Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Oct. 5, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-02, Section: A, page: 0646. Advisers: William Becker; Jeffrey Smith.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0704. Adviser: Darren H. Lubotsky. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 116-125) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Economics, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 13, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4784. Adviser: Gerhard Glomm.

This dissertation studies agricultural technology adoption, child labor and development. Although adoption of fertilizers has been high in South Asia, farmers may fail to use it efficiently. Besides higher costs incurred by households engaged in agriculture, inefficient use of fertilizers may also have negative consequences for the environment. The first chapter of this dissertation uses a field experiment in Bangladesh to study whether providing farmers access to a simple rule-of-thumb tool (leaf color chart) to manage the timing of fertilizer applications can improve efficiency of fertilizer use and lead to productivity gains. The second chapter explores whether characteristics of agricultural trainers, who introduced the leaf color charts to the farmers in the treatment group, play an important role in the adoption and use of leaf color charts by farmers. The final chapter of this dissertation studies the impact of a large public workfare program targeting rural households in India on children. In particular, we study the impact of time use by the youngest and oldest children in a household as adult time use changes in response to new work opportunities. / Public Policy

Many markets exhibit substantial heterogeneity -- e.g.~in ability, in preferences, in products, in strategies. Allowing for this (sometimes multi-dimensional) heterogeneity can change both the theoretical predictions of models and the results of empirical analyses. This dissertation consists of three essays on markets and games with different forms of heterogeneity. The first chapter introduces preference heterogeneity and multi-dimensional skill heterogeneity into the analysis of labor markets. In matching markets, agents have heterogeneous preferences over potential partners, so welfare depends on which agents are matched to each other in equilibrium. Taxes in matching markets can generate inefficiency by changing who is matched to whom, even if the number of workers at each firm is unaffected. This ``allocative distortion'' is not evident in traditional models of income taxation that do not allow for workers to have multi-dimensional preference and productivity heterogeneity. For markets in which workers refuse to match without a positive wage, higher taxes decrease match efficiency. However, in more balanced matching markets where transfers may flow in either direction, such as the student--college market, lowering taxes may decrease match efficiency because an agent can transfer enough to ``buy'' an inefficient partner (only to be ``bought back'' when taxes are lowered further). Simulations show that, in matching markets, traditional deadweight loss estimates based on the change in taxable income can be substantially biased in either direction. The second chapter builds on the merger analysis literature that recognizes the importance of product heterogeneity. Both merger simulations and the more recent ``first-order'' approach to merger analysis recognize that because product heterogeneity can vary, market concentration is not always a good measure of the competitiveness of the market. We derive approximations of the expected changes in prices and welfare generated by a merger, using information local to the pre-merger equilibrium. We extend the pricing pressure approach of recent work to allow for non-Bertrand conduct, adjusting the diversion ratio and incorporating the change in anticipated accommodation. To convert pricing pressures into quantitative estimates of price changes, we multiply them by the merger pass-through matrix. Pass-through rates can vary by industry and the same pricing pressure can lead to very different price changes, depending on the pass-through rates. Weighting the price changes by quantities gives the change in consumer surplus. The third chapter uses data on thousands of players who play a game over a hundred times to do a with-in player analysis of play and allow for heterogeneity in the mixed strategies that players use. We use of data from a Facebook application where users play a simultaneous move, zero-sum game -- rock-paper-scissors -- with varying information to provide empirical insights into whether play is consistent with extant theories. We report three major insights. First, we observe that many employ strategies consistent with Nash, at least some of the time. Second, players predictably respond to incentives in the game. For example, out of equilibrium, players strategically use information on previous play of their opponents, and they are more strategic when the payoffs for such actions increase. Third, experience matters: players with more experience use information on their opponents more efficiently than less experienced players, and are more likely to win as a result. We also explore the degree to which the deviations from Nash predictions are consistent with various non-equilibrium models. We find that both a level-k framework and a quantal response model have explanatory power: whereas one group of people employ strategies that are close to $k_1$, there is also a set of people who use strategies that resemble quantal response. / Economics

Many of the world's rural poor make a living from agriculture. Consequently, the productivity of agriculture and non-agricultural employment opportunities are important determinants of rural poverty and the subject matter of the three essays in this dissertation. The first chapter in this dissertation estimates the long-term causal effect of inheriting land in rural India. Using quasi-experimental methods, I find that inheriting land greatly influences occupational trajectories and can suppress consumption to an extent that may overwhelm its direct benefit. The second chapter uses a field experiment to understand whether barriers to information influence agricultural productivity. We find that the introduction of a mobile phone-based agricultural information service greatly influences reported sources of information, input adoption decisions and agricultural productivity. The final chapter studies the effect of the external provision of agricultural information on social interactions and agricultural outcomes in village India. Using a field experiment, I find that the introduction of a mobile phone-based agricultural extension service influences the structure and content of social interactions with peers both within and outside the original study population. Respondents receiving valuable agricultural information are more likely to interact with their peers and share information from the service. These changes in social interactions also influence the agricultural outcomes of peers. These results suggest that technological innovations may increase the returns to in-person exchange of information and, in so doing, influence agricultural outcomes. / Public Policy

This dissertation seeks to identify causes and consequences of some of the most complex social phenomena, such as civil conflict and climate change. In the first essay I draw on existing theories of labor coercion (Acemoglu & Wolitzky, 2011, Dippel, Greif and Trefler, 2015) to examine how poor labor market institutions, as those present in places where cocaine production takes place in Colombia, prevent low-income farmers to grasp the returns of positive productivity shocks generated by good weather, and instead, witness increasing coca-profiting group confrontations in high productivity areas. I employed an Instrumental Variables approach together with Fixed Effects estimators to calculate the effect of exogenous variation in productivity on the dynamics of the conflict, to find that citizens security improves in high-productivity period and worsens in low-yield months. The second essay is a research project with Alberto Abadie, Maurice Kugler and Juan Vargas, where we examine the causal effect of Plan Colombia, the largest US aid package ever received by a country in the western hemisphere, on citizens security (measured by civilians and military killings) and illegal crop acreages in Colombia. To infer the causal effect of the policy on the illegal crop and violence outcomes, we rely on GMM estimators and high-frequency variations in violence. We show that the marginal effect of spraying of one acre of coca reduces the cultivated area by about 11 percent of an acre. Since aerial spraying may shift coca crops to neighboring municipalities, this results should be interpreted as a local effect. In addition, since the same coca fields are often sprayed multiple times, this figure constitutes a lower bound of the mean eradicating effect of aerial spraying. Our results also suggest that guerrilla-led violence increases both in the short and the long term. We interpret this result as evidence that the guerrilla tries to hold on violently to the control of an asset that is of first order importance for their survival. In the third essay I seek to understand household adaptation and labor market impacts of extreme weather events in developing countries. This project focuses its attention on labor supply in the developing world – the primary source of household income throughout the world. Also, household allocation of adult and child labor in response to precipitation represents an avenue for exploring potential adaptations that may minimize or worsen the welfare effects from extreme weather events. My econometric results provide evidence of reductions in labor income mainly through an increase in adult unemployment. Individuals try to smooth the loss of labor income by restorting to “forced entrepreneurhip” or self-employment and by sending youth to work. The worst estimate of the loss in real wages per hour is 8% in the rainy season, but this coefficient is most likely an under-estimation of the effect of floods on real wages per hour, as individuals may have been adapting to ENSO and the unavailability of labor market data from the most affected municipalities during the floods of 2010. Finally, estimates of the causal effects of floods are non-linear. While an additional 95th percentile flood raises the probability of unemployment by 0.0026 percentage points, the effect doubles with one additional 99th percentile flood. / Public Policy

This dissertation explores intergenerational mobility and inequality in the early twentieth century. The first chapter asks whether economic downturns increase or decrease mobility. I estimate the effect of the Great Depression on mobility, linking a sample of fathers before the Depression to their sons in 1940. I find that the Great Depression lowered intergenerational mobility for sons growing up in cities hit by large downturns. The effects are driven by differential, selective migration: the sons of richer fathers are able to move to better destinations. The second chapter compares historic rates of intergenerational mobility to today. Based on a sample matched from the Iowa 1915 State Census to the 1940 Federal Census, I argue that there was more mobility in the early twentieth century than is found in contemporary data, whether measured using intergenerational elasticities, rank-rank correlations, educational persistence, or occupational status measures. In the third chapter, I detail the machine learning method used to create the linked census samples used in chapters 1 and 2. I use a supervised learning approach to record linkage, training a matching algorithm on hand-linked historical data which is able to efficiently and accurately find links in noisy in historical data. / Economics

The essays in this thesis examine the impact of the termination of court desegregation orders on patterns of residential choice and high-school completion. I do this by first examining decisions individual households make about where to live in the aftermath of a change in student-assignment policy using evidence from a single school district. Then, I generalize and assess trends in patterns of residential segregation and high-school dropout rates in a national study. In the first essay, my co-author and I examine whether the legal decision to end race-conscious student assignment policies in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district increased the probability that families with children enrolled in the district would move to neighborhoods with a greater proportion of student residents of the same race as their own children. We make use of a natural policy experiment—a judicial decision to end court-ordered busing—to estimate the causal impacts of this policy shift on household residential decisions. We find that, for those who moved, the legal decision made white families with children in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools substantially more likely than they were during desegregation to move to a neighborhood with a greater proportion of white residents than their own neighborhood. In the second essay, I assess the impacts of the end of court desegregation orders on a comprehensive national sample of districts under court order in 1991. In a series of analyses, I conclude that the release of these districts from court desegregation orders increased the rates of black-white and, even more conclusively, Hispanic-white residential segregation. Furthermore, the declaration of districts as unitary increased rates of 16-19 year-old school dropouts in these districts by three to seven percentage points for Hispanics, one to two percentage points for blacks, and almost four percentage points for blacks living in school districts outside the South. Taken together, these findings suggest that barring the use of race in the assignment of students to schools has deleterious effects on black and Hispanic students and the communities in which they reside.

Abstract not available.