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  • (2017) Parfinenko, Nina
    Thesis
    This Thesis empirically examines several aspects of the Australian labour market. Chapter 1 studies the effects of ethnic discrimination on females' employment. Most ethnic minorities experience employment gaps. However, these gaps can result from either employers' discrimination or from the employees' cultural norms towards market employment. Conventional measures of discrimination are likely to reflect the effects of both. Chapter 1 offers a novel differences-in-differences methodology that separates the effects of the employees' cultural norms from the employers' discrimination. Applied to the HILDA data this methodology reveals non-trivial effects of the cultural norms. Despite employment gaps for all ethnic minorities we find evidence of employers' discrimination only against Asians. Chapter 2 also studies employment status. It uses a mixture regression approach to identify the homogeneous groups in the sample. The two identified groups qualitatively differ with respect to how the characteristics affect the employment status of the respondents. The career-oriented group is more likely to work when married and when they have children. The family-oriented group, in contrast, is less likely to work in such circumstances. Education increases employment chances for the career-oriented, but has no effect on the family-oriented group. The (negative) effects of children on employment are three to five times larger for the family-oriented group than for average females. Roughly 40% of females sampled in HILDA wave 13 are family-oriented and need much stronger incentives to return to employment after childbearing than the conventional estimates would imply. Chapter 3 examines the determinants of the earnings losses of mothers. It studies whether the partial effects of children on mother's expected earnings can be explained by her human capital. The lifetime children effects are well explained by the (under-accumulated) experience of the mothers. In contrast, the human capital variables do not explain the partial effects of small children. Such effects, as we show, decrease with the mothers' education. We also construct earnings-age profiles for mothers and non-mothers aggregating the earnings gap along the profiles. Such measure of the loss also decreases with the mothers' education, but the marginal effects of children are not monotonic. The second child comes cheaper than the first, but the third one is more difficult than the second.

  • (2019) Jiranaphawiboon, Abhisit
    Thesis
    Public concerns about potential harms of violent video games are often based on a positive association between exposure to video game violence and aggression found in psychology experiments. Whether this aggressive tendency manifests itself in terms of actual criminal behavior seems unclear. In this paper, I utilize temporal variation in aggregated violence exposure using data containing weekly unit sales of the top 30 game titles in the United States from 2005-2014, and analyze the impact of this exposure on assaults committed by young males. I find that weeks with high intensely violent video game sales have a lower number of assaults. The effect becomes more noticeable during the 9 P.M. – 12 A.M. time window over the weekend. One million additional sales of intensely violent games reduces assaults by 2.15% during that time period. I interpret this finding as a product of time substitution, where people play games that they have recently bought for longer hours, which draws them away from risky outdoor activities. As a result, crime drops in response to the absence of proactive criminals on the streets. A highly pronounced impact among young males can be explained through self-selection: they disproportionately commit impulsive crimes, and also identify as frequent purchasers and avid players of intensely violent games. In further evidence of the time substitution hypothesis, crime rates are higher in the week preceding a new release, when gamers are likely to reduce their playing hours of old games in anticipation of beginning the new game. The presence of time substitution in this natural experiment reconciles with the opposite findings from the lab. Gamers cannot commit crimes spurred on by their heightened aggressive tendencies while simultaneously gaming.

  • (2018) Zhang, Xiaoyun
    Thesis
    This thesis consists of three essays that analyze the impact of public policies on individual labor supply and health outcomes in China. The policies considered in this thesis include migration, public health insurance, and pension policies. Modern microeconometric techniques are applied to study a range of outcomes including female labor supply, informal care provision, and elderly health status. The essays share two key themes: (i) rapid population aging in China is one of the main motivations for the research and (ii) each essay accounts for the strong intergenerational relations in Chinese families and models the impact on several generations. The first essay investigates the effect of adult children's labor migration on the health of their elderly parents in rural China. An instrumental variable strategy is used to account for the potential endogeneity in children's migration decisions. The results show a positive effect of children's migration on elderly parents' health. Children's migration increases their parents' ability to perform activities of daily living and increases their mental health scores. The second essay studies the impact of a new public health insurance policy on women's informal caregiving to older parents and their labor supply. The New Cooperative Medical Scheme has significantly decreased demand for informal care by the elderly, resulting in an increase in the working hours of working-age adult daughters/in-law. The third essay analyzes the effects of parental retirement on women's time allocation, fertility timing, and labor supply through intergenerational time transfer. China's mandatory retirement eligibility age is used as an exogenous variation for retirement. The results show that maternal retirement increases the employment rate of women with children. Women are also more likely to give birth when they anticipate their mother's retirement. Overall, the findings of the thesis provide important directions for further policy reforms in China. The Chinese government should continue to reform the household registration (hukou) system and improve social security programs for rural-urban migrants. Public health care and pensions systems for the rural population should also be improved. Furthermore, childcare services need to be developed if the government wants to increase female labor force participation.

  • (2017) Xu, Xiao Chun
    Thesis
    The theme of this thesis is about Australian macroeconomic issues. It features three self-contained chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of the Australian economy. Chapter 1 examines the effects of a compulsory superannuation scheme on the Australian economy. I set up a general equilibrium, overlapping generations life-cycle model to study the effects of superannuation on housing purchases, general wealth accumulation, government age pension liabilities, and the broad economy. The quantitative model suggests that superannuation generates a significantly higher level, and a more equal distribution, of wealth. Superannuation also delays housing purchases, though it increases the aggregate level of the housing stock. In addition, it reduces age pension payments and the tax rate. Furthermore, if the domestic capital supply can alter the interest rate, then superannuation increases productivity and housing wealth. However, the interest rate change diminishes non-housing wealth and raises age pension liabilities. Chapter 2 is about the mining boom and Australia's “two-speed economy”, in which there is a divergence in output between mining-related industries and the rest of the economy. I estimate a sectoral Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model for Australia to investigate the aggregate and industry-level effects of a boom in commodity prices and the contributions made by the macroeconomic stabilisation tools of monetary policy and a flexible exchange rate. Using counterfactual policy exercises, I find evidence of the macroeconomic stabilisation policies contributing to the formation of a two-speed economy. Furthermore, using a forecast error variance decomposition I show that commodity price shocks have significant long-run ramifications for the Australian economy. Chapter 3 tests whether exchange rate movements can be explained by economic fundamentals associated with the Taylor rule, namely the price level, the output gap, and inflation. Using an Unobserved Components model based on the asset pricing approach of Engel and West (2005), the evidence suggests that these fundamentals only play a small role for the bilateral exchange rates (against the US dollar) of Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

  • (2016) Tang, Cheng-Tao
    Thesis
    This thesis consists of three essays addressing the issues of labor mobility or human capital accumulation from different aspects. The first essay is titled as “Human Capital Accumulation and the Use of Non-compete Agreements.” This essay analyzes under what conditions it is desirable for firms to use non-compete agreements (NCAs) by analyzing a model with non-contractible and partially transferable human capital, wage bargaining, and bilateral investment from both firms and works. Elaborating on the trade-off between mitigating the firm's and worker's under-investment problem, we show that firms will use NCAs if and only if the relative importance of firm's training when building up worker's overall human capital is sufficiently high. We also analyzed an extension of our model that incorporates unknown match quality and the measurement of worker's riskiness. The result suggests that it is more desirable to use NCAs for the high risky worker, which offers implication in the recruitment practice. The second essay is titled as “Asset Specificity, Human Capital Acquisition, and Labor Market Competition.” This essay explores a new model of labor market competition that incorporates asset specificity, acquisition of firm-specific human capital, firm size, and labor mobility. Each firm's production efficiency is determined by the level of its managerial capability, and firm-specificity of asset and human capital in the model. Elaborating on the connection between labor mobility and the levels of firms' asset specificity and their employment sizes, we show that the importance of managerial capability and firm-specificity of asset systematically influence labor mobility, asset specificity, average firm size, and employment practices. The model's empirical implications are also discussed. The third essay is titled as “Taxation of Human Capital and Labor Income Inequality: The Role of Parental Transfer.” This essay studies how labor income and bequest taxes affect labor income inequality. The data from 19 OECD countries between 1980 and 2008 show that the labor income taxation significantly increases income inequality measured by Gini coefficient, and the inequality effect of bequest taxation is ambiguous. We construct an overlapping-generations model with heterogeneous agents---who make educational investment and bequest decision in different periods of the life cycle---that can account for these facts.

  • (2014) Wong, Chun Yee
    Thesis
    The aim of this thesis is to examine the efficiency of the provision of school vouchers. The voucher scheme launched in 2007 on Hong Kong's kindergarten market is used as a case study to examine the gain in total surplus to government expenditure, and the effects of the eligibility requirements of the voucher scheme on the efficiency of the provision of vouchers. This thesis consists of seven chapters, including the introduction in the first and the conclusion in the last. Chapter 2 presents the literature review of studies on school vouchers and the background and policy setting of the voucher scheme in Hong Kong. Chapter 3 illustrates that the school fees of the voucher kindergartens in Hong Kong continuously decrease from 2006 to 2010. However, there is no significant increase in the attendance rate, proportion of enrolment at voucher kindergartens, and the average enrolment per voucher kindergarten after the launch of the voucher scheme. Chapter 4 estimates the demand for kindergartens by applying the discrete choice demand model with random coefficients. The results indicate that parents have strong preferences regarding the proximity of kindergartens. Moreover, the variation of parents' preferences in school fees is low, while that in the curriculum is high. The simulations conducted in Chapter 5 are for the estimation of the rate of gain in consumer surplus to the provision of vouchers. The results suggest that if all kindergartens are covered by vouchers, the rate of gain in consumer surplus is 96.862% - the highest rate among all the simulation scenarios. In Chapter 6, another set of simulations is conducted to examine the efficiency of the provision of vouchers by taking kindergartens’ price decision into account. The results suggest that if all kindergartens are eligible for the voucher scheme, the rate of gain in total surplus is 91.722%, which is the highest value compared to all the other scenarios with restrictions on kindergartens from joining the voucher scheme. The empirical evidence supports the idea that imposing restrictions on kindergartens from joining the voucher scheme reduces the efficiency of the provision of vouchers.

  • (2014) Dickwella-Vidanage, Pahan Prasada
    Thesis
    In early anarchic states of society, the distribution of resources was determined primarily by private capacity for violence. Increasingly, sophisticated political systems have attempted to consolidate this capacity in the hands of the state as an enforcer of rights to resources. Nevertheless, even in modern democracies, private resources continue to be used in attempts to control the state and influence distribution. This thesis explores some of the tensions between violence and democratic process in several settings: resource contests, elections and intra-state conflicts. A participatory state is a pre-commitment by rational individuals to avoid conflict by mutually contributing towards an impartial peacekeeper. In the first essay (Chapter 2), I use a laboratory experiment to test the propensity to make costly investments in an institution for mutual conflict-avoidance in a rent-seeking game. I find that this specific institution induces agents to reduce conflict effort compared to when the institution is unavailable. This result is robust to egalitarian and unequal distributions of endowments. In the second and third essays (Chapters 3 and 4), I empirically investigate the roles of pre-election and post-election violence in the political economy of African national-level elections. Using an instrument variable regression model, I find a positive partial effect of pre-election violence on voter support for incumbent. I also find that the incidence of post-election violence drops when incumbent is re-elected. The partial effect of the incumbent’s margin of victory on post-election violence is negative in linear and Poisson regressions, and the local average effect of the incumbent’s victory is negative in a regression-discontinuity setting. In the fourth essay (Chapter 5), I focus on the salience of ethnic fractionalisation and polarisation in explaining the severity of intra-state conflicts. Three levels of conflict severity are modelled using a generalised ordered response model, simultaneously estimating parameters for each threshold of conflict severity. I find that polarisation, fractionalisation, and income inequality are respectively associated with minor, moderate and major conflict. In effect, the salience of polarisation and fractionalisation is found to be dependent on the severity of conflict.

  • (2014) Zhang, Le
    Thesis
    This thesis investigates the production and evaluation of evidence in experimental economics, and it consists of four essays. The first two essays are concerned with the question of how giving decisions are affected by different experimental design choices. We first present our replication of Engel's (2011) meta-study of dictator game experiments. Using his data and statistical models, we determine his results to be robust with one important exception. In Engel's report, the effects of the take-option on giving are statistically insignificant. By contrast, we find the negative effects to be economically and statistically significant, which is consistent with the relevant literature. We also find that the effects of the take-option disappear when the reference point is changed away from the original endowment in a data coding that we call normalisation. In the second essay, we reflect on the meta-analysis method used in the first essay. We investigate the effects of various experimental design and implementation choices using our own data, including a comparison between Engel's dataset and our own dataset. The aim of the third essay is to emphasise the importance of sample size design and appropriate statistical inferences. We demonstrate that it is a problematic procedure of statistical inference only to consider significance levels (type-I error) without taking into account type-II error. Making use of the marginal effects estimated in the meta-analysis from the first essay, we determine the statistical power of these studies to be notably low. We also discuss the consequences of low statistical power with specific examples. In the fourth essay, we analyse participants' pro-social and antisocial preferences using both dictator and joy-of-destruction games. We examine the extent to which behaviours are context-dependent and consistent with between-subjects and within-subject experimental designs. We determine that for one-shot dictator and joy-of-destruction games, participants' social preferences depend on the choice set. We also observe certain inconsistent behaviours (exhibiting both altruism and nastiness) and find significant differences in the proportion of inconsistent behaviours across treatments. While most participants tend to be selfish, they choose to increase social welfare when given the opportunity.

  • (2016) Wei, Xinyang
    Thesis
    This thesis studies firm trading behaviour in the European Union (EU) carbon market and investment decision-making in China’s electricity industry in the context of policies addressing local and global air pollution. The first two papers derive the lessons learnt from the EU carbon market for policy-makers (such as the Chinese government) introducing such instruments, and the last paper assesses the effects of such policies on investment decisions in the electricity sector. The first paper aims to provide empirical evidence for beyond compliance trading behaviour in the EU carbon market by investigating companies’ characteristics and related volumes. To explore decision-making at the parent company level, a microeconomic choice model is applied to a unique dataset that contains information on the EU carbon registry and firm-specific characteristics. The results suggest that Eastern European state-owned firms are less likely to trade allowances beyond their compliance needs, and that their volumes are significantly lower. However, Western European stateowned firms are more active in terms of beyond compliance trading and related volumes. The second paper uses a bottom-up approach to analyse value-added tax (VAT) fraud across all countries involved in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in phase 2. The results show that the VAT losses for all EU countries are estimated at €3,341 million. The extent of the losses varies for each country, with France having the highest fraudulent volume. The results also reveal that large-scale VAT fraud significantly decreased after 2010, which was the result of anti-fraud policies. In addition, VAT fraud was strongly connected with overseas tax havens, and the Danish registry became a loophole, which resulted in the prevalence of VAT fraud throughout the EU carbon market. The third paper simulates different single and combined policy scenarios to evaluate the effects of air pollutant control and carbon mitigation policies on China’s future electricity generation portfolio investment. By using a portfolio assessment model that incorporates key uncertainties, the results show that China can achieve significant reductions for both greenhouse gas and local air pollutant emissions through a combination of climate change and air pollution control policies. In addition, the paper identifies co-benefits from the perspectives of both air pollutant control and carbon mitigation, and it discusses the net generation costs of different policy scenarios in the process of policy evaluation.

  • (2015) Pham, Tuong Van
    Thesis
    This thesis focuses on the so far neglected area about the behavior of heterogeneous intermediate suppliers in international trade. The supplier of intermediate goods has been either assumed away or treated homogenously in earlier trade models that analyze firm behaviour. My empirical analyses of suppliers in Vietnam as well as in 29 European countries under investment liberalization reveal a vast heterogeneity among the suppliers in term of their both ex ante and ex post abilities. It is the productivity of each supplier that determines which type of final producer it would supply to and the gains it gets from such supplying linkage. Motivated by these empirical findings, this thesis establishes two new theoretical models that incorporate the intermediate sector with heterogeneous intermediate suppliers in the heterogeneous producer model. With this new structure, I’m able to examine the simultaneous equilibria in both sectors and analyze the interdependence between the behavior of the final producers and their suppliers. My first model analyzes the choice of an intermediate supplier in serving different types of final producers, and predicts that more productive suppliers self-select into supplying to multinationals or exporting. A reduction in trade or investment cost would affect its relative preference for these two choices. My second model focuses on the product quality choice of firms that produce multiple products and source their quality-differentiated inputs from various suppliers. This is a novel contribution to the unification of two separate literatures on vertical differentiation and horizontal differentiation of products and offers a better explanation for some new stylized facts in international trade. Specifically, this model explains the variation in a firm’s product range and prices under different market competition conditions and trade liberalization. The major predictions are that: (i) higher ability firms export a larger and higher quality range of products and source their inputs from more suppliers; (ii) the characteristics of a market, including its size, productiveness and skill-intensity would determine the competition level, hence, affect the product choice of exporters to that market; and (iii) under greater competition, a firm’s top quality-, and at the same time, its lowest quality-adjusted priced products would be the most successful ones.