Economics Theses and Dissertations

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Effects of Behavioral and Environmental Factors on Infant Health
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18) Cil, Gulcan; Cameron, Trudy Ann
Health at birth is considered an important indicator of health outcomes in adulthood. It is also shown to have a strong association with future educational attainment and labor market outcomes. I examine the effects of behavioral and environmental factors on infant health. The factors I focus on include alcohol consumption during pregnancy, extreme weather events associated with climate change, and pollution that may result from unconventional oil and natural gas development. In Chapter II, I examine the effects of point-of-sale alcohol warning signage that alcohol retailers are required to post in some states on alcohol use during pregnancy and on birth outcomes. I find that point-of-sale warning signs discourage alcohol consumption among pregnant women and are associated with a decrease in the odds of newborns having very low birth weight or being very pre-term. The findings of this research inform decision makers about a potentially effective mechanism through which alcohol consumption among pregnant women can be reduced. They also suggest causal evidence for the link between prenatal alcohol exposure and inferior health at birth. Chapter III documents that exposure to heat waves during pregnancy is associated with increased likelihood of the mother experiencing an adverse health condition during pregnancy and the newborn having an abnormal condition at birth. The results provide an assessment of the magnitude and timing of the effects of extreme heat events associated with climate change on infant health which is potentially helpful in enhancing the effectiveness of adaptation efforts. Finally, Chapter IV provides an empirical investigation of the link between unconventional oil and natural gas development and infant health. The results indicate that unconventional drilling activity is associated with a small, but statistically significant, decline in birth outcomes, especially for those living in rural areas. Given that it is estimated that the rapid expansion in unconventional oil and gas extraction will continue for at least a few more decades, the results of this study may contribute to the discussions related to initiation or tightening of regulations and monitoring efforts to control pollution. This dissertation includes previously unpublished co-authored material.
Open Access
Essays in Environmental and Public Economics
(University of Oregon, 2012) Vander Naald, Brian; Vander Naald, Brian; Cameron, Trudy Ann
Benefit-cost analysis of environmental policies typically focuses on benefits to human health and well-being. When it comes to humans' willingness to pay (WTP) for improvements in the quality of life for other species, however, the evidence is limited. We argue that the other-species morbidity-reduction component of WTP should be calculated net of any "outrage" component associated with the cause of the harm. This net WTP is likely to be correlated with the premium that people are willing to pay for chicken products from birds for which the quality of life has been enhanced by improved animal welfare measures. This paper uses a conjoint choice stated preference survey to reveal the nature of systematic heterogeneity in preferences for "humanely raised" versus "conventionally raised" chicken. We also use latent class analysis to distinguish between two classes of people - those who are willing to pay a premium for humanely raised chicken and those who are not. Proposition 21 on California's 2010 ballot concerned an $18 annual surcharge on vehicles to support state parks. Prop 21 failed, implying 25% of these parks risk closure. Voting patterns at the Census tract level depend on gross price, incomes, age profiles, political ideology, environmental preferences, the availability of local substitutes, and park salience. We simulate counterfactual scenarios under which Prop 21 might have passed and use county-level hold-out samples to illustrate the predictive ability of our model. The California Air Resources Board is slowly phasing out perchloroethylene as the main input in dry cleaning operations in the state. Exploiting differential implementation of this regulation between SCAQMD (South Coast Air Quality Management District) and the rest of the state, we examine the effect of this regulation on the propensity for dry cleaning businesses to exit the industry. We find that regulation has encouraged early exit from the industry in some cases. We also find that regulation decreased ambient concentrations of perchloroethylene in the atmosphere. This dissertation contains both published and unpublished co-authored material. It also contains an appendix for chapter II as a supplemental file.
Open Access
Essays in Environmental Economics
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Mueller, Rosie; Cameron, Trudy Ann
This research examines both health effects and market responses from local changes in environmental quality. Both can be of significant interest to policy makers. I examine the health effects of population exposure to pollution from a primary resource-extraction industry and the housing-market effects when an area is officially designated as being at risk from water pollution exposure. In Chapter II, I examine how adult mortality rates are affected by coal-mining activity in Appalachia. I find increased surface coal-mining activity leads to increased mortality attributable to internal causes, specifically among the population over age 65. Increased surface coal mining is most significantly associated with increases in mortality from cardiovascular disease, suggesting air pollution as a plausible mechanism. Chapter III documents the association between infant health and coal-mining activity in Appalachia. Descriptive evidence implies infant health outcomes are worse in certain Appalachian coal counties compared to other parts of the U.S., but after controlling for other sources of observed and unobserved heterogeneity, I find no evidence that changes in surface coal-mining activity directly affect birth outcomes in these counties. In Chapter IV, I evaluate the effect of a policy intervention in Oregon which provided information to residents regarding potential exposure to groundwater pollution from agricultural runoff. I find that this policy led to an increase in home prices for properties that were more likely to be reliant on public water supplies, suggesting that consumer demand shifted away from well-water-dependent properties that were at risk of contamination. The heterogeneity of the policy effect is consistent with a heightened awareness of groundwater quality among residents and housing market participants after the information was announced.
Open Access
Essays on Development and Health Economics
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Mitchell-Nelson, Joseph; Cameron, Trudy Ann
This research examines the role of culture in two specific contexts--World Bank project management and preferences for pandemic mitigation strategies--and contributes a novel econometric method for sample selection correction for choice experiments. Chapter 2 explores how the cultural background of World Bank project leaders affects the success of foreign aid projects, using a constructed measure of cultural proximity between project leaders and the countries where their projects take place. A principal-agent model of project leaders' incentives predicts that cultural proximity and a recipient country's institutional quality will interact to affect project quality. This prediction is borne out in data on project evaluations of 1,946 World Bank projects. Chapter 3 examines individual preferences for local COVID-19 lockdown policies that force trade-offs between, on the one hand, deaths and illnesses averted, and, on the other hand, employment and income. We field a choice experiment to 993 respondents to determine individuals' willingness to make these trade-offs, and we specifically examine the effect of federal unemployment insurance on these decisions. We find that a stronger social safety net for the unemployed makes individuals, on average, \textit{more willing} to accept county-level income losses but \textit{less willing} to accept increases in county-level unemployment rates in exchange for reduced COVID-19 deaths and illnesses. Split sample regressions reveal that this puzzling change in preferences is driven almost entirely by politically moderate and conservative respondents. Finally, chapter 4 proposes a new method for sample selection correction for conditional logit models based on mixed logit estimation methods. Survey-based research methods can produce biased estimates if the responding sample is systematically different from the population of interest. A seminal paper by \cite{Heckman_Ecta79} demonstrates how an explicit response/non-response model can be combined with a least-squares-based outcome model to correct for selection bias, but this approach is inappropriate for the conditional logit choice models typically used to analyze the data from choice experiments. Our new method, however, is appropriate for addressing sample selection in choice experiments, which are often used to value goods, services, and social policies that are not traded in markets. This dissertation includes previously unpublished co-authored material.
Open Access
Essays on Economic Development and Climate Change
(University of Oregon, 2015-08-18) Fitch-Fleischmann, Benjamin; Cameron, Trudy Ann
The first essay considers the relative effectiveness of government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as channels to allocate resources. I use a catastrophic climate-related shock--Hurricane Mitch--to examine the political economy of these channels of aid distribution at the micro level. I combine extensive data on aid received by Nicaraguan households with data on municipal election outcomes and an exogenous, precipitation-based measure of hurricane impact. I find that the hurricane had long-lasting effects on the aid received by households from both NGOs and the government. In the short term, however, the government did not provide aid according to the objective measure of hurricane damage but instead provided aid along political lines. The second essay presents estimates of a relationship between extreme hot temperatures during gestation and a child's subsequent physical well-being in a sample of children in Peru, thus extending existing evidence constructed from U.S. data. Estimates are constructed using high-resolution gridded climate data and geo-coded household surveys. The results suggest that a period of extreme heat (a month whose average temperature is more than 2 standard deviations above the local average) in the period 1 to 3 months before birth is associated with lower weight at birth and a reduction in height (measured 1 to 59 months after birth) that cannot be fully explained by birth weight. There is no evidence of differential maternal investment, as measured by duration of breastfeeding, according to a child's exposure to extreme heat during gestation. The third essay asks whether improved treatment of HIV/AIDS in Africa can be achieved simply by paying health workers to do more. I present estimates of the impact of financial incentives paid to individual workers at public health facilities in Mozambique. The results suggest that piece-rate incentives increased the delivery of five out of fourteen health services for which treatment effects can be identified, with estimated increases ranging from 34 to 157 percent, depending on the particular service. I find no evidence of a corresponding decrease in the delivery of services that are not financially incentivized, suggesting that there is no "crowding out" of intrinsic motivation.
Open Access
Essays on Income Inequality and the Environment
(University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Voorheis, John; Cameron, Trudy Ann
This dissertation considers two of the most pressing concerns of the current time, income inequality and exposure to pollution, and provides evidence that these two concerns may in fact be causally linked. In order to do this, I assemble novel datasets on income inequality and pollution exposure, and propose an strategy for causally identifying the effect of the former on the latter. In the first substantive chapter, I develop a new dataset on income inequality measured at the US state and metropolitan area level. I compare the trends in income inequality measured using different income definitions. In general, pre-tax, pre-transfer income inequality has increased in most states since 1980, but post-fiscal income inequality has seen slow or no growth since about 2000. I conduct inference on how income inequality has changed using a semi-parametric bootstrap method, and consider potential correlates with state-level income inequality. I find that de-unionization is perhaps the most important factor driving rising inequality. In the second substantive chapter, I leverage satellite-derived remote sensing data on ground-level concentrations for two important pollutants (NOx and PM2.5) to measure the distribution of pollution exposure. I propose a dashboard approach to measuring environmental inequality and environmental justice, proposing and applying several candidate measures to the satellite datasets. I find that environmental inequality has largely decreased since 1998, as has average exposure. I consider potential correlations between neighborhood demographics and the distribution of exposure, but find inconclusive results. In the third substantive chapter, I attempt to resolve this ambiguity by considering whether rising income inequality within metropolitan areas (the subject of the first chapter) might causally affect the distribution of exposure across people (the subject of the second). Using a simulated instrumental variables identification strategy designed to address potential endogeneity due to locational sorting, I find that income inequality decreases the average level of exposure, but increases environmental inequality. I argue this is consistent with the benefits of pollution reduction accruing to the most advantaged, and provide evidence that this may work through the political system: inequality increases the responsiveness of politicians to the environmental demands of the rich.
Open Access
Risk Aversion and Information Acquisition Across Real and Hypothetical Settings
(University of Oregon, 2012) Taylor, Matthew; Taylor, Matthew; Cameron, Trudy Ann
I collect data on subjects' information acquisition during real and hypothetical risky choices using process-tracing software called Mouselab. I also measure subjects' cognitive ability using the cognitive reflective test (CRT). On average, measured risk preferences are not significantly different across real and hypothetical settings. However, cognitive ability is inversely related to risk aversion when choices are hypothetical, but it is unrelated when the choices are real. This interaction between cognitive ability and hypothetical setting is consistent with the notion that some individuals, specifically higher-ability individuals, treat hypothetical choices as "puzzles" and may help explain why some studies find that subjects indicate that they are more tolerant of risk when they make hypothetical choices than when they make real choices. On average, subjects demonstrate a similar degree of consistency across settings, and there are also no significant differences across settings in the amount of time subjects take to make a choice, the amount of information they acquire, or how they distribute their attention. I also find evidence to suggest that subjects acquire information in a manner consistent with the implicit calculation of expected utility. Specifically, individuals do not merely make choices "as if" they are integrating probabilities and outcomes, it appears that they actually are. Moreover, as they progress through a series of choices in a commonly used risk preference elicitation method, their information acquisition becomes progressively more consistent with integration models. Finally, on average, individuals appear to acquire information in real and hypothetical settings in similar ways.

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