Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Maura P. Doyle. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Henry Willmore. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-123). / by C. Keith Head. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Luigi Zingales. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-113). / Chapter 1 looks at the empirical estimation of the welfare impacts of bargaining. Bargaining for retail goods is common in developing countries, but rare in the developed world. The welfare implications of this difference are theoretically ambiguous-if bargaining is a low cost form of price discrimination, it may lead to greater trade and welfare and even approximate the optimal incentive compatible outcome. However, if bargaining imposes large utility costs on the participants, then a fixed price may be preferable. I develop the tools to resolve this question, specifying a model of repeated trade with asymmetric information adapted to the context of bargaining, and developing a dynamic structural estimation technique to infer the structural parameters of the market. I then apply these techniques to the market for local autorickshaw transportation in Jaipur, India, using data I collected over 2008-2009. Chapter 2 carries out the first comparison of production function parameters estimated by structural techniques with those estimated via randomized instrumental variables using a unique dataset and field experiment performed by De Mel, McKenzie, and Woodruff (2008). In the context of a simple model of a household firm, I discuss the coefficients that each approach estimates, and the assumptions necessary to interpret those coefficients as the structural parameters of the model. I find that the values of structural and experimental estimators that most plausibly estimate the same parameters are indeed statistically and economically similar, suggesting that in some contexts structural models of production functions may be effective in recovering the parameters of production functions in the context of developing markets. These parameters may then be used to address questions relating to firm productivity and capital allocation that are both central to the study of firms in development, and potentially difficult to identify using randomized variation alone. Chapter 3 documents an attempt to overcome the challenges of police reform in the Indian state of Rajasthan, evaluated through a series of RCT (Randomized Control Trials). Four reform interventions were implemented in a randomly selected group of 162 police stations across 11 districts of the state: (1) weekly duty rosters with a guaranteed rotating day off per week; (2) a freeze on transfers of police staff; (3) in-service training to update skills; and (4) placing community observers in police stations. To evaluate these reforms, data was collected through two rounds of surveys (before and after the intervention) including police interviews, decoy visits to police stations, and a large scale crime survey-the first of its kind in India. The results suggest that two of the interventions, the freeze on transfers and the training, do have the potential to improve the police effectiveness and public image. The other reforms showed no robust effects, an outcome that may be due to their incomplete implementation. / by Daniel Eben Keniston. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis investigates the unintended consequences of government policy, specifically policy meant to benefit agricultural producers. The first chapter asks how agricultural subsidies affect farmland rental rates. Chapter two examines the relative effects of ad hoc disaster payments and crop insurance, focusing on the potential to smooth income shocks, and the final chapter studies the targeting efficiency of the Conservation Reserve Program. Chapter one exploits exogenous variation in agricultural subsidies to measure the effects on farmland rental rates. The primary finding is that landlords capture one-fifth of the marginal subsidy dollar per acre. This finding stands in contrast to the standard assumption that landlords immediately capture the entire subsidy. There is some evidence that the share of the subsidy captured by landlords increases as the farmland rental market becomes more competitive. The analysis also indicates that the lower effective price of land induces tenants to rent more land such that they gain roughly $1 per dollar of subsidy. Taken together, the results suggest that agricultural subsidies benefit farmers, as well as individuals that own agricultural land. Chapter two exploits random weather variation and exogenous variation in crop insurance take-up in order to investigate the relative effect of two forms of government-provided disaster relief on farm failure rates. / (cont.) I find that disaster relief in the form of ad hoc disaster payments slightly reduces the average farm failure rate, while average farm failure rates increase under a crop insurance regime. The relative effect suggests that farm failure rates increase by 1.7 percentage points (about 30-percent) under the crop insurance regime. Excessively generous ad hoc disaster payments and moral hazard provide possible explanations for these findings. These findings suggest that government-provided crop insurance plays an important role in farmer risk management. Chapter three estimates the premiums received by Conservation Reserve Program participants above their reservation rents. Findings suggest that participants receive substantial premiums, and the premiums have increased over time as uncertainty about the program has decreased. / by Barrett Edward Kirwan. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation consists of three essays in microeconomic theory. The first two concern methods of modeling bounded rationality and unawareness, while the third applies a model of jointly determined reputation to incentive problems in the market for expert advice. Increases in awareness information can be associated with dramatic increases in certainty or uncertainty. The first chapter of this dissertation seeks to unify both phenomena under a single framework of epistemic negligence, or errors in an agent's epistemic relation to tautological beliefs. It is shown that impossible possible worlds (excess uncertainty) result from a failure to believe all tautologies, while possible impossible worlds (excess certainty) result from belief in 'tautologies' which may in fact be false. A propositional model is employed throughout the paper, and several of its properties are compared to the standard state-space model, which implicitly assumes that epistemic negligence does not exist. Chapter 2 continues to work with a propositional model of knowledge, focusing more closely on agents who fail to take into account all relevant dimensions of uncertainty. / (cont.) We show that in such a setting, if agents' learning makes them better off over time, then (1) they may suffer from delusion, but only in a proscribed way that is consistent over time, and (2) contrary to standard conceptions of learning, it is possible for them to rule in 'states of the world' that they had previously ruled out, because by doing so they increasingly avoid overconfident mistakes. As a separate concern, and in light of recent corporate scandals, chapter 3 develops a theoretical model designed to address the question of whether reputational concerns can discipline providers of expert advice to exert costly but accuracy-enhancing effort. The primary finding of the paper is that the effort exerted by an expert can be highly sensitive to whether its reputation is determined by its effort alone or whether the firm it is evaluating also has a costly action available to it, by which it too can influence the expert's reputation for accuracy. We characterize equilibria in these two settings, and they are found to differ in several interesting ways, which shed some light on the concerns of federal authorities that credit rating agencies applied insufficient effort to their evaluation of firms such as Enron. / by Nathan A. Barcuzi. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Charles J. Hadlock. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [139]-143). / by Theodore S. Sims. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis consists of three chapters on the economic and political effects of in-migration. In the first chapter, I show that political opposition to immigration can arise even when immigrants bring significant economic prosperity to receiving areas. I exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to US cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the Immigration Acts of the 1920s, and instrument immigrants' location decision relying on pre-existing settlement patterns. Immigration increased natives' employment and occupational standing, and fostered industrial production and capital utilization. However, despite these economic benefits, it triggered hostile political reactions, such as the election of more conservative legislators, higher support for anti-immigration legislation, and lower public goods provision. Stitching the economic and the political results together, I provide evidence that natives' backlash was, at least in part, due to cultural differences between immigrants and natives, suggesting that diversity might be economically beneficial but politically hard to manage. The second chapter asks the following question: is racial heterogeneity responsible for the distressed financial conditions of US central cities and for their limited ability to provide even basic public goods? If so, why? I study these questions exploiting the movement of more than 1.5 million African Americans from the South to the North of the United States during the first wave of the Great Migration (1915-1930). Black immigration and the induced white outmigration ("white flight") are both instrumented for using, respectively, pre-migration settlements and their interaction with MSA geographic characteristics that affect the cost of moving to the suburbs. The inflow of African Americans imposed a strong, negative fiscal externality on receiving places by lowering property values and, mechanically, reducing tax revenues. Unable or unwilling to raise tax rates, cities cut public spending, especially in education, to meet a tighter budget constraint. While the fall in tax revenues was partly offset by higher debt, this strategy may, in the long run, have proven unsustainable, contributing to the financially distressed conditions of several US central cities today. The third chapter, coauthored with Michela Carlana, studies the effects of immigration on natives' marriage, fertility, and family formation across US cities between 1910 and 1930. Instrumenting immigrants' location decision by interacting pre-existing ethnic settlements with aggregate migration flows, we find that immigration raised marriage rates, fertility, and the propensity to leave the parental house for young native men and women. We show that these effects were driven by the large and positive impact of immigration on native men's employment and occupational standing, which increased the supply of "marriageable men". We also explore alternative mechanisms - changes in sex ratios, natives' cultural responses, and displacement effects of immigrants on female employment - and provide evidence that none of them can account for a quantitatively relevant fraction of our results. / by Marco Tabellini. / Ph. D.