ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4
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- All Subjects: Economics
- Creators: Murphy, Alvin
Description
This dissertation analyzes and quantifies a subset of the benefits and costs associated with residential location decisions in the housing market, and how these benefits and costs can be altered through public policy. Chapter 1 motivates and previews how I, through three essays, empirically explore this topic. Chapter 2 focuses on the benefits that neighborhoods can provide to children. I investigate whether neighborhood exposures during childhood affect academic outcomes observed at the end of high school, and whether the effects can be explained by neighborhood schools. I find that neighborhood exposures during childhood affect high-stakes standardized exam scores, 12th grade GPA, the probability of intending to attend college and the probability of dropping out of high school. By leveraging variation in the age at which students move, I estimate exposure effects that encompass the effect of neighborhood schools and other amenities. I demonstrate that these effects cannot be fully explained by conventional school quality measures based on test scores or graduation rates, which points to the potential importance of peer effects and other neighborhood amenities as complementary mechanisms. In two interrelated essays, Chapters 3 and 4 quantify the costs of housing, and how these costs are impacted by changes to federal policy. Homeownership in the US has been supported via the mortgage-interest-deduction provision of the tax code. However, US tax policy was substantially changed with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017, which, by doubling the standard deduction and capping state and local tax deductions, effectively made housing more expensive relative to other types of consumption. I estimate time-varying user-costs of housing and subsidies at a fine level of geography and show that the TCJA reduced the federal housing subsidy by over 80%. I document important heterogeneity in the impacts of the policy across racial and political lines. Finally, I show that increasing the current limit on deductions of state and local taxes would have small overall impacts on subsidies, with strongly heterogeneous effects.
ContributorsDowling, Jakob (Author) / Kuminoff, Nicolai V (Thesis advisor) / Murphy, Alvin (Thesis advisor) / Aucejo, Esteban M (Committee member) / Bishop, Kelly C (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
There is a growing consensus that environmental hazards and changing weather patterns disproportionately affect the poor, vulnerable, minority communities. My dissertation studies the nature of risk faced by vulnerable groups of individuals, how these risks affect their labor choice, income, consumption, and migration patterns. In Chapter 1, I study how seniors of different racial and income groups respond to information about hazardous waste sites in their neighborhood and their cleanup process. I find white seniors tend to move out at a higher rate when informed about the presence of a waste site as well as when the site is cleaned up compared to non-white seniors. This suggests that neighborhood gentrification exhibits inertia in the manifestation after the cleanup of Superfund sites. I find an assortative matching of seniors to neighborhoods based on their race and income, reinforcing findings in the environmental justice literature. Chapter 2 documents the effect of drought on labor choices, income, and consumption of rural households in India. I find that household consumption, as well as agricultural jobs, declines in response to drought. Further, I find that these effects are mediated by job skills and land ownership. Specifically, I find that households with working members who have completed primary education account for most of the workers who exit the agricultural sector. In contrast, I find that households with farmland increase their agricultural labor share post-drought. Cultural norms, relative prices, and land market transaction costs provide potential explanations for this behavior. Chapter 3 builds a simple model of household labor allocation based on reduced-form evidence I find in chapter 2. Simulation of the calibrated model implies that projected increases in the frequency of droughts over the next 30 years will have a net effect of a 1\% to 2\% reduction in agricultural labor. While small in percentage terms, this implies that 2.5 to 5 million individuals would leave agriculture. An increase in drought will also increase the size of the manufacturing wage subsidy needed to meet the goals of `Make in India’ policy by 20\%. This is driven by the need to incentivize landowners to reduce farm labor.
ContributorsBasu, Sayahnika (Author) / Kuminoff, Nicolai (Thesis advisor) / Bishop, Kelly (Thesis advisor) / Herrendorf, Berthold (Committee member) / Mueller, Valerie (Committee member) / Murphy, Alvin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
The presence of children can influence importantly how households respond to income risk. The aim of this dissertation is to study how different aspects of families' life-cycle decisions are affected by different sources of income fluctuation. In the first part of this dissertation, I study the relationships between fertility choices, consumption, and labor supply, by developing a model with endogenous fertility decisions and income volatility. Within this framework, fertility choices act as a mechanism to smooth utility over time. In this context, I analyze the insurance value of fertility choices. I use a structural model that combines two features underexplored by the literature: children as consumption commitments, and nonseparabilities of family size and consumption. Having children in the household affects consumption and labor marginal utilities, changing the insurance value of fertility decisions and generating incentives to avoid childbearing during low-income spells. I find that the welfare loss of a negative transitory income shock is 34 to 38 times larger if households are not able to choose when to have their children. These results underscore how costly unplanned childbearing can be to the household in terms of welfare.The second part of this dissertation evaluates the impact of being born under negative conditions in the labor market on human capital formation, and what parental behavior could be leading to those effects. I estimate the impact of the unemployment rates on children's assessment outcomes in cognitive and noncognitive skills. Counterintuitively, the results suggest that higher unemployment rates are linked to positive child development outcomes later in childhood. In my main specification, an increase of 1 percentage point in state unemployment causes an increase of 2.5% of a standard deviation in cognitive test scores after controlling for income at birth, hours worked at birth, and other variables.
ContributorsMangini, Marco (Author) / Silverman, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Aucejo, Esteban (Committee member) / Murphy, Alvin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This dissertation explores the effect of school competition on the human capital accumulation of students. Policies that expand the scope for school choice have become increasingly popular largely due to the belief that this will create incentives for low-performing, incumbent schools to improve academic outcomes. However, there is a general lack of empirical support for these positive academic spillover effects in most contexts. In the first chapter, I demonstrate that if schools respond to competition through channels not typically considered in standard arguments in favor of school choice, it means that these policies may lead to negative, unintended consequences for academic achievement. I find that increasing the number of schools serving a given market can have a negative effect on test scores through creating incentives for schools to increase the provision of non-academic services that do not contribute to academic preparation, and through the creation of excess costs in the public school system. I use an empirical strategy designed to address strategic location decisions by new entrants as well as student selection across schools to show that entry of a new charter middle school during a recent large-scale charter expansion in North Carolina decreased average traditional public middle school test scores across a school district.
The second chapter considers the extent to which policymakers have tools available to them that can improve the ability of competition to generate the increases in test scores at incumbent schools that they have prioritized. I show that the efficacy of school choice can be improved by providing short-term, partial reimbursements to public school districts for increases in charter school enrollment by resident pupils. I also demonstrate that these effects occur not only due to the direct increase in district revenue associated with reimbursements, but also because the presence of this aid reduces the incentives of school administrators to compete for students through non-academic channels. The empirical strategy that I use to generate these results leverages plausibly exogenous cutoffs for aid eligibility induced by a unique policy in the state of New York.
ContributorsTobin, Zachary Benjamin (Author) / Aucejo, Esteban (Thesis advisor) / Silverman, Daniel (Committee member) / Murphy, Alvin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022