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This web-based open textbook and course for Microeconomics for Business was created under a Round Eight ALG Textbook Transformation Grant. The text is a remix including newly-created textbook chapters and chapters from OpenStax Principles of Microeconomics. Original chapters are also available for download in the repository. Topics include: Introduction to Economics Demand and Supply in Competitive Markets Elasticity of Demand and Supply Markets and Government Consumer Choice Production, Costs, and Profit Firms' Decisions under Perfect Competition Monopoly, Rent Seeking, and Antitrust Policies Firms' Decisions under Monopolistic Competition Market Concentration, Oligopoly, and Firms' Strategic Interaction Accessible files with optical character recognition (OCR) and auto-tagging provided by the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation. ; https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/business-textbooks/1006/thumbnail.jpg

Defence date: 13 December 2019 ; Examining Board: Prof. Andrea Ichino, European University Institute; Supervisor Prof. Michèle Belot, European University Institute; Prof. Yann Algan, Sciences Po; Prof. Eleonora Patacchini, Cornell University ; This thesis is a collection of independent essays in applied microeconomics. In the first chapter, I investigate if growing up in an ethnic enclave slow down the adoption of natives cultural behaviour by immigrants. To measure cultural behaviour, I use administrative data on usage of contraceptives by women aged 15 to 20. To observe exogenous variation in the ethnic concentration of (close) neighbourhoods, I rely on the random allocation of asylum seekers to government run accommodation in the Netherlands during the period 1996 to 2012. Although behaviours do converge with time, neighbourhood ethnic composition has no effect on this process. In the second chapter, co-authored with Eva Johansen, we study if teenagers decision to use contraceptives is influenced by peers. To identify peer effects, we rely on cross-cohort variation in students usage in Danish high-schools. To address the reflection problem, we focus on the influence of older cohorts on younger ones. Contraception not being prevalent among young women with a non-Western background, its usage is a good measure of cultural adaptation. Looking at the effect of different peers group is indicative of which is influential. Immigrant teenagers adapt their behaviours to what other immigrants (but not what other natives) do. Their probability of using contraceptives and of having an abortion becomes lower, but not their likelihood of being treated for chlamydia. In the third chapter, I study the influence of pre-migration social background on the economic assimilation of immigrants. I use unique French survey data to trace family histories over three generations, both in the sending country before migration and later in France. Pre-migration socioeconomic status is key in explaining the educational achievements of second generation immigrants. Holding the origin country fixed, it is as important as father's occupation in the destination country. After an initial loss at migration, the first generation regains human capital more slowly than the second generation develops its own. In a simple model of human capital accumulation, this can be due to (i) parents investing more in their children than in themselves or (ii) the productivity of the two investments being different. The latter channel is supported empirically. ; -- 1. Does growing up in an ethnic enclave slow down the adoption of natives cultural behaviour? -- 2. Who influences young immigrants? -- 3. The Intergenerational (Im)mobility of Immigrants

Principles of Microeconomics covers the scope and sequence for a one-semester economics course. The text also includes many current examples, including; the Keystone Pipeline, Occupy Wall Street and debates over the minimum wage. The pedagogical choices, chapter arrangements, and learning objective fulfillment were developed and vetted with feedback from educators dedicated to the project. The outcome is a balanced approach to economics and to the theory and application of economics concepts. Current events are treated in a politically-balanced way, as well. Note: Principles of Microeconomics PDF and web view versions have been updated to include current F.R.E.D. (Federal Reserve Economic) data. OpenStax College has compiled many resources for faculty and students, from faculty-only content to interactive homework and study guides.

Defence date: 28 May 2015 ; Examining Board: Professor Andrea Mattozzi, Supervisor, EUI; Professor Andrea Ichino, EUI; Professor Peter Fredriksson, Stockholm University; Professor Tarjei Havnes, University of Oslo. ; Abstract The first chapter analyzes the effects of commercial television in Norway. Matching data on cable television networks with individual-level administrative register data, we find that the expansion of commercial television reduced ability test scores as well as high school graduation rates. We find stronger effects on sons of low-income parents and particularly large effect for children in elementary school. Aggregate data show a substantial drop in time spent reading by young people in the same period, suggesting that television watching may have crowded out more cognitively stimulating activities such as reading. This chapter is joint work with Simen Markussen and Knut Røed. The second chapter investigates how sickness absence behaviour in Norwegian municipalities was affected by the terrorist attack in Norway on July 22, 2011. Using register data covering the complete Norwegian population, I find that sickness absence rates declined substantially in municipalities affected more intensely by the attack. In municipalities from which a resident was killed in the attack, sickness absence rates declined by 4% compared to municipalities without victims. The effect is precisely estimated, stable across several challenging specifications, and persists for as long as there is available data. The effect for people in their 20's is more than twice that for the population at large – for this group, local exposure to the attack decreased absence rates by around 10%. The third chapter exploits a natural experiment in the Norwegian political system. I find that obtaining the right to vote at a lower age is associated with substantially higher turnout among first-time voters, and that this is driven by parental influence. Counter to conventional wisdom about the habitual nature of voting, this difference in political participation does not persist for subsequent elections.

This thesis provides an empirical investigation of externalities and social interaction mechanisms in various settings. In the first chapter, I show how input heterogeneity triggers productivity spillovers at the workplace. I find that the exogenous assignment of inputs of heterogeneous quality allows workers to free ride on each other, yielding negative productivity spillovers. In the second chapter, I investigate the impact of violent conflict on firm behavior. I show how conflictinduced distortions in the accessibility of foreign markets force Palestinian firms to substitute imported materials with domestically produced materials, diminishing their output value. In the third chapter, I explore the relationship between ethnic diversity and conflict in contemporary South Africa. Results show that ethnic diversity within the black majority was highly correlated with conflict incidence during the democratic transition. In the fourth chapter, I study spillovers among potential victims from investment in crime protection technologies. I find that burglary protection investment of neighbors significantly increases the likelihood of a given household of investing in the same technology. ; Esta tesis es un estudio empírico de externalidades y mecanismos de interacción social en varios contextos. En el primer capítulo muestro como heterogeneidad en la calidad de los insumos genera efectos derrame en el puesto de trabajo. Encuentro que la asignacíón exógena de los insumos genera un problema de free riding, con efectos de derrames negativos sobre productividad. En el segundo capítulo, investigo el impacto de un conflicto violento sobre la actividad de las empresas. Los resultados muestran como el conflicto genera distorsiones en el acceso a los mercados extranjeros, forzando las empresas palestinas a substituir materiales importados con materiales locales, con una consecuente disminución del valor de su producción. En el tercer capítulo, exploro la relación entre diversidad étnica y conflicto en el el Sudáfrica ...

This thesis is composed of three independent articles. The first chapter studies a nationwide teacher pay-for-performance program in Peru, and shows that it had a precisely estimated null impact on student learning. I provide suggestive evidence that some of the program's characteristics might have hindered teachers' ability to improve the incentivized outcome or infer their probability of winning the bonus, explaining this zero effect. In the second chapter, I examine the impact of compulsory voting laws in Austria, and show that while these laws led to significant increases in turnout, they had no impact on government spending patterns or electoral outcomes. Individual-level data suggests these results occur because individuals swayed to vote due to compulsory voting are more likely to be non-partisan and uninformed, and have less interest in politics. In the final chapter, I study how income inequality affects growth in Brazil, and find that places with higher initial inequality exhibit higher subsequent growth. I show that this effect is entirely driven by inequality originating in the left tail of the income distribution, and provide evidence on channels consistent with credit constraints and setup costs for human and physical capital investments, as well as an increasing and concave individual propensity to save. ; Esta tesis se compone de tres artículos independientes. El primer capítulo estudia un programa nacional de remuneración basado en el desempeño en el Perú, y muestra que tuvo un efecto nulo y precisamente estimado sobre el aprendizaje estudiantil. Proporciono evidencia sugiriendo que algunas de las características del programa podrían haber limitado la capacidad de los docentes de mejorar en términos del indicador incentivado o inferir su probabilidad de ganar el bono, explicando así este efecto nulo. En el segundo capítulo, examino el impacto de las leyes de voto obligatorio en Austria, y muestro que aunque estas incrementaron considerablemente la participación electoral, no tuvieron impacto ...

This dissertation consists of three chapters in the field of applied microeconomics with a focus on labor economics and behavioral economics. It covers various topics and methods. A common theme is the importance of decisions. Our economy is the result of innumerable decisions made by individual and institutional agents. The decisions are constraint by resources and differ in complexity and impact. All three chapters contain empirical analyzes of such decisions reaching from binary decisions in the stylized context of the prisoners dilemma, over individual training and employment choices and consequences in late-careers, to the impact of the political choice of the minimum-wage introduction on income inequality and poverty. In the first chapter we study how individuals make decisions in the stylized context of the repeated prisoners' dilemma. In a meta-study we reanalyze 12 experiments on the repeated prisoner's dilemma (PD) and identify three distinct types of players: defectors, cautious cooperators and strong cooperators. The defectors defect with a high probability in every round. Both cooperating types play semi-grim behavior strategies. This simple three-type mixture fits significantly better than any model consisting of combinations of (generalized) pure strategies from the literature, which we fitted at the treatment level (considering 1051 pure-strategy mixtures), even when we use constant specifications of the three types across all experiments. The three best fitting strategies vary slightly across experiments, however. Structurally analyzing these strategies, we find that subjects have limited foresight and subjectively assign utility values to the four states (cc,cd,dc,dd) of the supergame, which relate to the original stage-game payoffs in a manner compatible with inequity aversion. This subjectively transforms the prisoners dilemma game into a coordination game and can reliably explain the strategies used across all 32 treatments. In the second chapter I study how individual decisions interplay ...

This dissertation is composed of three papers on distinct topics, each using a different method from applied microeconomics. In chapter 1, I study how candidates' election results affect the future contribution behavior of their donors using a regression discontinuity design. I find that contributors to narrowly-winning House candidates are much more likely to contribute in the following cycle than contributors to narrow-losers. Much of this effect is driven by future giving to the same candidate, contrary to a "reinforcement learning" hypothesis. This has broader implications, as incumbents can rely more on contributions from past donors than can new challengers. I estimate that candidates from narrowly-winning parties receive $130K more in individual contributions than those from narrowly-losing parties in the following cycle, almost all of this coming from these repeat donors.In chapter 2, we study the role of self- and social-image in social comparisons. Wepropose and test a theory that casts peer effects as the result of a signal extraction. The theory posits that individuals receive signals of their own attributes through completion of costly actions. Signal extraction is improved through social comparisons with other's actions. In experiments, we find that subjects choose to complete more real-effort tasks in exchange for charitable donations if they anticipate learning how their decisions compare to the choices of others. Further, differentiated responses to noisy or refined social information adhere to the dynamics of signal extraction.In chapter 3, we characterize how municipal governments respond to economic fluctua- tions, using employment shocks as a proxy. We specifically study the role Tax and Expenditure Limitations play in this response. We find that, following a positive employment shock of one percent, limited municipalities persistently lag behind their unconstrained counterparts in capital- intensive spending, with little differential effect on public safety and administrative expenditures. Our findings illuminate an unintended consequence of fiscal responsibility measures in U.S. cities: limits designed to restrain the size of government may instead alter the government's spending mix, inducing investment cuts that allow a government to maintain patterns of administrative and public safety spending.

This dissertation contains three essays in Applied Microeconomics. Chapter 1 provides the first causal estimates of the effect of children's access to computers and the internet on adult educational outcomes such as schooling and choice of major. I exploit cross-cohort variation in access to technology among primary and middle school students in Uruguay, the first country to implement a nationwide one-laptop-per-child program. Despite a notable increase in computer access, educational attainment has not increased. However, college students who had been exposed to the program as children, were more likely to select majors with good employment prospects. Chapter 2 provides the first empirical evidence of the historical effects of natural disasters on economic activity in the United States. Although the literature has focused on salient natural disasters, more than one hounded strike the country every year, causing extensive property destruction and loss of life. My coauthors and I construct an 80 year panel data set that includes the universe of natural disasters in the United States from 1930 to 2010 and study how these shocks affected migration rates, home prices and poverty rates at the county level. Severe disasters increased out-migration rates by 1.5 percentage points and lowered housing prices/rents by 2.5–5.0 percent, but milder disasters had little effect on economic outcomes. Chapter 3 exploits the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, the first successful environmental science book, to investigate whether public information can influence popular demand for environmental regulation. Protecting the environment is often plagued by collective-action problems, so it is important to understand what motivates politicians to act. Combining historical U.S. congressional roll-call votes and census data, I find that the propensity of politicians to vote in favor of pro-environmental regulation increased by 5 to 33 percentage points after the publication of the book. The response to the informational shock varies with the constituency's level of education, income, and exposure to pollution.

Principles of Microeconomics 2e covers the scope and sequence of most introductory microeconomics courses. The text includes many current examples, which are handled in a politically equitable way. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of economics concepts. The second edition has been thoroughly revised to increase clarity, update data and current event impacts, and incorporate the feedback from many reviewers and adopters. Changes made in Principles of Microeconomics 2e are described in the preface and the transition guide to help instructors transition to the second edition. The first edition of Principles of Microeconomics by OpenStax is available in web view here.

The benchmark model of economics, expected utility theory, assumes that individuals manage uncertainty by forming beliefs about all relevant events and that these beliefs satisfy the probability axioms. There is ample scope for individuals to come to radically different conclusions on the likelihood of events. The first chapter of this thesis examines differences between individuals in how their beliefs evolve in the context of stock returns. In this chapter, which is joint with Hans-Martin von Gaudecker, we analyse a long panel of households' stock market beliefs to gain insights into the nature of the levels, dynamics, and informativeness of these expectations. In a first step, we classify respondents into one of five groups based on their beliefs data alone. In a second step, we estimate models of expectations at the group level so that belief levels, volatility, and response to information can vary freely across groups. At opposite extremes in terms of optimism, we identify pessimists who expect substantially negative returns and financially sophisticated individuals whose expectations are close to the historical average. Two groups expect average returns around zero and differ only in how they respond to information: Extrapolators who become more optimistic following positive information and mean-reverters for whom the opposite is the case. The final group is characterised by its members being unable or unwilling to quantify their beliefs about future returns. Expected utility theory cannot fully account for how individuals choose under uncertainty. In some settings, observed decisions of a sizeable fraction of individuals cannot be explained with any probabilistic belief. This suggests that heterogeneity in how individuals manage uncertainty goes beyond beliefs, extending to what has become known as ambiguity attitudes. Analysis of these attitudes for natural events is the subject of the second chapter, which is joint with Hans-Martin von Gaudecker and Christian Zimpelmann. We analyse the stability and distribution of ambiguity attitudes using a representative sample. We employ four waves of data from a survey instrument with high-powered incentives. Structural estimation of random utility models yields three individual-level parameters: Ambiguity aversion, likelihood insensitivity or perceived level of ambiguity, and the variance of decision errors. We demonstrate that these parameters are very heterogeneous but fairly stable over time and across domains. These contexts span financial markets, our main application, and climate change. The ambiguity parameters are interdependent in their interpretation and the precision of their estimates depends on decision errors. To describe heterogeneity in these three dimensions, we adopt a discrete classification approach. A third of our sample comes rather close to the behaviour of expected utility maximisers. Half of the sample is characterized by a high likelihood insensitivity, with thirty per cent ambiguity-averse and twenty per cent making ambiguity-seeking choices for most events. For the remaining eighteen per cent, we estimate sizeable error parameters, which implies that no robust conclusions about their ambiguity attitudes are possible. Predicting group membership with a large number of observed characteristics shows reasonable patterns. The difficulty of finding reliable probabilities for uncertain events raises the question how individuals aspiring to be rational should approach it. One intriguing proposal is to turn to prediction markets or bookmakers. In the third chapter, I examine betting odds, which are often seen as a credible source of predictions for future events in sports, politics, and entertainment. Who will win Wimbledon, who will be the next US President and which movie will win Best Picture at the Oscars? Betting odds, offered by bookmakers or by traders in prediction markets, typically exist for answers to each of these questions and can be turned into implied probabilities. Are these well-calibrated in the sense that they indicate the empirical frequency of outcomes? Do they incorporate publicly available information that might be relevant for prediction? Using a large sample of ATP tennis matches, I investigate these questions with machine learning methods that combine model-based ratings of player strength with a large number of other player features to estimate probabilities. I find that, in almost all settings, implied probabilities are very well calibrated and can be regarded as probabilities of events that condition on an information set containing publicly available statistics on players and matches. They reduce the error of the best prediction model by around 1.3% in terms of negative log-likelihood.

This dissertation tackles three questions theoretically and empirically. The first chapter studies how non-binding default options influence the behavior of consumers. We argue that default options arise in an inherently strategic setting between a default setter and decision makers. Building upon this premise, we show empirically and theoretically how default effects depend on the characteristics of the default setting institution and the decision makers. The second chapter provides evidence that two important features of labor markets—the existence of involuntary unemployment, and the segmentation of markets according to firms offering "good" and "bad" jobs—may have a common underlying cause. In particular, in the prevalent case that contracts are incomplete, the implicit contracting strategies adopted by firms may simultaneously generate both phenomena. The third chapter investigates the effects of power concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., voters' capacity to empower competent politicians. We show that variations in power concentration involve a tradeoff. On the one hand, higher concentration of power enables the voters' preferred politician to enforce his agenda. On the other hand, higher power concentration leads to more opportunistic campaigns. We find theoretically and empirically that full power concentration is desirable only if politicians are strongly driven by welfare considerations.

The textbook contains a systematic presentation of the most difficult provisions of the discipline "Microeconomics". The book comprehensively, thoroughly and deeply analyzes the mechanisms of modern microeconomics as the foundation of economic thinking at the lowest level of management. The structure of the book includes two sections and 12 chapters, at the end of which control questions and test tasks are proposed. At the end of the textbook, symbols, a glossary and a bibliography are presented. The textbook is addressed to students in the field of preparation 38.04.01 "Economics" (qualification "master"). The book will be useful to students in additional professional educational programs, graduate students and researchers, as well as working in the field of farm management in enterprises, industries, and government bodies. Учебник содержит систематизированное изложение наиболее трудных положений дисциплин «Микроэкономика». В книге всесторонне детализированы и глубоко анализируются механизмы современной микроэкономики. Структура книги включает в себя два раздела и 12 глав, в конце которых предложены контрольные вопросы и тестовые задания. В конце учебника представлены условные обозначения, глоссарий и библиографический список. 38.04.01 «Экономика» (квалификация «магистр»). Книга будет полезна обучению по дополнительным профессионально-образованным программам, аспирантам и научным сотрудникам, а также работникам сферы управления хозяйством на предприятиях, в органах государственной власти.

A divergence of views among microeconomists in general and game theorists in particular regarding the explanatory objectives of microeconomic theory has become apparent in recent years. This divergence concerns, most fundamentally, the question whether institutions, legal or customary rules, or social norms are to be classified among the endogenous as opposed to the exogenous variables in the framework of microeconomic analysis. 1 The majority of economists are probably agnostic or ambivalent on this question, not having confronted, or not having had to confront, the issue in their own work. Many have sidestepped it by treating institutions as immutable or by restricting their analyses to a given rule regime. But rules do vary and change, and among those who are concerned with studying variation in institutions, two diverging views are increasingly identifiable, sometimes coexisting even within the writings of the same author.

In der ökonomischen Forschung wird eine Vielzahl von Strategien verwendet, um zu versuchen kausale Schlussfolgerungen aus Beobachtungsdaten zu ziehen. Neue Strömungen in der Literatur zu kausaler Inferenz konzentrieren sich auf die Kombination von Methoden zur Vorhersage und kausalen Fragestellungen. Diese neuen Methoden ermöglichen es neue Forschungsfragen zu beantworten und bieten die Möglichkeit bestehende Forschungsfragen in der Literatur neu zu adressieren. Diese Dissertation umfasst empirische Arbeiten in den Bereichen (i) Umweltökonomie: Ich evaluiere die Preispolitik für Abfälle mithilfe der "synthetic control" Methode und Methoden des maschinellen Lernens; (ii) Arbeits- und Migrationsökonomie: Ich identifiziere und quantifiziere nicht gemeldete landwirtschaftliche Arbeitsleistung, die durch einen plötzlichen Migrationszustrom verursacht wird; (iii) Konfliktökonomie: Ich analysiere die wirtschaftlichen Kosten eines hybriden Krieges, des Donbass-Krieges in der Ukraine. Der Beitrag dieser Dissertation zur bestehenden Literatur ist dreifach. Erstens kombiniere ich neuartige Datenquellen und stelle neue Datensätze bereit. Zweitens verwende ich moderne Evaluierungsmethoden und passe sie an, um politisch relevante kausale Parameter in verschiedenen Bereichen der ökonomischen Forschung abzuschätzen. Drittens vergleiche ich neuere mit traditionellen ökonometrischen Ansätzen, die zuvor in der Literatur verwendet wurden. Meine Dissertation zeigt, dass moderne ökonometrische Techniken vielversprechend sind, um die Genauigkeit und Glaubwürdigkeit von kausalen Schlussfolgerungen und die Evaluierung von Politikmassnahmen zu verbessern. ; In economics, researchers use a wide variety of strategies for attempting to draw causal inference from observational data. New developments in the causal inference literature focus on the combination of predictive methods and causal questions. These methods allow researchers to answer new research questions as well as provide new opportunities to address older research question in the literature. This dissertation entails empirical work in the fields of (i) environmental economics: I evaluate waste pricing policies using synthetic controls and machine learning methods; (ii) labor and migration economics: I identify and quantify unreported farm labor induced by a sudden migrant inflow; (iii) conflict economics: I evaluate the economic costs of an hybrid war, namely, the Donbass war in Ukraine. The contribution of this dissertation is threefold. First, I combine novel data sources and provide unique datasets. Second, I apply and tailor modern evaluation methods to the estimation of policy-relevant causal parameters in various fields of economics. Third, I compare recent versus traditional econometric approaches previously employed by the literature. My dissertation shows that modern econometric techniques hold great promise for improving the accuracy and credibility of causal inference and policy evaluation.