Agricultural & Resource Economics Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2739
Browse
6 results
Search Results
Item POLICY IMPACTS FOR DEVELOPMENT: EXAMPLES FROM A MARRIAGE LAW AND A LAND REFORM(2024) Chen, Ying; Battistin, Erich; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This abstract outlines the chapters that form my doctoral dissertation. The first two chapters analyze the impacts of the 1974 Age-of-Marriage law in Indonesia, which aimed to curb child marriage.In the first chapter, I study the effectiveness of age-of-marriage laws. I discuss how age-of-marriage restrictions delay marriages and also affect the marriage market equilibrium, including not only when people marry but also who they marry. I build a theoretical model and illustrate graphically what happens when a law abruptly shifts the supply of marriageable brides and grooms. My model predicts that the age-of-marriage laws are expected to postpone first marriages universally. However, the extent of their impact on the marriage market varies depending on the strength of age-related preferences. In cases where individuals strongly favor a specific age gap between spouses, no marriage market effects are anticipated. Conversely, under weaker age-related preferences, the law alters matching in the marriage market and can affect bride prices, age gaps, or marriage rates. I then test some of those predictions with regression discontinuity estimates using birth cohort as the running variable. Using a large nationally-representative dataset, I estimate impacts of the Indonesian Law on age of marriage and probability of underage marriage for both women and men. In addition, I examine marriage-market effects by estimating impacts on the age gap between spouses as well as spouse education. My estimations based on large survey datasets support the notion that the marriage law delayed marriages and prevented under-age marriages, and also altered matching patterns, at least in the short run. Because the estimation in an RD design is complicated by the misreporting of birth dates, I deploy a range of robustness checks to bolster my findings. Though some of the robustness checks raise important caveats, my overall findings still suggest the law effectively delays marriage and alters matching in the marriage market. The second chapter further explores the effects of delaying marriage on life outcomes. I continue to rely on Indonesia’s Age-of-Marriage law and the same nationally representative dataset. I leverage a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to explore whether the law further brought about other commonly expected desirable outcomes of delayed marriage, such as higher education attainment, employment participation, health, wealth, and more. My results show that the law had a strong impact on girls education. It led to significant increases in all completion rates for girls, from primary school to bachelor degrees. This is consistent with some existing studies finding that delayed marriage can prevent girls from dropping out of school. I do not find similar impacts for men, for whom the marriageable age is 19. My results further do not suggest strong impacts on employment, but I significant positive effects on access to banking and communications, as well as health insurance. Echoing results from Chapter 1, I find strong impacts on spouse outcomes, suggesting that women who delayed their wedding married more educated and more successful men. The third chapter examines the land rental market effects of increased tenure security in the context of China’s land titling reform. Between 2009 and 2018, the Chinese government introduced a nationwide reform to register land titles for rural individual households in over 600,000 villages. To estimate the causal effect of the land reform, I leverage differences across villages induced by a pilot project of the reform conducted between 2009 and 2013. Estimates suggest that registering land titles for individual households led to a substantial increase in their participation in farmland rental markets, and allowed a shift towards non-kin tenants with a higher willingness to pay.Item Essays on transportation and environment in China(2021) Shen, Chang; Alberini, Anna; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation focuses on environmental issues associated with the transportation sector in China. The automobile industry in China has grown exponentially in the past 20 years. The rapid growth poses enormous challenges for the reduction of CO2 emissions and pollution. My dissertation utilizes a variety of data sources and explores what policies and market incentives can effectively promote greener transportation and reduce GHG emissions and pollution.In my first chapter, I investigate how Chinese consumers value fuel economy. Understanding this is central to determining what is the optimal policy for reducing vehicle emissions under current policy environments. I find that the new vehicle market displays full valuation, ranging from 85-105% under different specifications and assumptions. Consumer accessibility to reliable fuel economy information has a positive impact on the valuation ratio. The high valuation of fuel economy suggests that a gasoline tax or carbon tax could be an efficient tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions for China. In my second chapter, which I co-authored with Professor Joshua Linn, I look at how rapidly rising income contributes to exploding vehicle demand in China, and how we can use this knowledge to better forecast future GHG emissions. We estimate an elasticity of new car sales to income of about 2.6. This estimate indicates that recent projections of vehicle sales in China have understated actual sales by 40 percent. In my third chapter, instead of looking at GHG emissions, I look at pollution from high-emission trucks. I evaluate how a ban on these trucks improves local NO2 levels in Beijing. The result suggests that the policy helped reduce NO2 by 1.26 μg/m3, or approximately 2.6% of the NO2 level. Additionally, it was found that stations located in areas with a high density of major roads, fewer natural surroundings, and more buildings saw a more significant policy effect than their counterparts.Item Environmental Federalism: Chinese Governmental Behaviors in Pollution Regulations(2019) Yan, Youpei; Lichtenberg, Erik; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)China's economic growth has come with the cost of environmental deterioration. The economy has faced with many problems in land resource depletion and industrial pollution. I examine two policies that tackle three major environmental aspects on land, water, and air in China. All three chapters share the theme that devolution without enough oversights in environmental policies has lead to unintended consequences in practice, as local officials have their trade-offs to promote local economy and protect environment. The first chapter explores the local government's behavior in a land conservation program, which intends to reduce soil erosion by subsidizing afforestation of low productive farmland on steep slopes. Theoretically, the incentives created by the program combined with insufficient oversight have led to afforestation of highly productive farmland on level ground. With a unique land transition dataset, I show that this unintended land use effect has been substantial. This unexpected displacement of highly productive farmland represents a form of leakage that has not been fully explored in the literature. And it is problematic to a country with limited arable land relative to population size as it can negatively impact national food production targets and self-sufficiency goals. The second chapter investigates water pollution activities under China's Pollution Reduction Mandates. In response to the substantial environmental deterioration, the central government taxes firm emissions and subsidizes abatement technology installation. In theory, devolution to local governments to lower pollution and promote economic growth can create local incentives to allocate subsidies to effectively export pollution. I provide the first evidence of the magnitude of these distortions with unique firm-level pollution panel data and find evidence of water pollution exported to downstream and further away from local residences. A simulation indicates that the distortions created by local jurisdictional control harm the environment substantially: centralized allocation of subsidies could reduce total emissions by 20-30%. The third chapter keeps investigating the inter-jurisdictional pollution externalities on air pollution under the same mandates. It provides a complimentary evidence to show that local governments have incentives to promote spatial spillovers and free-ride on the downwind neighbors.Item Higher education, human capital spillovers and economic growth(2019) Qi, Yuandong; Leonard, Kenneth; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Many theorists suggest that the concentration of human capital in a region helps improve productivity for firms and individuals by creating social learning chances for workers. Such human capital spillovers can generate innovations and new ideas which are the driving forces for sustainable long-term growth. My dissertation provides systematic empirical evidence for human capital spillovers using micro-level data from China. In chapter 1, I provide motivation, a discussion of identification challenges, a literature review on human capital spillovers, a description of the data used in my dissertation, a description of the Chinese economy, and a preview of my identification strategies and findings. In chapter 2, I investigate the effect of aggregate human capital on productivity in an indirect way. I compare the wages of otherwise similar individuals that live in cities with different level of college share. The resulting estimates indicate that workers working in cities with higher human capital do have higher wages than otherwise similar workers in cities with lower human capital. Interestingly, I find that both skilled and unskilled workers benefit from the increase in human capital, but unskilled workers benefit more than skilled workers. This is may be due to imperfect substitution between skilled and unskilled workers. In chapter 3, I take a constant-composition approach, which in theory sepa- rates imperfect substitution effect from spillovers by holding the skill composition in the workforce constant, to further investigate the existence and magnitude of human capital spillovers. The results show that the relationship between workers’ wages and city-level human capital remains positive and statistically significant. The es- timates from individual wage data indicate that a one percentage point increase in the share of college-educated workers in the population is associated with a 1.4 to 3.6 percent increase in wages. In chapter 4, I take a direct approach to estimate the impact of aggregate human capital on productivity. Specifically, I apply a first differenced instrumental variable model to a balanced firm panel data to study the impact of an increase in the share of college-educated workers on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP). I find that one percentage point increase in college share in a city increases firms’ TFP by 0.8 to 2.1 percent. Private firms are more responsive to overall human capital than state firms, and the human capital spillovers are stronger in denser and larger cities. Chapter 5 concludes.Item Managerial Incentives in Public Service Delivery: Evidence from School-based Nutrition Programs in Rural China(2014) Sylvia, Sean Yuji; Hoffmann, Vivian; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Growing evidence indicates that weak or misaligned incentives facing providers pose a significant barrier to service delivery in many developing countries. To address weak supply-side incentives, performance pay and related approaches explicitly linking provider pay and performance have become increasingly common in public service delivery. Despite the growing prominence of these approaches, however, many conceptual issues surrounding the use of performance pay in this context remain unexplored. A fundamental one is the role of performance pay for managers in the organizations commonly tasked with delivering public services. Although a large literature examines performance pay for managers in private firms, much less is known about the use of performance pay for their counterparts in public service organizations. Improving public service delivery may nonetheless depend heavily on aligning the incentives of managers with social objectives. Drawing on a large-scale field experiment involving 300 primary schools in rural China, this dissertation explores how performance incentives for school administrators affect their implementation of new, school-based nutrition programs targeting anemia. School-based nutrition programs are an important function of schools, particularly in settings with less developed public health infrastructures. Weak incentives for schools to effectively implement these programs are compounded as these programs compete with more traditional functions for finite school resources. I report the results of this field experiment which was designed to test three main issues concerning the use of performance incentives for school administrators in this context. First, I study the effect of offering administrators performance pay contracts tied to reductions in school-level anemia prevalence. As part of the experiment, a subset of schools were randomly allocated to receive one of two levels of performance incentives for reductions in student anemia or to a no-incentive comparison group. I find that large incentives led to meaningful reductions while smaller incentives (10% of the size) were ineffective in reducing anemia. Further, I find that an important channel through which large incentives impacted student nutrition was by motivating administrators to engage households and influence feeding at home. I discuss the implications of this finding for the design of performance incentives tied to jointly produced outcomes. Second, I study the impact of providing administrators with more resources to implement a nutrition program and how this interacts with performance incentives. To test this, schools were orthogonally assigned to two levels of block grants within each level of performance incentives. I find that, absent explicit anemia-based incentives, increasing the size of block grants under the control of administrators led to sizable reductions in anemia prevalence but were nearly twice as costly as performance incentives. This impact was not purely the result of additional inputs; larger block grants also caused a more efficient use of inputs and an increase in effort devoted to reducing anemia. I also find that additional resources and incentives are substitutes in this context. I provide evidence that this substitution is due, at least in part, to incentives re-framing the task of implementing the nutrition programs from one that was part of the professional role of administrators to one that was not. Finally, I approach the health promotion and education roles of schools as a multi-tasking problem and use remaining experimental groups to examine how performance incentives for school administrators to reduce anemia and improve test scores each affect anemia prevalence and academic performance. Although the theory of multitasking is well-developed, there are few empirical studies testing this theory directly. I emphasize three main findings. First, incentives in the two dimensions (given in the context of an anemia reduction program) both led to significant reductions in anemia prevalence. Second, anemia-based and test-based incentives serve as substitutes in the direction of anemia reduction: providing administrators with both types of incentives did not lead to significantly larger reductions in anemia. Third, I find that anemia incentives caused an allocation of resources away from education 'inputs' but this did not lead to significantly lower student performance on standardized exams after one year. These results reflect that test-based incentives are well-aligned with improving nutrition, but anemia-based incentives are not well aligned with effort to improve academic performance. Strengthening incentives to improve academic performance while also emphasizing the relationship between good nutrition and academic performance may therefore be sufficient to motivate administrators to effectively implement school-based anemia reduction programs while causing less reallocation of resources away from education.Item A balancing act? An empirical examination of whether the dynamic balance policy has helped China reduce cultivated land loss amid rapid urban land expansion(2011) Feng, Juan; Lichtenberg, Erik; Ding, Chengri; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For decades, the Chinese government has been concerned about its ability to meet the grain self-sufficiency goal due to the depletion of cultivated land caused by urbanization and industrialization. The Dynamic Balance Policy (DBP) was initiated in 1998 to balance China's need to protect cultivated land with the need to provide land for urban and industrial development. The DBP is a "no net loss" policy which requires local government to keep their good-quality cultivated land at the current level. If cultivated land is converted to other uses, an equal amount of other land, adjusted for the quality, must be converted to cultivation to compensate for the loss. Empirical evidence suggests that the DBP has had no effects of reducing cultivated land loss in China. Economic incentives, such as the values of urban and cultivated land, emerge as the most influential factors for China's land use changes. Moreover, these economic incentives may have overridden the effects of the DBP, if any. Polices can be made more effective to address the windfall profits in land acquisition and conveyance, and offer economic incentives for not converting cultivated land to urban uses. This dissertation conducts a systematic examination of the effects of the DBP of curbing the rate of cultivated land conversion. In particular, it develops a theoretical model of land conversion that combines the institutional structure of land use in China and the incentive structure of Chinese local officials whose goal is to promote local economies and budgetary balances. This model serves as the theoretical foundation for the empirical examination. The empirical implementation of the land conversion model uses the official land use data provided by the Ministry of Land and Resources of China and economic data published in various issues of provincial statistical yearbooks. This is a unique set of data which combines China's official land use data and economic data at the prefecture level and covers a period of rapid economic growth and prominent changes in land uses from 1996 to 2004.