Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-137). / by Giuseppe Moscarini. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references. / by D. Nathan Sheets. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. Thesis. 1970. Ph.D. / Three unnumbered leaves inserted. Vita. / Includes bibliographies. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. Thesis. 1971. Ph.D. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 172-176. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 118). / by Meghan Ruth Busse. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation consists of three empirical studies, each using a measure of pre-market skills to examine an aspect of wage inequality in the U.S. labor market. Chapter One analyzes the factors associated with the change in the gender wage gap for young workers. I decompose the change in the gender wage gap over the entire wage distribution into factors associated with education, pre-market skills and the minimum wage. Improvements in education explain nearly all of the fall in the gap for the top three quarters of the distribution, leaving a small role for beneficial unexplained factors that led to excess shrinking of the gap. Women in the bottom quarter of the distribution actually experienced residual increases in the gender wage gap, and the gap rose outright for women in the bottom decile of the distribution. The fall in the real value of the minimum wage is discussed as a plausible explanation for the residual increase in the gender wage gap for low-earning women. Chapter Two evaluates the increase in the return to college between 1979 and 1999. Improved sorting of highly skilled individuals into college over the period implies that the composition of unobserved skill across education groups is not time invariant. Despite the increase in college attendance, college degree holders in 1999 had higher measures of pre-market skills than degree holders in 1979. For new labor market entrants, improved skill sorting accounts for four to nine percent of the increase in the return to college over the period. Accounting for improved sorting and the increased return to these skills reduces the estimated increase in the return to college by one third for males and one sixth for females. / (cont.) Chapter Three explores the wage premium associated with on-the-job computer use. I show the computer wage premium does not appear to be simply the result of a spurious correlation with typically unobserved cognitive and interpersonal skills. For males and females, the return to on-the-job computer use falls by less than 15% after controlling for worker heterogeneity in pre-market skills. Controlling for education, workers using a computer at work do not receive a higher wage premium for their other productive skills. / by Michael Douglas Steinberger. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references. / (cont.) The remedial education program hires young women from the community to provide remedial assistance to third and fourth grade children who have fallen behind their peers. The program is extremely cheap (five dollars per child per year), and is easily replicable. We find the program to be very effective, increasing learning by 0.15 standard deviations in the first year, and 0.25 in the second year. The results are similar in the two grade levels, and in the two cities. / This dissertation comprises three separate empirical studies. Using a non-parametric regression discontinuity design that compares candidates who barely win an election to those who barely lose, the first study estimates the effect of incumbency on a candidate's electoral prospects in India. Starting in 1991, I estimate that, rather than being at an advantage, incumbents are actually fourteen percent less likely to win an election than similar non-incumbents. While the available data prevent a formal test, the dominance of a single political party (the Indian National Congress) before 1991 may have provided a framework in which experience was valuable because incumbents who gained experience under the Congress system would interact with the same system when reelected. Starting in 1991, however, no party could be counted on to control parliament, making experience under the previous regime potentially less valuable. The second study estimates the effects of new competitors on existing candidates in India by taking advantage of a change in the election laws in 1996 that made it more difficult for candidates to run for office. The law affected constituencies differently, allowing the use of both across time and between constituency variation in the number of candidates to estimate the impact of restricting the number of new candidates in an election. The resulting estimates suggest that the reduction in the number of new candidates had a small, but measurable effect on the probability that the average existing candidates would win election. However, there is evidence of heterogeneity in the effect across candidates. Finally, the third study presents the results of a two-year randomized evaluation of a remedial education program in India. / by Leigh L. Linden. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005. / "June 2005." / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis is a collection of three empirical essays on the effect of profit incentives on innovation and technology adoption. Chapter 1, written with Daron Acemoglu, investigates the effect of (potential) market size on entry of new drugs and pharmaceutical innovation. Focusing on exogenous changes driven by U.S. demographic trends, we find a large effect of potential market size on the entry of non-generic drugs and new molecular entities. These effects are generally robust to controlling for a variety of supply-side factors and changes in the technology of pharmaceutical research. Chapter 2 investigates the effect of price-induced technology adoption on energy demand in U.S. manufacturing. I use plant data from the Census of Manufactures, 1967-1997, and identify technology adoption by comparing the energy efficiency of entrants and incumbents. I find a statistically significant effect of technological change, though the magnitude is small relative to changes in energy use due to factor substitution. The results suggest that technological change can reduce the long run effect of energy prices on growth, but by significantly less than previous research has suggested. Chapter 3 studies the response of the manufacturing sector to a carbon tax. I estimate long run price elasticities for fuels and electricity, exploiting the ability of entering plants to choose their technology in response to expected prices. A tax of $10 per metric ton of carbon would reduce emissions by 2 percent arid raise operating costs by 8 percent in the short run. Emissions would be 5 percent lower in the long run, and costs would be 5 percent higher. / (cont.) The tax would make plants more vulnerable to subsequent natural gas and distillate oil price shocks, and less sensitive to coal, residual and electricity shocks. Exit would increase by 0.2 percentage points. / by Joshua Abraham Linn. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 183). / This thesis examines the effect of bankruptcy law on consumer borrowing and welfare. The thesis consists of four theoretical chapters and two empirical chapters. Chapter 1 presents a simple model of consumer borrowing where the repayment of debt is governed by a bankruptcy law which allows a consumer to protect income below a given exemption level from creditors. Increasing bankruptcy exemption levels are found to increase borrowing and to increase consumer welfare so long as the consumer is borrowing less than the maximum amount possible. If consumers are borrowing the maximum amount possible, increasing exemption amounts increases credit constraints and decreases borrowing. Consumer welfare is maximized at the point where the marginal benefit the amount of insurance provided by the bankruptcy regime equals the marginal cost to reducing borrowing. Chapter 2 expands the model described in chapter 1 to include consumers who differ as to either their demand for credit or their ability to repay loans. The optimal exemption level is found to occur where the marginal cost due to increasing credit constraints to consumers with a higher demand for credit or a lower ability to repay is balanced against the increased insurance benefit provided to other borrowers. / (cont.) Chapter 3 considers the effect of bankruptcy law on credit markets with asymmetric information. I find that the possibility to receive a discharge of debt provided by bankruptcy law may cause consumers to distort their borrowing choices. Optimal exemption levels balance costs due to distortions in borrowing with benefits associated with increases in insurance. Chapter 4 presents a model of the effect of bankruptcy law on incentives to work. I find that increasing exemption levels may either increase or decrease incentives to work or to take risk. Chapter 5 examines the effect of exemption levels on household borrowing. I find that increasing personal property exemption levels are associated with higher levels of home mortgage debt and decreased probabilities that non-homeowners have greater than $50,000 in debt. Homestead exemptions are negatively associated with homeownership. Chapter 6 finds that personal property exemption levels are positively related to bankruptcy filing rates. / by Frederick Link. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Thoams James Skinner. / Ph.D.