itself, as well as how it functions in application. I argue that preference-based approaches to well-being, which often emply GDP as a key metric, fail to adequately reflect the well-being of a nation’s citizens. I suggest that the Capabilities Approach offers a superior approach to well-being both in theory and in practice. Though it is possible that there are other equal or better options, I find that the Capabilities Approach successfully reaches the genuine depths of a person’s well-being without allowing for one individual’s well-being to impede on another’s. While it is evident that the capabilities approach still faces a number of hurdles and room for development, I hope to have argued that it is a step forward from traditional as well as subjective approaches to well-being. With further research and development, it is evident that this shift will allow for development decisions that are unbiased, equally considering the interests of all citizens, and thus a step forward towards truly increasing the well-being of humans throughout the world.

This collection of essays examines the impact of two antecedents of household food consumption: SNAP and habit formation to nutrients. Household food choice invariably plays a substantial role in health outcomes such as obesity. Low-income households may be especially vulnerable to obesity as they face a more restricted set of food choices due to income constraints and may have less information on healthy eating relative to high-income households. This dissertation unravels this dynamic by providing causal estimates of the effect of two major determinants of food choice. Chapter 2 and chapter 3 test the impact of SNAP participation on consumption of foods that are likely to cause obesity. With some exceptions, SNAP restricts benefits to be spent only on unprepared grocery food items from participating retailers. Chapter 2 considers the broad category of Food Away From Home (FAFH) which is shown to be less healthy than meals prepared at home and shows that SNAP significantly reduces FAFH expenditure of participants. However, the magnitude of this decrease is not large enough to have a tangible impact on obesity. Chapter 3 considers household expenditure on carbonated soda, which is the key source of sugar intake among low-income households. Not only is carbonated soda SNAP-eligible, it is cheaper when purchased with SNAP benefits relative to cash because benefits are exempt from all sales taxes. Results show that SNAP participation leads to a significant rise in carbonated soda sales in low-income counties. I also find that the SNAP tax exemption does not lead to higher consumption among participants relative to non-participants. Chapter 4 tests habit formation to dietary fat using purchases of ground meat and milk products. Products in both categories have salient fat content information on the packaging. Products within each category differ only by fat content and are usually identical otherwise. Differences in habit formation are, therefore, caused by different levels of fat content. Results show a positive association between habit formation and fat content for all products in the ground meat category and all products, except fat-free milk, in the milk category. However, this relationship is modest leading to the conclusion that policy interventions, such as a saturated fat tax, might be effective in discouraging consumption of high fat products.

Shanghai’s residential property prices have been consistently rising for the past decade. Both the municipal and national governments have announced a series of alternately restrictive and encouraging house purchasing policies that aimed at adjusting housing prices. This paper studies all of the policies announced from January 2011 to October 2016. Using residential house price data of houses of different sizes and in different locations, this paper shows that two out of the six restrictive policy events achieved their intended negative impact on housing prices, while two out of four encouraging policy events delivered their intended positive impact. When aggregated, encouraging policies had a significant impact and restrictive policies did not.