This dissertation contains two chapters on law and economics and one chapter on international trade. An important but under-researched issue for medical malpractice (med-mal) litigation is how physicians' previous medical malpractice experiences affect their behaviour. Using Florida data on closed med-mal claims, I find that if physicians have prior paid claims, their current litigation is resolved faster and is associated with less cost. Having a prior payout does not significantly predict the likelihood or the amount of the current payout. This suggests that ``learning'' occurs as a result of prior med-mal experience. As a theoretical motivation, I developed a dynamic version of the divergent expectations (DE) litigation model. The model predicts, consistent with the data, that physicians have a more realistic analysis of med-mal litigation if they have prior experience. Many robustness checks are carried out to test the results, including using a fixed effect framework, to which the results are robust. In the second chapter, we investigate the impact of ``duty to settle'' rule in predicting patterns in data. Prior models and studies of settlement ignore the insurer's ``duty to settle'' -- the obligation to settle within policy limits if it would be unreasonable to refuse a within-limits settlement offer. We incorporate the duty to settle into a structural model of settlement of medical malpractice claims, and then estimate the model using maximum likelihood methods applied to a Texas closed claims database. Both the data and our model predict: a mass of cases with a settlement demand by the plaintiff exactly at limits; a smaller but still sizeable mass of cases with settlement exactly at limits; very few above-limits payments by insureds; and when above-limits payments are made, they are often by insurers. The model does a reasonable job in predicting data moments, including fractions of cases settled at limits, settled above limits, and tried. Using the model in counterfactual analysis, we predict: (i) with no duty to settle, more cases will be tried; (ii) with strict insurer liability for not settling within limits, there will be fewer trials and more above limits payments by insurers; and (iii) the duty to settle will rarely cause insurers to pay more than the expected value of claims. The third chapter of this dissertation is on international trade. There is a well established literature on the impact of sovereign debt renegotiation on bilateral trade, including Rose (2005) among others. However, there is no study that disentangles impacts of renegotiation on the intensive and extensive margins, where the former is the trade volume of established bilateral trading relationships and the latter is the number of established relationships. This study employs the UNComTrade dataset and debt renegotiation data from the Paris Club for over 150 countries in order to address the impact of a debt renegotiation on the extensive margin of trade. This paper finds that bilateral trade volume declines following a sovereign debt renegotiation. The result is robust to the use of trade lags as instrumental variables to address endogeneity. Consistent with the trade literature, this study documents a negative impact of a debt renegotiation on the trade value using the Tobit approach in a fixed effect model, to appropriately handle censored data. Interestingly, a comparison between the marginal impacts of a debt renegotiation on the extensive and the intensive margins shows that the former effect has at least the same magnitude as the latter. / text

L'attention est une ressource rare. Cette étude examine comment l'attention limitée des utilisateurs affecte le marché de la publicité sur Internet. J'analyse pour celà le marché coréen des moteurs de recherche et présente une estimation structurelle de la demande de bannières publicitaires qui tient compte de l'attention limitée des utilisateurs. Le modèle théorique qui sous-tend cette estimation suppose que l'attention des utilisateurs est distribuée de manière hétérogène.Dans ce cadre, je montre qu'une plateforme en monopole tend à diffuser trop d'annonces et que la probabilité que les messages publicitaires atteignent leur cible depend des caractéristiques des utilisateurs et des sites Web.Un modèle de choix discret à coefficients aléatoires est utilisé pour estimer la fonction de demande des utilisateurs. Les deux fonctions de demande et la fonction de profit des plateformes permettent de déduire le taux de marge. Celui-ci comprend trois composantes: un effet de réseau du côté utilisateur, un effet de congestion et l'indice de Lerner.Les modèles d'estimation sous forme réduite sont discutés en guise d'introduction.Ils semblent révéler l'existence d'un phénomène de congestion de l'information sur le marché des moteurs de recherche coréens.L'estimation structurelle que je met en oeuvre consiste tout d'abord à simuler la probabilité qu'un utilisateur prête attention à un message publicitaire posté sur un site Web. Cela permet, dans un second temps, d'indentifier dans quelle mesure la congestion de l'information affecte la demande de publicité.Le modèle estimé permet de prédire la probabilité qu'un message publicitaire donné soit perçu par les utilisateurs d'un site Web. Cette probabilité varie de 0,19 à 0,58 selon les sites et varie egalement selon le sexe, l'âge et le niveau de l'éducation des utilisateurs. Une augmentation de 1% du nombre d'annonces affichées sur une page Web se traduit par une baisse de 0,06% de la probabilité qu'un message publicitaire soit perçu par les utilisateurs.La demande des usagers estimée révèle que la publicité est une nuisance pour 92.17% des utilisateurs. En estimant la demande de publicité, je conclus que l'externalité liée à l'attention limitée des utilisateurs constitue un déterminant important du taux de marge des plateformes.L'étude enfin montre que le niveau de publicité sur les sites Web est systématiquement en dessous du niveau optimum social, ce qui implique que le pouvoir de marché dont bénéficient les sites conduit à une restriction du nombre de bannières publicitaires qui va au-delà de ce qui serait socialement optimal, compte tenu de l'externalité négative que constitue la congestion de l'information. Cela se traduit par une augmentation du surplus des annonceurs mais par une baisse du surplus social (perte sèche).J'effectue enfin une expérience contrefactuelle sur l'impact des logiciels de blocage de publicité. Cette experience révèle que la generalisation de tels logiciels réduit les niveaux d'annonce, parce que la valorisation des utilisateurs par une plateforme correspond au nombre moyen de messages publicitaires qu'ils perçoivent. Ces resultats soulignent que la prise en compte du phénomène de congestion de l'information est essentielle dans l'estimation des demandes de contenus audiovisuels et d'espace publicitaire. / Attention is a scarce resource. This study investigates the problem of the limited consumer's attention span and its impact on Internet advertising markets. For this, I explore Korean search engine market and present a structural model of the demand for the display advertising where the limited attention of website users is considered.The theoretical model assumes that the users' attention is distributed heterogeneously in constructing advertising demand.I show that the monopoly platform would send excessive messages in this setting and that the probability of message process differs by characteristics of users and websites.A random-coefficient discrete choice model is used to formulate the user demand function. Having two demand functions at hand, a markup is derived from the platform's profit function and is shown to have three components: Lerner's index, a network effect from user side, and the congestion effect.The reduced-form estimation models are, then, discussed. These estimations are to explore the market characteristics and to find preliminary evidences of the information congestion in Korean Internet search engine market.For the structural estimation, I simulate the probability that a user pays attention to a message posted on the website. This, in turn allows me to identify the extent to which information congestion affects the advertising demand.The estimated model enables me to predict a probability that a message is seen by a user of one particular website in a given month. The probability ranges from .19 to .58 across websites and it depends on gender, age, and education level of website users. I also find that 1% increase in ad level drops 0.06% of user's message process.I separately estimate the user demand function and find that advertising is a nuisance for 92.17% of users. Using estimates from both demands, I find that the externality from the limited attention is an important determinant of the platform's markup.The study shows that the ad level on a website is systematically below the social optimum level, implying that the website's market power leads to a decrease in quantity beyond what would be socially optimal in view of the negative externality from information congestion.The corresponding deadweight loss and the surplus gain for the society are estimated.I perform a counterfactual experiment on the impact of introducing ad avoidance options on websites. From the experiment, I find that ad levels decrease in the share of ad-avoiders because the platform's valuation on users rises in average attention. These results may stress the importance of users' limited attention in the demand estimation of monopoly media markets.

Ce travail de doctorat explore les conséquences des activités de recherche d’emploi sur trois aspects de l’économie : la qualité des emplois à travers l’appariement entre les travailleurs et les entreprises, les contrastes géographiques en matière de chômage, et la croissance des salaires au cours de la vie. / This PhD dissertation explores the consequences of search activities on three dimensions of the economy: the quality of jobs through the matching between workers and firms, the geographical disparities in unemployment, and the wage growth over the life cycle through job mobility.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(経済学) / 甲第18638号 / 経博第500号 / 新制||経||271(附属図書館) / 31552 / 京都大学大学院経済学研究科経済学専攻 / (主査)教授 照山 博司, 教授 柴田 章久, 准教授 敦賀 貴之 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Economics / Kyoto University / DGAM

<div>This dissertation consists of three chapters regarding labor economics. The first chapter studies the relative preference men and women have for working with coworkers of the same or opposite sex. The second chapter develops a conceptual framework for estimating the distribution of perceived returns to investments conditional on observed characteristics. The third chapter applies the methods described in the second chapter to estimate perceived returns to college and discusses policy implications.</div><div><br></div><div>The first chapter analyzes the effect of occupational gender composition on job-specific labor supply for workers of each gender. I construct a static model of job selection wherein preferences regarding coworker gender composition produce gender-specific compensating differentials. I estimate the model to identify the underlying coworker gender preference parameters. Based on estimated compensating differentials, men's preference is highest for occupations that are 60% female and lowest for female-dominated occupations. Women prefer jobs that are female-dominated, and are least satisfied with jobs that are 25% male all else equal.</div><div><br></div><div>The second chapter describes a conceptual framework for inferring agents' perceived returns to college by exploiting the dollar-for-dollar relationship between perceived returns and tuition costs in a binary choice model of college attendance. This approach has four attractive features. First, it provides estimates of perceived returns in terms of compensating variation, which directly inform financial policies that seek to (dis)incentivize the investment. Second, it provides very fine continuously-heterogeneous estimates conditional on a large set of observed characteristics, allowing for differential predictions for how selective, well-publicized policies are likely to affect different types of individuals. Third, because it obtains type-specific perceived returns distributions instead of point elasticities, it provides differential predictions for the effects of type-specific financial interventions depending on the magnitude of the intervention. Finally, the estimates are obtained assuming rational expectations only on prices (one component of returns) rather than on returns as a whole.</div><div><br></div><div>The third chapter applies the method described in the second chapter to estimate perceived returns to college using NLSY79 data. Estimating the model using both maximum likelihood and moment inequalities, I find that the scale of the distribution of perceived returns is an order of magnitude lower than past work has found when assuming rational expectations on income returns. The low variance I find in perceived returns implies high responses to financial aid. I predict a 2.6 percentage point increase in college attendance from a $1,000 universal annual tuition subsidy, which is consistent with quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of tuition assistance on college attendance. Adapting the difference-in-difference estimation performed by Dynarski (2003) on the effect of the Social Security Student Benefit to the current setting, I find that the policy increased perceived returns to college by $23,800, compared to an average aid amount of $6,700 per year ($26,800 per four years) (year 2000 dollars). Using the estimated distribution of perceived returns, I perform a counterfactual policy experiment that induces a set percentage of the population to attend college at minimal cost to the government.</div>

À la suite des réformes successives de la Politique Agricole Commune (PAC), les soutiens publics par des prix ont diminué au profit de soutiens directs aux revenus agricoles. Cela a exposé les agriculteurs français à une grande volatilité des prix, reconnectés avec les prix mondiaux.Cette thèse mesure l'évolution de la productivité de l'agriculture française dans un modèle dynamique stochastique en intégrant la récente augmentation de la volatilité des prix. Nous étudions le lien dynamique entre le risque de prix, les décisions des agriculteurs et la productivité dans le cadre de l'estimation structurelle. La revue de la littérature présentée dans le chapitre 2 décrit la productivité comme un résidu et souligne les problèmes de mesure des données du capital et le problème de l’endogénéité dans l’estimation primale.Le chapitre 3 compare les méthodes numériques permettant de résoudre et d'estimer les modèles d'équilibre général dynamique stochastique (DSGE) ou de type DSGE, dans lesquels le capital et la productivité sont des variables d'état. Le chapitre 4 estime la productivité dans un modèle dynamique stochastique en utilisant l'approche d'entropie maximale généralisée (GME). Nous trouvons que la croissance de la productivité de l’agriculture française a diminué après la réforme de la PAC, à cause de l'augmentation de la volatilité des prix. En effet, le risque de prix impacte la productivité négativement à travers les choix de production, de consommation, d’investissement et d’emprunt des agriculteurs. Le chapitre 5 simule les impacts de marché des instruments de la P / The EU has adopted many reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the past decades. Price support has decreased, and decoupled payments have been introduced. As a result, European agricultural prices have become more volatile, in line with world prices.This dissertation measures the evolution of the productivity of French agriculture in a dynamic stochastic farm decision model in the new economic context with increased price volatility. On this basis, it studies the dynamic link between price risk, farmer decisions, and productivity in the structural estimation framework. The literature review in Chapter 2 describes productivity as a residual and emphasizes the measurement issues from the unobserved capital data series and the endogeneity problem in primal estimation.Chapter 3 compares the numerical methods to solve and estimate nonlinear dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) or DSGE-like models, in which capital and productivity are latent state variables. Chapter 4 estimates productivity in a dynamic stochastic decision model based on the generalized maximum entropy (GME) approach. We show that the productivity growth in French agriculture has slowed down and become more volatile following the rise in price volatility. Overall, price risk has an impact on productivity in the way that when exposed to high risks, farmers change their production, consumption, investment and financial borrowing decisions, which in turn affects the realized productivity negatively. Chapter 5 simulates the market impacts of the CAP instruments in a dynamic GTAP-AGR CGE mode

<div>This thesis has three major chapters. Structural estimation of non-homothetic demands is the element that is the most common across the three papers in which structural parameters from the data.<br></div><div><br></div><div><b>First Chapter</b>: Preference structures in applied general equilibrium models are commonly in favor of the family of linear expenditure system (LES) due to the desire for global regularity and applicability, while other emerging preference functions include the constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) forms that are used as sub-utility functions to fulfil regularity conditions with additional flexibilities. Hanoch (1975) introduces indirect, implicit additive relationships—a generalization of the CES—to obtain more flexible demand relationships that are globally regular. These preference relationships unlink substitution effects from income effects in ways that go beyond relaxation of homotheticity, and are more flexible than their direct dual. However, the estimation of these models as demand systems has proven to be challenging, and most published work in this area has focused on estimation approaches that involve approximations or that cannot fully identify parameter values in the preference relationships. Essay one introduces a direct approach which avoids approximations and allows parameters to be identified. We demonstrate the estimation using the readily accessible Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) and the confidential World Bank (International Comparison Program) databases, estimating the constant difference of elasticity or CDE directly in a maximum likelihood framework. In doing this, we show that the global regularity conditions stated in Hanoch (1975) can be slightly relaxed, and that the relaxed parametric conditions facilitate estimation. We introduce a normalization scheme that is beneficial for the scaling of the parameter values and which appears to have little impact on the economic performance of the estimated system. We develop a numerical test that justifies the normalization scheme. The series of procedures developed in this paper applied to this empirical example is generalized to solve many other econometric problems of general demand models of the Bergson family and those that are under-identified using reduced-form approaches. </div><div><br></div><div><b>Second Chapter</b>: This paper presents a general equilibrium gravity model of trade based on the constant difference of elasticities of substitution preferences. Hanoch (1975) illustrates these preferences' advantages in terms of parsimony and flexibility. This paper introduces a parsimonious, non-homothetic and globally well-behaved demand model into the gravity model that both separates substitution effects from income effects and has non-constant substitution elasticities. These features of the demand model---together with the structural estimation procedure devised in this paper---allow nesting several prominent theoretical motivations for the gravity model, and exploring the merits of this more general model. They also allow identification of the elasticity of trade costs with respect to distance and asymmetric border coefficients from the elasticity of trade flows with respect to trade costs. Most previous studies cannot separately identify these structural parameters. </div><div><br></div><div><b>Third Chapter</b>: The primary advantage of structural approaches to estimating the gravity model of trade is that they allow a transparent mapping of regression coefficients to structural parameters. Unfortunately, as shown in essay two, existing structural estimation methods are unable to separately identify trade costs and the trade elasticity without incorporating external data. We demonstrate that theoretical structure is alone sufficient for identifying all of the structural parameters of the canonical constant elasticity of substitution (CES) gravity model. We accomplish this by adopting an implicitly indirect representation of utility and estimating structurally using a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints. Our estimate of the elasticity of substitution is much smaller than in much of the rest of the literature, an outcome that we attribute to Pigou's Law, which ties income and substitution elasticities together in demand systems that assume additive preferences. This restriction is undesirable in demand systems, generally, and is a critical weakness for the canonical gravity model, a model that is commonly used to interpret the geographic trade pattern and to infer the welfare gains from trade. We demonstrate a non-homothetic CES model that both achieves identification and relaxes this restriction. Our counterfactual results based on the model suggest that the combination of a lower elasticity and lower trade costs generate a larger welfare change due to border removal compared to the CES model.<br></div>

No description available.

In Paper [I] we use data on Swedish public procurement auctions for internal regularcleaning service contracts to provide novel empirical evidence regarding green publicprocurement (GPP) and its effect on the potential suppliers’ decision to submit a bid andtheir probability of being qualified for supplier selection. We find only a weak effect onsupplier behavior which suggests that GPP does not live up to its political expectations.However, several environmental criteria appear to be associated with increased complexity,as indicated by the reduced probability of a bid being qualified in the postqualificationprocess. As such, GPP appears to have limited or no potential to function as an environmentalpolicy instrument. In Paper [II] the observation is made that empirical evaluations of the effect of policiestransmitted through public procurements on bid sizes are made using linear regressionsor by more involved non-linear structural models. The aspiration is typically to determinea marginal effect. Here, I compare marginal effects generated under both types ofspecifications. I study how a political initiative to make firms less environmentally damagingimplemented through public procurement influences Swedish firms’ behavior. Thecollected evidence brings about a statistically as well as economically significant effect onfirms’ bids and costs. Paper [III] embarks by noting that auction theory suggests that as the number of bidders(competition) increases, the sizes of the participants’ bids decrease. An issue in theempirical literature on auctions is which measurement(s) of competition to use. Utilizinga dataset on public procurements containing measurements on both the actual and potentialnumber of bidders I find that a workhorse model of public procurements is bestfitted to data using only actual bidders as measurement for competition. Acknowledgingthat all measurements of competition may be erroneous, I propose an instrumental variableestimator that (given my data) brings about a competition effect bounded by thosegenerated by specifications using the actual and potential number of bidders, respectively.Also, some asymptotic results are provided for non-linear least squares estimatorsobtained from a dependent variable transformation model. Paper [VI] introduces a novel method to measure bidders’ costs (valuations) in descending(ascending) auctions. Based on two bounded rationality constraints bidders’costs (valuations) are given an imperfect measurements interpretation robust to behavioraldeviations from traditional rationality assumptions. Theory provides no guidanceas to the shape of the cost (valuation) distributions while empirical evidence suggeststhem to be positively skew. Consequently, a flexible distribution is employed in an imperfectmeasurements framework. An illustration of the proposed method on Swedishpublic procurement data is provided along with a comparison to a traditional BayesianNash Equilibrium approach.

La tesi è una raccolta di tre articoli sugli effetti delle politiche per l’infanzia e le scelte dei genitori circa l’utilizzo dell’asilo nido sullo sviluppo cognitivo dei bambini. Il primo capitolo presenta una rassegna degli studi più recenti sul tema, considerando in particolare le analisi che hanno valutato gli effetti di politiche per l’infanzia e il ruolo della partecipazione pubblica nella gestione del servizio. Il secondo capitolo esplora la relazione tra la disponibilità di asili nido in Italia e i risultati scolastici dei bambini misurati dai test INVALSI relativi all’anno scolastico 2009-10. Il terzo capitolo analizza gli effetti delle scelte materne di lavoro e uso del child care sullo sviluppo cognitivo del bambino tramite la stima di un modello strutturale. / This thesis is composed by three chapters, dealing with the effects of policies for young children and parental child care decisions on subsequent child’s cognitive development. The first chapter presents a review of the most recent studies on this topic, considering in particular analyses that focus on public child care policies. The second chapter investigates the relationship between child care coverage in Italy and children’s scholastic achievement, as measured by the INVALSI test scores for the school year 2009-10. The third chapter evaluates the effects of maternal decisions concerning work and external child care use on subsequent child’s cognitive outcomes defining and estimating a behavioral model.