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This dissertation contains three essays on labor economics and development economics.In the first and second chapters, I examine determinants and consequences of alcohol consumption in Russia and quantify the effects of various public policies on mortality rates and on consumer welfare. For the past twenty years, Russia has confronted the Mortality Crisis - the life expectancy of Russian males has fallen by more than five years, and the mortality rate has increased by 50%. Alcohol abuse is widely agreed to be the main cause of this change.In the first chapter, I employ a rich dataset on individual alcohol consumption to analyze the determinants for heavy drinking in Russia, including the price of alcohol, peer effects, and habits. I exploit unique location identifiers in my data and patterns of geographical settlement in Russia to measure peers within narrowly-defined neighborhoods.This definition of peers is validated by documenting a strong increase in alcohol consumption around the birthday of peers. With natural experiments, I estimate the own price elasticity of the probability of heavy drinking using variation in alcohol regulations across Russian regions and over time. From these data, I develop a dynamic structural model of heavy drinking to quantify how changes in the price of alcohol would affect the proportion of heavy drinkers among Russian males (and subsequently also affect mortality rates). I find that that higher alcohol prices reduce the probability of being a heavy drinker by a non-trivial amount. An increase in the price of vodka by 50% would save the lives of 40,000 males annually, and would result in an increase in welfare. Peers account for a quarter of this effect.The second chapter analyzes the consequences of government policy towards light alcohol drinks. Light drinks are commonly viewed as stepping stone to harder drinks, but also as safer substitutes for them. Here, I analyze this trade-off by utilizing micro-level data on the alcohol consumption of Russian males. I find, first, that beer is a safer drink compared to hard alcohol beverages, in the sense that consumption of hard beverages increases the hazard of death while consumption of beer does not. Second, I find that beer is a substitute for vodka: there is significant positive cross-price elasticity of vodka consumption with respect to beer price. I find also little evidence that beer consumption actually serves as stepping stone for vodka consumption. Initiation of beer consumption instead forms habits for the further consumption of beer. Drinking beer at earlier ages results in higher beer consumption and higher overall alcohol intake in older years, but also results in reduced consumption of hard drinks compared to vodka drinkers and to non-abstainers. Finally, I estimate a multivariate model of consumer choice, and quantify the effect of different government policies on mortality rates, drinking patterns, and consumer welfare. I find that the taxation of beer may decrease consumer welfare and increase mortality rates. In contrast, subsidizing beer consumption will increase consumer welfare and even slightly decrease mortality rates.The third chapter of my dissertation documents the unequal enforcement of liberalization reform of business regulation across Russian regions with different governance institutions, which leads to unequal effects of liberalization. National liberalization laws were enforced more effectively in sub-national regions with a more transparent government, more-informed population, higher concentration of industry, and stronger fiscal autonomy. As a result, in regions with stronger governance institutions liberalization had a substantial positive effect on the performance of small firms and on the growth of the official small-business sector in general. In contrast, in regions with weaker governance institutions there is no effect from the reform, and in some cases even a negative effect is observed.

Chapter I: The Impact of Occupation on HealthParticipation in meaningful occupations contributes to good health and well-being. Workers are more likely to derive satisfaction from participating in occupations well-suited to their skills and training. This project provides causal evidence of the impact of occupation on health among college graduates. In particular, I estimate the health effect of participation in occupations well-suited to their education level, that is, occupations that value college education. Valuation of college education in an occupation is measured by occupation-specific college earning premium: the adjusted percentage difference in earnings between workers with and without college degrees in this given occupation. The causal inference relies on estimation with instrumental variables, which are constructed in the spirit of Hausman's price instrumental variables. The result suggests that college educated individuals participating in occupations with higher college earning premiums have better self-reported health, even after accounting for income, occupational prestige, and within-occupation hierarchy. This is the first paper to establish the causal impact of occupation on health. I also show that this causal impact remains significant across various specifications.Chapter II: The Power of PropagandaSince the 1950s, China's central government's gender equality propaganda is widely accepted as the explanation for China's high female labor force participation rate. In an effort to provide empirical evidence for this viewpoint, this project shows that early exposure to propaganda promoting gender equality affects individuals' attitudes towards women in the workforce. We gauge variation in the political climate between 1952 and 2008 by using the official newspaper of the central government, People's Daily, which has been under the direct control of the Chinese Communist Party's top leadership. For causal inference, we exploit provincial variation in propaganda intensities, proxied by provincial level radio and television signal coverage. In addition, we use the timing of exogenous events to generate an instrumental variable for intensity peaks of the gender-equality propaganda. First, we exploit the exogenous timing of a series of national and international Women's Conference as one set of instrumental variables. Second, we utilize the timing of Jiang Qing's (Mao's wife) coming into prominence and her sudden removal by a political coup towards the end of the Cultural Revolution. We find that women with more intense exposure to propaganda promoting gender equality before age 26, and men with more intense exposure before age 18 tend to endorse women's participation in the workforce. The effect of propaganda is more pronounced on women than men. It is worth noting that while propaganda encourages women's participation in the workforce, it does not emphasize men's responsibility in the household. We indeed find evidence of the "superwoman complex": women are expected to strive for a career and do the bulk of the housework. This further evidence suggests that propaganda is able to transmit a more nuanced message, rather than a singularly progressive one. This is the first paper to empirically establish the long-term effect of early exposure to propaganda on individual's preference formation.Chapter III: Do Food Stamps Need More Restrictions?Given the high prevalence of obesity in low income population, several times in the history of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Congress has considered placing limits on the types of food that could be purchased with program benefits. This study provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness of such potential restriction by examining the impact of income on calorie consumption patterns. The intuition is that if limited budget is the main reason why low-income households choose calorie dense food items, then subsidy without any restriction, acting as an upward shift in income, would reduce the likelihood of obesity. Using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data from 2007-2014, I compare individuals from households who were recently dropped from SNAP, most likely due to a positive income shock, to individuals who are still participating in the program. I find little income effect on calorie consumption patterns. Whereas reduced grocery store accessibility is significantly correlated with an increase in total calorie intake, and calorie intake from sugar and fat. The result of this study suggests that placing limits on the types of food that could be purchased would be effective in curbing the obesity pandemic in low income population, and it also confirms the importance of eliminating food deserts.

Public economics is based on the policies of the government. Public economics aspects or financial aspects of people in general division is the investigation of government arrangement through the viewpoint of monetary proficiency and value. At its most fundamental level, public economics aspects gives a system to pondering regardless of whether the administration ought to take an interest in monetary markets and to what degree it ought to do as such. Keeping in mind the end goal to do this, microeconomic hypothesis is used to survey whether the private market is probably going to give proficient results without legislative impedance. Characteristically, this investigation includes the examination of government tax assessment and consumptions. This subject incorporates a large group of points including market disappointments, externalities, and the creation and execution of government approach. Public economics matters expands on the hypothesis of welfare financial matters and is eventually utilized as an apparatus to enhance social welfare. Wide techniques and points include the hypothesis and use of open finance examination and outline of open policy distributional impacts of tax assessment and government expenditures examination of market failure and government failure. Accentuation is on diagnostic and logical strategies and regularizing moral examination, as recognized from belief system. Cases of subjects secured are impose incidence, ideal taxation, and the hypothesis of open merchandise Muskan Dhakad "Public Economics" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-2 | Issue-5 , August 2018, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd17057.pdf

Ethical considerations intersect with economics education on a number of planes. Nonetheless, in terms of curricula, only a handful of economics departments offer courses specifically focused on ethics. This chapter addresses the ways in which instructors can incorporate ethical components into teaching principles and field courses in order to broaden economic understanding and to enhance critical thinking. It examines three pedagogical issues: the artificial dichotomy between positive and normative analysis; the limiting scope of efficiency in outcomes analyses; and the incorporation of alternative ethical frameworks into public policy debates.

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience find that fictional works exert strong influence on readers and shape their opinions and worldviews. We study the Potterian economy, which we compare to economic models, to assess how Harry Potter books affect economic literacy. We find that some principles of Potterian economics are consistent with economists' models. Many others, however, are distorted and contain numerous inaccuracies, which contradict professional economists' views and insights, and contribute to the general public's biases, ignorance, and lack of understanding of economics.

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience find that fictional works exert strong influence on readers and shape their opinions and worldviews. We study the Potterian economy, which we compare to economic models, to assess how Harry Potter books affect economic literacy. We find that some principles of Potterian economics are consistent with economists' models. Many others, however, are distorted and contain numerous inaccuracies, which contradict professional economists' views and insights, and contribute to the general public's biases, ignorance, and lack of understanding of economics.

Over the last five years, the field of economics has undergone a reconsideration of its role in society. With the exception of a select few (Rajan, 2005), most economists were blindsided by the housing crash in 2007 and subsequent financial meltdown. This has prompted both a rethinking of econoimc thought on the institutional and legislative curriculum, and the undergraduate economics curriculum, which has been led by Wendy Carlin at University College London and Diane Coyle of Enlightenment Economics. Additionally, students have begun to take important roles in the debate. In April, the student-run Post-Crash Economics Society (PCES) at the University of Manchester published a report titled Economics, Education and Unlearning, which provided a critique of economics education in the UK and at Manchester in particular. However, as the report points out, "the problems . are certainly not limited to Manchester and are in fact international in scale". While the report has its commendable strides, it falls short on two crucial aspects: the suggestion that economics cannot be a scientific discipline and the driving recommendation of the report for a move towards "pluralism" in the discipline. This essay will focus on these two issues and argue that they are fundamentally misguided.

ABSTRACT: The fields of law and economics are hallmarks of social sciences. Legal studies account for the oldest foundations of scholarly work and have ever since been part of academic institutions. Since the inception of the science of economics, this standardized way of measuring utility had rising popularity. Surprisingly, the interdisciplinary discourse of Law & Economics has just recently started in the previous decades. In today's world, the time has come to acknowledge the power of integrating Law & Economics as a most important approach to solve the most pressing issues of our contemporary times. Climate change, inequality and the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our society will require the bundled strength of Law & Economics to successfully understand, harness the positive advancement but also curb harmful consequences of the opportunities and threats of our contemporary society. Law offers a humane-ethical clarity, governmental impetus and practical feasibility but also historical adaptability to implement societal changes including a legal birds-eye view of comparative approaches around the world, an exemplary sensitivity to disparate impacts of external influences on society but also clear guidelines how far the individual freedom can be granted in light of common security protection and societal welfare enhancement. Economics features the most advanced discounting of future value methods, an exemplary formalization of societal welfare maximization over time but also the most sophisticated ways to quantify societal losses over time and in often-overlooked or behaviorally-unforeseen externalities. Only in the harmonious combination of both disciplines will the most pressing contemporary predicaments of our time be solved and widespread inequalities be alleviated through fine-tuned redistribution mechanisms. Acknowledging the power of an interdisciplinary approach and cherishing a unique field of Law & Economics can help bridge the gap between societal entities. ...

This dissertation studies retirement savings, weather insurance take-up and reference-dependent theory in the literature of development economics and behavioral economics. It consists of two field experiments and one laboratory experiment.In Chapter one, I uses a field experiment to study the relationship between financial literacy and retirement savings in China. When the Chinese government launched a highly subsidized pension system in rural areas in 2009, 73% of households chose to save at a level that is lower than that implied by a benchmark life-cycle model. We test to what extent the low contribution level is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of compound interest. In a field experiment with more than 1000 Chinese households, we randomly assigned some households to a financial education treatment, emphasizing the concept of compound interest. This treatment increased the pension contribution by roughly 40%. The increase accounts for 51% of the gap between contribution levels in the Control group and those implied by the benchmark model. To pinpoint mechanisms, we elicited financial literacy after the intervention, and added a third group in which we explain the pension benefit in general. We find that the neglect of compound interest is correlated with low contributions to the pension plans in the control group, and that financial education about compound interest does help households partially correct their erroneous understanding of compound interest. Moreover, explaining compound interest increases their ability to translate benefits into their own situation. Welfare analysis suggests that financial education increases total welfare, although the fact that the treatment effects are heterogeneous implies that some households end up saving more than the level implied by the benchmark model. In Chapter two (coauthored with Jing Cai), we use a novel experimental design to test the role of experience and information in insurance take-up in rural China, where weather insurance is a new and highly subsidized product. We randomly selected a group of poor households to play insurance games and find that it increases the actual insurance take-up by roughly 48%. To pinpoint mechanisms, we test whether the result is due to: (1) changes in risk attitudes, (2) changes in the perceived probability of future disasters, (3) learning the objective benefits of insurance, or (4) the experience of hypothetical disaster. We show that the overall effect is unlikely to be fully explained by mechanisms (1) to (3), and that the experience acquired in playing the insurance game matters. To explain these findings, we develop a descriptive model in which agents give less weight to disasters and benefits which they experienced infrequently. Our estimation also suggests that experience acquired in the recent insurance game has a stronger effect on the actual insurance take-up than that of real disasters in the previous year, implying that learning from experience displays a strong recency effect.In Chapter three, I conducted a controlled lab experiment to test to what extent expectations and the status quo determine the reference point. In the experiment, I explicitly manipulated stochastic expectations and exogenously varied expectations in different groups. In addition, I exogenously varied the time of receiving new information and tested whether individuals adjust their reference points to new information, and the speed of the adjustment. With this design, I jointly estimated the reference points and the preferences based on the reference points. I find that both expectations and the status quo influence the reference point but that expectations play a more important role. Structural estimation suggests that the model of the stochastic reference point fits my data better than that with expected utility certainty equivalent as the reference point. The result also suggests that subjects adjust reference points quickly, which further confirms the role of expectation as reference point

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-105) ; Explores issues and concepts related to the economic viability of small-scale political institutions, reviews surveys of "decentralization experiments," and considers the potential for small-scale (neighborhood) government to play an ecocomically useful role in providing neighborhood-based health care service delivery.

This paper begins with a discussion on James Buchanan's suggestion to replace the word "economics" with "symbiotics", viewing human behavior through the window of exchange rather than choice. Although our current textbooks - such as those by Daron Acemoglu, David Laibson, and John A. List (Microeconomics and Macroeconomics) - tend to over-emphasize choice rather than exchange, a look at documents published in Scopus during the past 70 years indicates that exchange is equally well represented throughout those years. More fundamentally, words such as choice or exchange are kind of "suitcase-like" words that conceal the complexity of very different things and concepts whose relationship we often do not sufficiently discuss or comprehend. As Richard Feynman, Marvin Minsky, and Aaron Sloman remind us, there is a difference between the name of a thing and what actually goes on. To make this point, the paper looks at the mechanism and machinery of decision-making to highlight that mechanisms can be programmed; in the process, reviving old AI ideas such as the General Problem Solver developed by Allen Newell, Clifford Shaw, and Herbert Simon, or Marvin Minsky's "Prediction Machine". The paper finishes by discussing not only the benefits of viewing an economic system through the lens of exchange, and therefore mutual aid, reciprocity, and redistribution, but also by emphasizing - as Kenneth Boulding has shown us - that social life is full of one-way transfers which are essential to a deeper understanding of our political economy and non-market machinery.

Chapter 1: Using a novel combination of administrative and proprietary data from 2007 to 2011 on King County, WA (metro Seattle), I estimate the effect of owner-occupants' home equity on their probability of sale and, indirectly, mobility. I exploit plausibly exogenous variation that follows only from changes in local housing price indices, and I account for confounding economic conditions that vary by time and location. The estimates indicate that sales decline dramatically over the combined loan-to-value ratio range from approximately 70% to 100%, well before homeowners reach negative equity levels.Chapter 2: A known shortcoming of Burdett and Mortensen's celebrated result of pure equilibrium wage dispersion is that it hinges upon the assumption of random matching. This chapter presents a modified version of their model, in which pure equilibrium wage dispersion arises under a form of balanced matching. Rather than modeling workers and firms, the model addresses workers and jobs. Matching is assumed to be random with respect to jobs, which amounts to balanced matching with respect to firms, when firm size is measured in terms of jobs. The bizarre implication of random matching with firms, whereby splitting a firm in two increases its recruitment rate, is eliminated. In addition to increasing employment, speeding up recruitment and reducing worker turnover, higher wages in the modified model also reduce the rate of job vacancy.Chapter 3: I model the relationship between a central government and its tax-collecting proxies. The Old Kingdom was the first great age of Ancient Egypt, witnessing the construction of such wonders as the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx. Its downfall was the culmination of a long process, whereby the balance of power gradually shifted from the royal court to an emerging provincial elite. I maintain that the process was born out of state policy: Incapable of perceiving the long-run dynamics governing the equilibrium division of resources between itself and its local proxies, the royal court set the economy on a divergent path that empowered the provincial elite at the state's expense. The underlying strategic interaction between the royal court and its proxies was present throughout the Old Kingdom period. Careful attention is paid to the question of which decisions should be modeled by optimizing behavior and which should not. The paper fills a gap in the literature by addressing why, in the short run, the royal court could not decrease the flow of state resources to the provincial elite.

The measurement of academic output in Ireland is of growing interest in the context of the government's strategy to identify and support centres of research excellence and to encourage inter-institutional collaboration in both research and fourth- level education. This paper looks at research output within the economics profession in these various centres, building on an earlier literature (Barrett and Lucey, 2003: Coupe and Walsh, 2003) which looked at the research output of Irish economists in peer-reviewed journals. Using a relatively new data-base, Scopus, we find that research output in the Republic of Ireland is heavily skewed by researcher and by institution and that the more productive and most cited Irish research economists are heavily concentrated in the Greater Dublin area.

There have been over one million deaths from the COVID-19 infection so far. The pandemic forced governments across the world into emergency lockdowns that pushed nearly all parts of the world economy into the deepest slump in production, investment, consumption, and employment since the 1930s. There is optimism that world economy will bounce back in 2021 in a V-shaped recovery. But that seems unlikely because global capitalism was in trouble before the pandemic hit and was already heading into a recession. The lockdown slump was just a tipping point. Also, the pandemic is not yet over and infections continue to mount. The impact of the pandemic lockdowns on employment and incomes, particularly for the poorest countries and the poorest in all countries has been devastating and will leave permanent scarring on economies and livelihoods. And there is no internationally coordinated plan to contain the pandemic and to restore livelihoods. Market-led economies and health systems have failed. Only a social economy where there is public ownership and community control of finance and industry can turn the world economy around for working people. Pandemic; Economy; Recession; Depression; Keynes; Stimulus.

This Article argues that the conventional narrative about the decline of Lochnerism and the rise of mid-century substantive due process jurisprudence is incomplete. That narrative focuses initially on how the premises underlying Lochner's conception of economic freedom were rejected. The Article instead focuses on how the labor movement articulated an alternative conception of freedom that was adopted by Congress, the Executive, and the Supreme Court. While Lochnerism was premised on a negative view of freedom, the labor movement articulated a positive view of freedom and analogized it to republican freedom of association in the political sphere. By reframing the terms of the Lochner-labor debate, the Article shows how strands of labor's conception of associational freedom in one nominally private sphere — the workplace — are transported into modern substantive due process jurisprudence in the post-Griswold era as the doctrine protects association in another — the intimate sphere. The Article traces similarities between the rise of labor's freedom and the rise of sexual and intimate freedoms and explores the ways in which they have transformed American constitutional law.