Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references. / by John Z. Smith, Jr. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-178). / by Eiichi Tomiura. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. Thesis. 1973. Ph.D. / MICROFICHE COPY ALSO AVAILABLE IN DEWEY LIBRARY. / Bibliography: leaves 543-548. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-150). / This thesis consists of three empirical essays on different aspects of macroeconomic volatility. The first essay provides evidence of a causal and economically important relation between financial development and macroeconomic volatility by looking at the effect of financial development in the volatility of sectors with different liquidity needs. The results show that sectors with high liquidity needs are relatively more volatile in financially underdeveloped countries. These sectoral effects of financial underdevelopment can significantly increase macroeconomic volatility, despite the fact that financial underdevelopment also induces countries to move away from sectors with high liquidity needs. The second essay explores the causes of the decline in U.S. manufacturing volatility during the last two decades. The essay presents and estimates a model that decomposes the changes in the volatilities of manufacturing sectors among the effects of output composition, aggregate shocks, sectoral shocks, and sectoral linkages. The results show that changes in the volatility of aggregate shocks and their impact across sectors account for the most of the decline in U.S. manufacturing volatility. A smaller role is played by changes in the volatility of sectoral shocks and in the intensity of sectoral linkages. The third essay analyzes both the sectoral effects of monetary policy and the role that monetary policy plays in the transmission of sectoral shocks. Our methodology is applied to the case of the U.S., finding considerable differences in the response of different sectors to monetary policy. The results also show that monetary policy is an important source of sectoral transfers: a shock to Equipment-and-Software Investment, naturally identified with the high-tech crises, induces a monetary policy response that generates a temporary boom in Residential Investment and Consumption of Durables, but which has almost no effect on the high-tech sector. / by Claudio Enrique Raddatz Kiefer. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation, which is a collection of three essays, uses empirical methods to study questions at the intersection of law and economics. The first chapter, co-authored with Joshua Fischman, explores how supervision by an administrative appeals court, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), influences the exercise of discretion of lower court immigration judges in asylum cases. The second chapter studies whether career concerns influence judicial decision-making within the context of asylum adjudication in immigration courts. The final chapter investigates how expansions in the right to counsel impacted criminal defendants, with particular focus on the Supreme Court's 1963 decision in Gideon vs. Wainwright. / by Jacklin Chou Lem. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-155). / This thesis consists of three essays on information, decision-making and health. All three concern the relationship between the choices consumers would make if they were "fully informed" in an appropriate sense and the choices we actually observe. Chapter 1 considers how we can determine whether consumers are appropriately taking into account health information when they make their food consumption decisions. The fundamental idea is to determine the value of a statistical life (VSL) implicit in food consumption decisions and to compare this value with previous estimates of the VSL. The main positive result is that the VSL estimated from food consumption is about 1/10th as large as estimates from other contexts. I also consider the normative implications under the assumption that VSL estimates from other contexts indicate how individuals would behave if they were "fully informed" and discuss what additional evidence might support such an assumption. Chapter 2, co-authored with Jonathan Gruber, performs an analogous exercise in the case of health care plans. Where Chapter 1 makes the normative assumption that consumers should value years of life equally regardless of where they come from (e.g. eating healthier foods or reducing risk of on-the-job death), Chapter 2 makes the normative assumption that consumers should value a dollar of cost savings equivalently whether it comes through premiums or out of pocket costs. This restriction can then be used to evaluate whether consumers are choosing appropriately. The chapter studies this question in the context of Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Plan, the most significant privatization of the delivery of a public insurance benefit in recent history. Chapter 3 attempts to consider the circumstances in which the partial equilibrium welfare analyses performed in parts 1 and 2 extend to a general equilibrium setting in which prices and product characteristics respond endogenously to changes in demand. In particular, Chapter 3 derives conditions under which more information leads to welfare gains in general equilibrium taking into account the endogenous response of firms' pricing and product quality decisions. / by Jason Abaluck. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. Thesis. 1972. Ph.D. / MICROFICHE COPY ALSO AVAILABLE IN DEWEY LIBRARY. / Bibliography: leaves 453-464. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 129-132). / In this thesis, I explore the properties of a martingale hypothesis test, and present three applications of the test that address empirical questions in asset-pricing finance. The martingale test exploits the lack of correlation between forecast error and the current information set. The test is designed to consider all alternatives, including linear and nonlinear relationships between the forecast error and a current information variable. When the current information variable is stationary, I follow the transformed empirical process approach of Koul and Stute (1999) to construct the appropriate test statistics for models with homoscedastic instantaneous variance and extend their results to models with conditional heteroscedasticity. When the current information variable is an integrated process, I follow the approach of Park and Whang (1999), and extend their results to account for estimated parameters, and derive the asymptotic properties. In the first application, I construct a test to determine if continuous-time affine diffusion models provide adequate approximations of observed discrete data, primarily with respect to the models' short-term forecastability. I apply the martingale hypothesis to test various parameteric specifications of the conditional means for the affine diffusion models. In the second application, I propose a unit-root type specification test for stochastic processes generated by linear functions of nonstationary integrated process, in order to test the random walk hypothesis in asset prices. In the third application, I construct a test of forward unbiasedness in order to relate the price of a futures contract to the future price of the underlying asset. / by Tomomi Kumagai. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-159). / by James Hubert John Morsink. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis consists of three essays addressing open empirical questions in applied microeconomics. Chapter 1 attempts to quantify the impact of climate change on Indian agriculture. I use historical data on past yearly weather fluctuations and crop yields to measure the effect of these weather fluctuations on output, then use climate change prediction models to derive projections of the impact of future climate change on future productivity. I find that even moderate climate change could be seriously detrimental to productivity, with a consensus prediction for warming over the period 2010-2039 reducing productivity 4.5 to 9 percent. Chapter 2 provides a new tool for analysis of distributional, or quantile, effects in regression discontinuity (RD) models. RD has become increasingly popular over the last decade as a method of obtaining quasi experimental estimates of mean treatment effects. This paper extends the methodology to the measurement of quantile treatment effects. I provide simulation evidence on the effectiveness of the estimator and an empirical application to returns to compulsory schooling in the United Kingdom. Chapter 3, written jointly with Esther Duflo and Michael Greenstone, examines the impact of a water and sanitation intervention in Orissa, India, on health outcomes, in particular the monthly incidence of severe cases of diarrhea and malaria. The design of the intervention, in particular the fact that the water system is activated suddenly, unpredictably and simultaneously for all households in a given village, allow us to overcome several empirical challenges that have impeded credible estimation in the past. We find large effects: the arrival of services appears to reduce severe cases of diarrhea by as much as forty percent, with similar effects on severe cases of malaria. Furthermore, these effects appear to be persistent, as they continue to be apparent in the data after three and even five years. / by Raymond P. Guiteras. / Ph.D.