Essays in Development and Labor Economics.

详细信息   

• 作者：Salas ; John Michael Ian.
• 学历：Ph.D.
• 年：2013
• 导师：Neumark, David,eadvisorBitler, Marianneecommittee memberShah, Manishaecommittee member
• 毕业院校：University of California
• Department：Economics
• ISBN：9781303379116
• CBH：3594224
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：2648432
• Pages：177

文摘

The first essay tackles the role of subsidized contraception in influencing fertility. It draws on two types of disruptions that affected the public supply of free contraceptives in the Philippines: a sharp reduction induced by the phase out of contraceptive donations to the country from an external donor coupled with a government policy that withdrew public funding to fill the supply shortfall, and substantial fluctuations in the shipment of free contraceptives to the countrys provinces that were brought about by supply chain issues. It finds that birth rates were responsive to both broad and transitory changes in public contraceptive supply: provinces which experienced bigger declines in the supply of free contraceptives also had larger increases or smaller decreases) in birth rates, while temporary supply drops increases) were followed by rising falling) birth rates. It also identifies poor, low-educated, and rural women as groups which may have difficulties coping with short-term gaps in public contraceptive supply. The second essay develops a novel approach of framing couple decision making as a deliberative and engaging process that may lead to a spouse prevailing over the other, but not necessarily so, in which case the decision-making authority is shared between spouses. It argues that when joint decision making is observed, it could be interpreted as indicative of cooperative spousal behavior. Using a rich dataset from a homogenous set of communities in the Philippines, it explores the patterns of household consumption spending that accompany the characterized decision-making arrangement. After controlling for total household resources and several factors that influence each spouses bargaining power, the evidence suggests that children fare favorably under couples joint decision making than under sole decision making by either the mother or the father. This result likely stems from couples ability to coordinate their spending priorities under joint decision making, which mitigates the underprovision of household public goods. The third essay, which is joint work with David Neumark and William Wascher, assesses recent studies claiming that estimates from the panel data approach used in much of the "new minimum wage research" are flawed because this approach fails to account for spatial heterogeneity. These recent studies use research designs intended to control for this heterogeneity, and conclude that minimum wages in the United States have not reduced employment. The essay explores the ability of these research designs to isolate reliable identifying information and tests their untested assumptions about the construction of better control groups. It presents evidence pointing to serious problems with these research designs. Moreover, it shows that new methods which let the data identify the appropriate control groups leads to evidence of disemployment effects, with teen employment elasticities near -0.15. It concludes that the evidence still shows that minimum wages pose a tradeoff of higher wages for some against job losses for others, and that policymakers need to bear this tradeoff in mind when making decisions about increasing the minimum wage.