Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Essays in Gender and Development(2023) SIVARAM, ANUSUYA; Goldberg, Jessica; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation consists of three essays at the intersection of gender and economics in developing countries. In chapter 1, I study the economic implications of a particular cultural practice: cousin, or consanguineous, marriage. One sixth of all marriages in Egypt are between first cousins, but there are important differences in the characteristics of individuals who select into such relationships relative to those who marry non-relatives. To measure the causal impact of the practice on socioeconomic outcomes abstracting from selection, I instrument for the probability of marrying a cousin using exogenous variation in family structure, and use weak instrument robust methods to estimate parameters and evaluate statistical significance. I find that individuals who marry a cousin because of exogenous attributes of their natal family structure are further in age from their spouse, predominantly driven by older men marrying cousins. I also find that women married to cousins receive higher levels of marital transfers that give them bargaining power within their marriages, likely as compensation for their spouse's attributes. This contrasts to patterns for those who select into cousin marriage; those individuals are younger at the time of marriage, match with partners closer to their own ages, and have no differences in the level of marital transfers exchanged. The contrast between OLS and IV results suggests that selection into cousin marriage may be motivated by anticipation of not matching on the wider marriage market, credit constraints, or the desire to consolidate property within the extended family. In chapter 2, I present baseline statistics from an experiment which examines the impact of random job offers on women's experiences of intimate partner violence in Bangladesh. This paper build on a larger study which aims to increase women's labor force participation and use of mobile money services. I collect supplementary data on women's experiences of intimate partner violence, men and women's agreement with conservative social norms, and second order beliefs regarding their community's sanction of intimate partner violence. I validate survey measures of intimate partner violence with a list randomization elicitation. I also present results from two incentivized decisionmaking activities conducted at baseline. I specify the outcomes I plan to test once endline data is available, as well as the econometric specifications I will use. Finally, I present power calculations using baseline data to determine the smallest effect sizes I can detect. Finally, in chapter 3, I study the impact of an exogenous negative shock to labor demand for female migrants within Bangladesh. I use a difference in differences strategy and compare outcomes between districts that have a history of sending migrants with those that do not, before and after the shock. I find that migrants respond to the initial shock and return to their households rather than remain unemployed in Dhaka, and that at least some of these women marry. I see no decrease in the level of investment in children's human capital, which suggests households do not revise their perceptions regarding the returns to education, and have access to other tools to smooth consumption. Finally, I see no changes in the daily agricultural wage rate for women in the years after the shock. I lack data on several important margins of adjustment which would allow us to discern the mechanisms behind the effects.Item Psychological Well-being and Health Gains in the Developing World: Evidence from Peru and Malawi(2018) Dickerson, Sarah; Graham, Carol; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I assess the relationship between psychological well-being and health gains in Peru and Malawi. The first chapter consists of a comprehensive and systematic examination of research that frames the quantitative analyses found in the second and third chapters. It investigates literature on the relationship between maternal well-being and multiple dimensions of health in children and adolescents. It also explains how maternal depression may interact with poverty to worsen offspring’s outcomes. Then, it explores literature on the association between catastrophic health expenditure in Malawi and two of its potential predictors: unexplained happiness and access to antiretroviral therapy (ART), a treatment regimen for people living with HIV/AIDS. The second chapter assesses the impacts of maternal depression and life satisfaction on children in Peru. Using panel data from rounds three (2009-2010) and four (2013-2014) of Young Lives Peru, I find that children’s self-reported life satisfaction and health positively correlate with maternal life satisfaction and negatively associate with maternal depression. Furthermore, maternal life satisfaction predicts whether a female adolescent smokes, while maternal depression predicts smoking behavior and misinformation on pregnancy amongst male adolescents. The third chapter investigates the relationships between household catastrophic health expenditure in Malawi and two predictors, antiretroviral therapy (ART) and unexplained happiness. Using data from round two (2004-2005) and round three (2010-2011) of Malawi’s Integrated Household Survey, I find that proximity to ART-providing clinics and higher levels of psychological well-being associate with reduced likelihood of catastrophic health expenditure.Item Essays in Health Economics(2009) Hayford, Tamara Beth; Duggan, Mark; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Health care expenditures have risen dramatically in the last several decades. Various agents have responded by reforming their practices in an effort to protect their budgets. My dissertation studies the implications of two of these changes on both quality and expenditure dimensions. The first chapter introduces and briefly discusses these topics. The second chapter discusses the implications of hospital mergers. A large body of research has examined their financial consequences, while little has analyzed the effect on patient health and experiences. This chapter aims to fill this gap, utilizing 17 years of hospital discharge data to study the impact of 40 California hospital mergers on changes in treatment choices and health outcomes. I use an empirical strategy that is based on geography of residence to enable a market level analysis. My findings indicate that hospital mergers result in increased utilization of intensive treatments for heart disease, such as bypass surgery and angioplasty. This result could be driven by increased access to intensive procedures as well as a change in hospital treatment practices. I also find evidence of a small increase in inpatient mortality which could be driven by an increase in average travel time to the nearest facility offering cardiac services. In chapter three, co-authored with Mark Duggan, we analyze the implications of a widespread Medicaid reform: contracting out health care treatment of Medicaid recipients to managed care organizations. State governments rapidly shifted Medicaid enrollees into managed care during the 1990s, perhaps partly as a response to increasing Medicaid expenditures. This reform has not previously been studied at the national level. We use state-level aggregate administrative data for the years 1991-2003 in conjunction with a unique data set on mandatory managed care enrollment policies to estimate the average national impact. Results suggest that this policy may have increased the expense of the Medicaid program, particularly for HMO-style insurance plans. We extend our analysis to investigate the impact of these policies on enrollment decisions. Using CPS data, we find mixed responses to mandatory managed care policies, though all changes in take-up were small and did not appear to increase uninsurance rates.Item Essays on the Economics of Education(2007-05-31) Imberman, Scott Andrew; Duggan, Mark G; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Part I: Charter schools are publicly funded schools that, in exchange for expanded accountability, receive more autonomy and experience fewer regulations than traditional public schools. Previous work has found mixed evidence on the impacts of charter schools on both charter and non-charter students. However, these studies focus almost exclusively on test scores and may not fully account for endogenous movements of students and location of schools. Using data from an anonymous large urban school district, I investigate how charter schools affect both charter and non-charter students. In the first chapter I look at the effects of charter schools on charter students. I find that charter schools generate improvements in student behavior and attendance but the effects on test scores differ by subject. These results change little after correcting for selection based on changes in outcomes, endogenous attrition, or persistence. In the second chapter I investigate whether charters affect students who remain in non-charter schools. I find little evidence of charter school impacts on non-charter students. However I also find evidence that regressions using school fixed-effects may be biased. Changes in peer characteristics do not appear to play a large role in the charter impacts. Part II: Strains on the Federal budget have created worries that Federal funding of aid for higher education will fall in the future. If this happens, state governments will need to try to re-allocate their higher education spending more efficiently. One possible way to do this would be to shift funding away from public provision towards demand-side subsidies so that more students could attend private colleges. However, this will only work if private colleges provide benefits to students over public. In order to answer this question, I use highly detailed and rich data sets to assess whether there are benefits to attending private colleges over public ones. For males the wage return is small and statistically insignificant during their twenties but statistically significant at around 11 percentage points by their mid-thirties. For females the wage returns are negative and statistically insignificant. Both males and females exhibit increases in the likelihood of finishing a bachelor's degree.Item Location Choice, Product Choice, and the Human Resource Practices of Firms(2007-05-10) Freedman, Matthew L.; Haltiwanger, John C; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is comprised of three chapters. The first investigates the implications of industrial clustering for labor mobility and earnings dynamics. Motivated by a theoretical model in which geographically clustered firms compete for workers, I exploit establishment-level variation in agglomeration to explore the impact of clustering in the software publishing industry on labor market outcomes. The results show that clustering makes it easier for workers to job hop among establishments within the sector. Further, workers in clusters have relatively steep earnings-tenure profiles, accepting lower wages early in their careers in exchange for stronger earnings growth and higher wages later. These findings underscore the importance of geography in understanding labor market dynamics within industries. While the first chapter reveals striking relationships between the human resource practices and location decisions of high-technology establishments, the second chapter (joint with F. Andersson, J. Haltiwanger, J. Lane, and K. Shaw) draws key connections between the hiring and compensation policies of innovative firms and the nature of their product markets. We show that software firms that operate in product markets with highly skewed returns to innovation pay a premium to attract talented workers. Yet these same firms also reward loyalty; that is, highly skilled workers faithful to their employers enjoy higher earnings in firms with a greater variance in potential payoffs from innovation. These results not only contribute to our knowledge of firm human resource practices and product market strategies, but also shed light on patterns of income inequality within and between industries. Building on this final idea, the last chapter (joint with F. Andersson, E. Davis, J. Lane, B. McCall, and L. Sandusky) examines the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to within-industry changes in earnings inequality. We find that the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers and firms based on worker skills are key determinants of changes in industry earnings distributions over time. However, the importance of these and other factors in driving observed dynamics in earnings inequality varies across sectors, with aggregate shifts often disguising fundamental differences in the underlying forces effecting change.Item INTEGRATED ECONOMIC DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM MODEL FOR DETERMINING IRRIGATION APPLICATION AND PROJECTED AGRICULTURAL WATER DEMAND ON A WATERSHED SCALE(2006-11-27) Hanna, Kalim; Shirmohammadi, Adel; Biological Resources Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study involves the development of an irrigation economic model used to determine the estimated net benefit of various irrigation systems when used in temperate zones. The model processes SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) output data together with user supplied economic data as a basis for identifying agricultural fields likely to result in the greatest economic return for irrigation installations, based on irrigation installation costs, water costs, and the expected revenue from increased yields due to applied water. The model is capable of not only identifying those agricultural fields within the area of interest likely to result in the greatest net benefit, but is able to prescribe the most profitable irrigation system from an array of possible systems, based on user supplied economic and performance data. The model can also be used to determine the optimal average monthly irrigation volume to be applied to a given field, by balancing the expected revenue due to the estimated yield increase as a result of irrigation application verses the cost of water. The model is applied in this study to a range of water cost levels and crop types from which general conclusions about the use of irrigation in temperate zones are made. The primary product of this study is an irrigation economic tool capable of determining the profitability of irrigation installations verses non-irrigated systems for a wide range of hydrological and environmental conditions. The project included the collection and compilation of required data on land-use, topography, and soil properties, into a GIS project, used as a data input basis for the SWAT model. For demonstration purposes the model is applied to the Pocomoke River basin located in the Coastal Plain of Maryland's Eastern Shore. Input data for the model is taken from multiple SWAT simulations for various crops, modeled with a statistically generated artificial weather pattern typical of the region. Further analysis is conducted on the environmental impact of irrigation, using SWAT model simulations over a range of irrigation application levels. General conclusions are drawn on the effects of irrigation on water quality parameters and the nutrient/sediment transport processes involved.