<p>An investigation of the dynamics governing the growth and development of the space industry with forecasts of the expected state and trajectory of the space industry under various policy tests and scenarios.</p>

This dissertation advocates for greater recognition and inclusion of the large and growing population of disabled people as an integral part of the marketplace and in marketing research. Three trends are converging that increase the imperative to focus more attention on disability in the marketplace: demographics, inclusion, and technology. The experience of disabled consumers in the marketplace is fundamentally different from that of able-bodied consumers and has implications for all stakeholders in marketing. To better understand the heart of this matter, Essay 1 develops a theoretical framework to explain how disabled individuals approach consumption decisions. They must choose between three coping strategies (self-initiative, social support, and assistive technology) to overcome the challenges of their disability and achieve their consumption goals. In doing so, they face an inherent and constant tradeoff of fulfilling a need for autonomy versus need for efficiency. No strategy fulfills both, rather each facilitates one while hindering the other, creating tension between competing goals. This tradeoff is typically not faced by able-bodied consumers, who are able to achieve both autonomy and efficiency on the same task. Essay 2 empirically and experimentally tests one aspect of the theoretical framework, namely how observers may perceive (or misperceive) the needs of people with physical disabilities, identifies inaccurate perceptions that may lead to suboptimal outcomes, and examines how these perceptions can be leveraged to improve outcomes. Although I advocate a fully inclusive design approach, in which people with disabilities are integral to decision making processes affecting them, the current reality is that many decisions are still made on their behalf by others. As a result, marketers, product designers, policy makers, and individuals need to understand the needs of people with disabilities to create, market, and support products that better fulfill those needs. In contrast to prior research on dehumanization, which finds that observers diminish the importance of high-order (psychological) needs of “othered” groups, I find that observers elevate the importance of high-order needs of people with physical disabilities to compensate for perceived physical challenges. Across eight studies, I identify this systematic bias and resulting consequential decisions in the realm of product design and response to marketing campaigns. I conclude by discussing implications of these findings for managers, public policy, and future research.

This dissertation studies three topics related to different types of network effects in financial economics. The first chapter, "Of Coupons and Cargo - International Debt, Production, and Trade," quantifies the relationship between firms' supply chain networks and financing decisions. Most multinational corporations raise a significant amount of debt capital outside their home country. In contrast to prevailing evidence, access to deeper financial markets cannot explain this phenomenon in its entirety, as international debt issues carry higher spreads than securities concurrently issued domestically. Novel data on the universe of fixed income securities, subsidiary locations, and shipment-level trade flows from seventeen countries, is used to understand the drivers of international debt issuance. On the extensive margin firms raise debt in exactly those markets which play a key role in their supply chain (through subsidiaries, suppliers, or customers). Tests on the intensive margin indicate that firms adjust the face value of debt outstanding in a given country following exogenous changes in their operating exposure. These results are consistent with firms using international capital markets to hedge their exposure to fluctuations in exchange rates. The second chapter, "Did You Catch the Game Last Night? - Peer Group Effects in Sell-Side Analyst Forecasts," assesses the reaction of sell-side equity analysts to sentiment shocks, as well as how such non-financial information permeates through social networks. We identify a source of peer group influence that is plausibly orthogonal to information provision, yet nonetheless affects economic decision-making: the shock to an equity analyst of their undergraduate college football team winning the NCAA Championship Game. We find that analysts' forecasts respond positively to their undergraduate school's football team winning the NCAA final. We then show that the shock of 'winning' spreads within an analyst's brokerage, positively influencing the forecasts of their colleagues. Brokerages where the degree of this diffusion is greater have lower female representation in their analyst teams, as well as lower ESG scores. The third chapter, "Sharing is Caring? - Knowledge Diffusion in Researcher Networks," focuses on the effects of social networks in innovation. Social interactions are at the core of many economic processes, including research and development. Yet their contribution to innovation is not well understood. A novel dataset on more than 19,000 economists linked to more than one million unique research projects and fifty million tweets (#EconTwitter) is used as laboratory to explore the relationship between different social interactions and research outcomes. Results suggest that interactions play a dominant role in the idea generation phase of research and a lesser one in the context of ongoing projects. They seem to matter little for completed research projects. More socially active scholars are more productive, as measured by the number of papers written, and their working papers are more visible (i.e., downloaded more frequently). A working paper being endorsed leads to an increase in downloads by 20%. However, indicative of a trade-off in spending their valuable time, these projects are less impactful based on citation measures.

The thesis explores two main topics, Catholic schools in a school choice setting and decentralization of education decision making. The first chapter uses Chilean data to assess the impact of Catholic versus secular voucher or public school attendance on student outcomes. I address admission selection bias by leveraging exogenous variation from school admission lotteries and controls for students' probability of securing a seat in each type of school. My causal estimates reveal that students attending Catholic schools have a 17 percent higher probability of taking the college entry exam (CEE) than those who attend secular public schools. Additionally, Catholic school attendance raises students' chances of scoring above the national mean by 33 percent in math and 45 percent in reading. Catholic school attendance also increases students' probability of applying and being accepted to college. Nevertheless, attending Catholic schools raises dropout rates for boys with low baseline ability. Notably, the positive CEE effects are driven by girl students; however, attending a Catholic school appears to dissuade girls from pursuing STEM majors. Survey evidence reveals that Catholic schools have stricter disciplinary measures and foster higher levels of parent involvement than other public and secular institutions---characteristics commonly associated with high-achieving charter schools. The second chapters explore how student selection changed in terms of socioeconomic characteristics and baseline ability after a centralized school admission system (CAS) was mandated to all publicly funded schools in Chile. That includes private Catholic and secular runned institutions as well as public schools. Estimating a difference in difference model with multiple time periods, leveraging the regional staggered implementation of the CAS. Results indicate that after the centralized admission system (CAS) started, private Catholic schools enrolled a higher proportion of lower-income and lower-ability students than before, this effect is also positive for private-secular and public-schools, but in a lower magnitude. Finally, the third chapter evaluates the effects of the administrative decentralization of education on teacher quality and student outcomes in Colombia. In 2001, the government established an arbitrary rule that granted municipalities with a 2002 population greater than 100,000 almost complete autonomy to provide education services (certification). This analysis takes advantage of this rule to evaluate, using difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity methodologies, the effect of municipal autonomy on teacher quality and student outcomes, including achievement and enrollment. The control group is made up of municipalities for which the provision of education was centralized and managed by the departmental authorities. The results indicate that administrative decentralization (being certified) improves both school enrollment and student achievement as well as the quality of teachers, as measured by teachers’ education level and scores on teachers’ entry competency exams. Using a mediation analysis, the paper finds that higher-quality teachers hired by the certified municipalities partially explained the improvement in student achievement. This analysis also shows that “certified” municipalities invest more local resources in education which also contributes to explain to a much lesser extent their superior educational outcomes. Finally, the results suggest that achieving better student outcomes is less related to the amount of resources that decentralized municipalities managed and more associated with the fact that those resources seem to have been better allocated, generating significant efficiency gains. These gains may be the consequence of lower transaction costs of matching local preferences with local educational interventions.

Applied economics studies target effects that can be relatively small. This dissertation delves into some statistical obstacles to the accurate estimation of such effects, with a particular focus on the concepts of statistical power and exaggeration---imprecise studies tend to produce inflated estimates of the effect of interest. It explores implications of low power and exaggeration that are specific to applied economics studies and their design. Through the example of studies on the acute health effects of air pollution, the first chapter identifies tangible drivers of exaggeration that extend beyond small effects and a limited sample size. This analysis uncovers an overarching mechanism, studied in Chapter 2, that induces exaggeration when using causal identification strategies. This subsequent chapter emphasizes that causal approaches only focus on a subset of the variation---the exogenous part---reducing the precision of the study and increasing risks of exaggeration. The final chapter further broadens the discussion to analyze design choices in light of the multiple goals of causal inference studies; these studies aim not only to identify an average effect but also differentiated effects across subgroups, as well as producing insights that extend beyond the population considered. Overall, this dissertation underlines the manifold implications of design choices on non-experimental economic studies, with the aim of contributing to more accurate estimations of effects to better inform policymaking.

Orientador: Maria Lucia Galves / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Civil, Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-21T09:38:52Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Bocca_LucasScatulin_M.pdf: 2952833 bytes, checksum: 2e74b706e339719cc2f3c1d7f0d67db6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: A capacidade de estocagem de grãos instalada nas propriedades rurais no Brasil é baixa, bem como os armazéns, silos e entrepostos comerciais (público ou privado), devido a localizações, tipos e condições físicas, apresentam deficiências no que se refere ao desempenho e suficiência dessa infraestrutura. Assim, esse trabalho procurou abordar o problema de decisão relativo à implantação de um sistema de armazenamento de grãos na propriedade rural, considerando riscos, benefícios, incertezas e alternativas. Para tanto, foi utilizada a metodologia de auxílio multicritério à decisão, de modo a considerar os inúmeros objetivos, consequências, critérios, valores, expectativas e desempenhos das alternativas consideradas. A aplicação do método em uma situação real foi realizada para auxiliar um empresário rural (sojicultura) a decidir qual infraestrutura adotar para armazenar sua produção. Os resultados obtidos foram importantes para melhorar o seu entendimento sobre a problemática considerada, bem como sobre as alternativas existentes e suas respectivas vantagens e desvantagens. Dessa forma, concluiu-se que a metodologia de auxílio multicritério à decisão pode ser uma abordagem útil na implantação de um sistema de armazenagem de grãos na propriedade rural, pois foi capaz de incorporar diversas variáveis e objetivos, bem como os valores do decisor (produtor), fornecendo subsídios para a tomada de decisão e o acompanhamento da eficácia e eficiência da solução adotada / Abstract: The grain storage capacity installed in rural properties in Brazil is low, as well as grain storehouses, silos and commercial warehouses (public or private), because the locations, types and conditions, display gaps with regard to performance and adequacy of such facilities. Thus, this study sought to address the decision problem on the implementation of on-farm grain storage system, taking account of risks, benefits, uncertainties and alternatives. For this purpose, it was adopted the methodology of multicriteria decision aid, in order to consider the many objectives, consequences, criteria, values, expectations and performances of the existing alternatives. The application of the method in a real situation was held to aid a rural entrepreneur (soybean production) to decide what infrastructure to select to store his production. The results were important to improve his understanding of the considered issues, as well as on the alternatives and their advantages and disadvantages. Thus, it was concluded that the methodology of multicriteria decision aid can be a useful approach on implementation of on-farm grain storage system because it was able to incorporate many variables and objectives, as well as the values of the decision maker (producer), supporting decision making and providing informations to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of the selected solution / Mestrado / Transportes / Mestre em Engenharia Civil