Essays on Development and Health Economics
| dc.contributor.advisor | Cameron, Trudy Ann | |
| dc.contributor.author | Mitchell-Nelson, Joseph | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-10-04T19:26:41Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-10-04T19:26:41Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022-10-04 | |
| dc.description.abstract | 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. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/27546 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | culture | en_US |
| dc.subject | development | en_US |
| dc.subject | health | en_US |
| dc.subject | microeconomics | en_US |
| dc.subject | selection bias | en_US |
| dc.subject | stated preference | en_US |
| dc.title | Essays on Development and Health Economics | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of Economics | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
Files
Original bundle
1 - 1 of 1
Loading...
- Name:
- MitchellNelson_oregon_0171A_13246.pdf
- Size:
- 2.95 MB
- Format:
- Adobe Portable Document Format