Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis is a collection of three empirical essays on issues in economic development, with a focus ,on political economy and the labor market in India. Chapter 1] analyzes the effect of television coverage on political voice by examining the functioning of Question Hour, a forum for political discussion in India's Parliament, which is intended to foster government accountability to the people by allowing Members of Parliament (MPs) to raise questions about issues of concern to the electorate which the Government must answer. I use an unusual source of variation in the telecast status of Question Hour, made possible by the fact that it was only shown on television every other week, to assess what effect television had. I find that MPs did not become more likely to represent the concerns of the voters in their constituency. I argue that the evidence is consistent with party establishments exercising greater control on the participation of their MPs when Question Hour was televised than they otherwise did. Chapter 2 studies caste and religion in India's new economy sectors - IT (software) and IT-enabled services (call-centers) - by sending fictitious resumes in response to job openings in and around Delhi, India advertised in major city papers and online job sites. We find evidence of discrimination against Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Scheduled Castes (SCs) in the call-center industry but no corresponding results for these or any other groups (including Muslims) in software jobs. We do however find that having a higher-quality resume helps SC applicants in software jobs the most, and OBCs not at all. We argue that the evidence for SCs is consistent with predictions from theories of statistical discrimination. / (cont.) Chapter 3 asks whether there is empirical evidence of differential treatment by gender in India's Civil Service by following the careers of 1457 civil servants in India from the time they were recruited to the time they reached the fifth of seven levels within the Civil Service hierarchy. I compile and use a newly-collected data set made up of employment records for all entrants into the Indian Administrative Service, or IAS, between the years 1971 and 1984. Using the individual's rank at entry as a measure of initial quality, I compare the career progress of men and women in each quartile of the rank distribution for each entering cohort, and find that women in the lowest rank quartile take significantly longer than similarly-ranked men (as well as than higher-ranked men and women) to be promoted to level 5 of the civil service hierarchy, which I argue is evidence of statistical discrimination against women in the Indian civil service. / by Saugato Datta. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 167-175). / This thesis consists of three chapters that analyze how the networks of firms, people, and locations shape socio-economic activities. The first chapter analyzes the role of supplier to buyer matching in the firm-to-firm trade as a source of geographic concentration of economic activities. Using a panel of firm-to-firm trade data covering over a million Japanese firms, I first provide evidence that the new supplier matching rate upon unexpected supplier bankruptcies increases in locations and industries when there are more alternative suppliers selling in the buyer's location, while this rate remains stable in the presence of other buyers looking for a match. I then estimate a new structural trade model that incorporates dynamic firm-to-firm matching across space in a standard Melitz model and concludes that this agglomeration mechanism drives a large part of spatial inequality of firm density and real wages in Japan. The second chapter (co-authored with Gabriel Kreindler) investigates how people's mobility patterns are associated with urban spatial economic activities. We use cell phone transaction data to extract commuting flows at a fine spatially and temporarily scale, and use a model to empirically associate commuting flows with spatial economic activity distributions in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. We validate our predicted measures of economic activities with a government survey and show several applications to provide a proof of concept of our approach. The third chapter develops an econometric framework to estimate structural parameters underlying a network formation model. I show that the set of equilibria is a complete lattice under certain conditions, and extend this characterization to an econometric framework based on the moment inequality model. I then apply this method to a student friendship network formation in the U.S. / by Yuhei Miyauchi. / Ph. D.

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

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1983. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY / Bibliography: leaves 115-119. / by Donald Riche Deere, Jr. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1990. / Vita. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Andrew R. Myers. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. Thesis. 1966. Ph.D. / Vita. / Includes bibliographies. / Ph.D.

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

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 178-180). / by Jeffrey Herman Zweibel. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1987. / Title as it appeared in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Graduate List, June 1987: Differential game models of oligopoly. / Bibliography: leaves 242-249. / by Marco Hanig. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-191). / This thesis consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I estimate the dynamic or inter-temporal knowledge spillovers resulting from corporate R&D in a setting with cumulative innovation, using a panel of US firms and a network of corporate patent citations. I show that the positive effect of dynamic spillovers on other firms' productivity is economically important, and at least as large as that of own R&D investments. Accounting for both static and dynamic spillovers, my estimates suggest that the social returns to corporate R&D are about three times as large as the private returns. The second chapter, joint with Jean-Noel Barrot, studies the effect of patent term duration on the rate and direction of follow-on innovation, using a quasi-natural experiment that lengthened the term of existing patents in the US. Leveraging a kink in the patent term extension formula, we find no significant impact of extensions on subsequent innovation, neither locally around the kink using a sharp "Regression Kink Design" nor on average on the population of treated patents. The third chapter, joint with Nicolas Caramp and Pascual Restrepo, studies how consumer durables amplify business cycle fluctuations on aggregate employment. We show that employment in durable manufacturing industries is more cyclical than in other industries, and that this cyclicality is amplified in genera.I equilibrium. Our estimates suggest that consumer durables are responsible for up to 40% of aggregate employment volatility. / by David Colino Llamas. / 1. Cumulative Innovation and Dynamic R&D Spillovers -- 2. Patent duration and cumulative innovation: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment (joint with Jean-Noel Barrot) -- 3. Durable Crises (joint with Nicolas Caramp and Pascual Restrepo). / Ph. D.