Suchergebnisse

1. Data and survey design -- 2. Describing the dynamics of health -- 3. Describing health care costs -- 4. Reporting heterogeneity in health -- 5. Health and lifestyles -- 6. Smoking and mortality -- 7. Health and retirement -- 8. Health and wages -- 9. Modelling the dynamics of health -- 10. Non-response and attrition bias -- 11. Models for count data -- 12. Modelling health care costs.

This dissertation combines research on three topics in applied empirical economics. The first paper, which is based on joint work with Patrick Johnston, examines the effect of development projects on civil conflict. The second paper estimates the effect of subsidized employment on the happiness of the unemployed. The third paper, based on joint work with Santiago Guerrero, analyzes the effect of restrictions to alcohol accessibility on Marijuana use.The first paper develops a theoretical model of bargaining and conflict in the context of development projects. The model predicts that development projects cause an increase in violent conflict if governments cannot (1) ensure the project's success in the face of insurgent opposition and (2) credibly commit to honoring agreements reached before the start of the project. The model is tested by estimating the causal effect of a large development program on conflict casualties in the Philippines. Identification is based on a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary poverty threshold used to assign eligibility for the program. Consistent with the model's predictions, we find that eligible municipalities suffered a substantial increase in casualties, which lasts only for the duration of the project and is split evenly between government troops and insurgents.The second paper estimates the causal effect of a type of subsidized employment projects - Germany's \emph{Arbeitsbeschaffungsmassnahmen} - on self-reported happiness. Results from matching and fixed effects estimators suggest that subsidized employment has a large and statistically significant positive effect on the happiness of individuals who would otherwise have been unemployed. Detailed panel data on pre- and post-project happiness suggests that this effect can neither be explained by self-selection of happier individuals into employment nor by the higher incomes of the employed. This suggests that subsidized employment programs are more effective at increasing the happiness of the unemployed than an increase in unemployment benefits. The third paper estimates the effect of the Minimum Legal Drinking Age of 21 years on Marijuana use. The casual effect of this law is estimated through a regression discontinuity design that compares Marijuana use among individuals just below and just above age 21. We find a significant drop in Marijuana use at age 21, which suggests that individuals substitute between alcohol and Marijuana. Policies that restrict alcohol accessibility are therefore likely to have the unintended consequence of increasing Marijuana use.

Applied Welfare Economics extends a conventional cost-benefit analysis by using important results in welfare economics. The analysis is extended to accomodate trade and income taxes, time, internationally traded goods, and non-tax distortions, including externalities non-competetive behaviour, public goods and price-quantity controls. The book is primarily intended as a reference for academic economists, policy analysts, and graduate students. Formal analysis isexplained using diagrams to make it more adaptable to the different institutional arrangements encountered in applied work.

Applied economics is both an art and a science. It requires a sound knowledge of economic theory, statistical techniques and data sources, together with an appreciation that behavioural changes can alter apparently established economic relationships. In this book leading economists illustrate the diversity of the subject, and present a series of studies that demonstrate a range of techniques and their applications to economic policy. It contains chapters which explore approaches to macroeconomic modelling analyses of corporate performance, new estimates of the evolution of incomes in the UK since the eighteenth century and assessments of the role of applied economics in guiding macroeconomic policy. All the chapters were specially commissioned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Cambridge, and the contributions to the book are a fitting tribute to the work instigated by Sir Richard Stone and carried forward by his successors

This thesis proposes the application of various economic theories and analytical techniques from the fields of energy economics, environmental economics, comparative economic systems and, development economics in the regional context of South and Central Asia. Applying IV estimation in essay one leads to the conclusion that ethnolinguistic diversity instrumented by diversity of ancient civilizations/empires is strongly linked with contemporary development in Afghanistan. Ethnolinguistic diversity induces higher levels of trust and lower levels of individualism. Moreover, it is associated with higher levels of income and lower levels of violence or crime. A robust regression discontinuity design has been used to estimate the impact of historical ethnolinguistic borders on the contemporary economic development of Afghanistan. Pashtuns have the clear advantage over the other ethnolinguistic groups in Afghanistan in terms of level of income and provision of public goods such as safe drinking water and electricity. The Pashtun belt has suffered more violence and crime due to foreign interference in the Pashtun areas. The ethnolinguistic division in Afghanistan in terms of political preferences is obvious by the fact that support for Ashraf Ghani declines significantly when crossing the ethnic and linguistic border into the non-Pashtun areas. Structural equation modeling results reveal that the empires of Achaemenids, Parthians, and, most prominently, Sasanians, categorized as Old Persian, and the empires of Turkic origin left a positive and persistent impact on the contemporary economic development of Afghanistan. Essay 2 and essay 3 of the dissertation deal with the economics of electricity and sustainable energy. Electricity generation from the use of fossil fuels is one of the largest sources of man-made carbon dioxide emissions in the world. Switching the power industry to the use of renewables such as hydro, solar, and wind energy is an option to deal with the issue of climate change. There are various ...

The present thesis is made up by three separate chapters in applied microeconomics touching the realms of labor, health and family economics. The first one considers individual genetic information to explore the interplay between genes and environmental factors in shaping individual labor outcomes. The second one looks at old age health and provide an estimate of the causal effect of retirement on a syndrome of health deficit accumulation known as frailty. The third one investigates and describes the role of preferences in the screening and matching process of child adoption with the use of a novel dataset.

The aim of the Ebook series of Research Topics in Agricultural & Applied Economics (RTAAE) is to publish high quality economic researches applied to both the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors of the economy. The subject areas of this E-book series include, among others, supply and demand analysis, technical change and productivity, industrial organization, labor economics, growth and development, environmental economics, marketing, business economics and finance. By covering a broad variety of economic research topics, this Ebook series should prove to be of considerable interest to a wide spectrum of academic, agricultural and applied economic researchers and scientists, as well as to industry specialists and government policy makers.

Collecting together papers from international journals, this book encompasses economics and the philosophical, historical, technical and practical facets of the real world. Grouped together in three separate, yet related parts, the essays deal with 'Problems of Developed Economies', 'Problems of Developing Economies' and 'International Prosperity and Progress'. Reviews of relevant books by Roy Harrod, T. Haavelmo, W. A. Lewis and T. Barna have been included as appendices. Truly international in its coverage and sources, this collection includes articles from the USA, Japan

Financial Economics has quickly established itself as a strong and growing market. Introduction to Financial Economics by Frank Fabozzi, Edwin Neave, and Gaofu Zhou presents an introduction to basic financial ideas through a strong grounding in microeconomic theory. This calculus based text explores the theoretical framework for analyzing the decisions by individuals and managers of firms, and area which is common to both the financial economics and microeconomics. It also explores the interplay of these decisions on the prices of financial assets.

Defence date: 29 January 2021 ; Examining board: Professor Andrea Ichino (European University Insitute); Professor Matteo Cervellati (University of Bologna); Professor Dominik Sachs (University of Munich); Professor Roope Uusitalo (University of Helsinki) ; This thesis consists of three articles in applied economics. In the first essay, I consider the extent to which informational frictions between workers and jobs can be alleviated with short-term contracts in the early career. I leverage a program at a Finnish university which gave out randomly selected students an internship subsidy for a three-month paid internship. I match these students to administrative data to track their transition to labor markets in the years around the program and find evidence that the program significantly improved early labor market success. In the second essay, I study the effect of social sorting on family formation and inequality across households. I leverage the institutional features of Finnish high-school assignments to evaluate how exposure to high- skilled, high-socioeconomic -status peers affect the quality of social ties individuals form. I find that while high schools are an important meeting place for future spouses, but that exposure to higher quality peers will not affect the eventual partner characteristics. This suggests that policies aiming to mix individuals from various backgrounds may not always work anticipated. In the third essay, I study with two co-authors the causes and consequences of broadly defined inequality and democratization using Finland as a natural experiment. We find evidence that the 19th famine affected inequality and labour coercion and thus the balance of political power. On the other hand, we find that these developments were critical in explaining both the increasing threat of revolution and participation in the Finnish civil war in the early 20th century and a subsequent shift to democratization. Areas that initially experienced higher growth in inequality, also experienced the most significant shift to redistribution in the aftermath of the war. ; -- Part 1. Abstract -- Part 2. Internships and the Allocation of Talent -- Part 3. Social Sorting, Family Formation and Inequality -- Part 4. The Violent Origins of Finnish Equality

Experimental economists are leaving the reservation. They are recruiting subjects in the field rather than in the classroom, using field goods rather than induced valuations, and using field context rather than abstract terminology in instructions. This volume examines the methodology of field experiments, and offers a wide array of applications of field experiments. The methodological issues revolve around the ability of field experimenters to ensure the same degree of control that lab experimenters claim. The applications cover issues such as risk and time preferences of the Danish population, savings decisions of the Canadian working poor, differences between the social preferences of American students and workers, the effect of educational vouchers on American school children, and differences in bargaining behavior across nations. This volume serves as an introduction to the issues and applications of this new area of experimental economics