Economics Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Economics Theses and Dissertations by Subject "Applied Econometrics"

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    Essays on Industrial Organization and Health Economics
    (University of Oregon, 2022-05-10) Jiang, Sichao; Miller, Keaton
    This thesis is composed of three essays and provides empirical contributions to the Industrial Organization literature, especially in the field of transportation and health economics. It aims to understand different issues related to economics by applying various empirical methods. The first essay (chapter 2) examines firm exit in Canadian markets, specifically the grain elevator market. There is a long line of previous literature that finds capacity, vintage, multi-plant ownership affect exit. In this paper, a choice model is used to examine a firm’s decision to shut down a grain elevator in terms of these variables, but also develops measures of spatial competition, local economic conditions and linkages to the transportation markets. In all cases, these variables are statistically important and point to results that reinforce previous studies, but also direct to new explanations on the determinants of plant exit. The second essay (chapter 3) examines the effects of marijuana legislation change on the agricultural labor market. The paper uses differences-in-differences with a synthetic control methodology to identify the effects of labor market outcomes from marijuana legalization. This method aims to avoid substantial labor market spillovers in neighboring states and to construct a decent parallel trend for the pre-treatment time period with pretty varied agricultural markets in the U.S. The results show that cannabis legalization is associated with an increase in overall employments that people are flushing into the industry, but no increase in per-employee wages in both the retailer and agricultural labor market. The third essay (chapter 4) looks into the accuracy of firms' prediction errors in the context of Medicare Advantage, where insurers receive subsidies from the government and compete to provide health insurance to seniors. The results show that on average firms overestimate future costs. Overestimation in forecast error decreases with the experience of the firm. Firms in more competitive markets (as measured by the number of other firms present) form more accurate estimates. Firms with higher costs than expected generally offer plans that feature greater patient cost sharing (i.e. higher deductibles and copays). This dissertation includes both previously published/unpublished and co-authored material.
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    Essays on Racial Disparities in Law Enforcement
    (University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Wilson, Melissa; Hansen, Benjamin
    It is evident based on recent news articles and social media discussions that racial bias in police action is currently at the forefront of public interest in the U.S. Whether police operate outside of what is considered fair under our justice system can be challenging to estimate. This paper analyzes the incidence of racial bias in traffic stops by city police departments in 9 cities across the country. Under the “veil of darkness,” police cannot determine the race of a driver prior to pulling them over, based on the hypothesis of Grogger and Ridgeway (2012). I take their method a step further in order to address an issue that may cause a bias in their results. Utilizing the Stanford Open Policing data, I employ a regression discontinuity design around the start of daylight savings time in order to make an accurate comparison between daylight and nighttime stops drawn from the same distribution of drivers. I find little evidence of racial disparities in police stops with no significance for black drivers and significance for Hispanic drivers that is not fully robust to functional forms. This indicates that daylight times do not affect the proportion of stops of minority drivers and racial disparities are not affected by visible lighting. I posit that this might be due to a flaw in the “veil of darkness” hypothesis, rather than a lack of racialdiscrimination. Next, I test the effect of marijuana decriminalization in Illinois on racial disparities in arrests for marijuana possession in Chicago and provide evidence to support that the disparity is driven by racial prejudice. I use drug arrest data with amount in possession reported to determine if racial discrimination affects police decision-making at varying severity levels differentially. By showing there is a larger racial disparity in arrest rates at lower contraband levels than at higher levels, I provide evidence that over half of the disparity is driven by officer taste-based discrimination. More notably, I conduct an Interrupted Time Series estimation using a large unique Chicago Police Department dataset to show that marijuana decriminalization led to a substantial drop in the racial disparity for marijuana-related arrests in Chicago. Additionally, there is a shift in the trend to be slightly positive, driven by arrests of black individuals over the decriminalized amount. This implies a shift in resources to target higher severity drug crime activity, but still disproportionately affects black individuals. This motivates policy decisions to decriminalize marijuana and, subsequently, other minor crimes that disproportionately affect minority groups in order to reduce racial disparities in arrests. Almost universally, drug crimes carry sanctions which vary across weight. A Beckerian model of crime has sharp predictions that those carrying drugs should attempt to sort in response to these crimes. However, police discretion can also vary how the actual weights up recorded. We investigate these competing factors using administrative records from marijuana possession arrests in Chicago. Using a bunching approach, changes in sanction thresholds, and variation in officer-suspect race matches, we test both how decriminalization and officer-race matching affect bunching. This dissertation includes unpublished co-authored material with Benjamin Hansen.