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- All Subjects: Economics
- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
- Creators: Schoellman, Todd
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Resource Type: Text
The second essay studies how heterogeneous households respond to the fast rising housing prices through their life-cycle behaviors. Chinese housing market has been undergoing a rapid booming period since 1998, causing the house prices increasing significantly. As a result, households endured severe financial burdens to buy homes at price-to-income ratios of around six. Along with the rising house prices, household savings rate has been increasing consistently since 1998. Can the rising house prices be an important factor to explain the increase in household saving rate? This paper develops a life cycle dynastic model with endogenous choice on housing, coresidence and intergenerational transfer, then quantitatively analyze the effect of housing price on household saving. It shows that housing is an important motive for saving, and it accounts for about 35% of the increase in household savings rate. The housing situation affects households’ saving behavior through three channels. First, households are financially constrained due to the down payment requirement and they choose to limit their consumption in order to buy houses. Second, young adults live in their parents’ houses for a long time and save more intensively, since they get to pay less for the housing expenses under coresidence. Thirdly, older parents make large sum of intergeneration transfer in aid of the children’s housing purchase, indicating the housing affordability issue also has influence on old parents’ saving decisions.
In the second chapter I use administrative data on the ownership, management, and taxes for the universe of all firms in Ecuador to study the role of family management in firm dynamics and its implications for aggregate productivity. A novel finding I document is that family-managed firms grow half as quickly as externally-managed firms. This growth differential implies that family-managed firms account for half of employment, despite comprising 80% of firms. I construct a general equilibrium model of firm dynamics that is consistent with these facts. Entrepreneurs choose whether to utilize family members as managers or hire external managers. External managers allow firms to scale up production, but their efficiency is a affected due to contractual frictions. Changes in the contractual environment that lead to a drop in the presence of family-managed firms by half could increase output on the order of 6%, as firms that abandon family management enjoy rapid growth.
The built environment is responsible for a significant portion of global waste generation.
Construction and demolition (C&D) waste requires significant landfill areas and costs
billions of dollars. New business models that reduce this waste may prove to be financially
beneficial and generally more sustainable. One such model is referred to as the “Circular
Economy” (CE), which promotes the efficient use of materials to minimize waste
generation and raw material consumption. CE is achieved by maximizing the life of
materials and components and by reclaiming the typically wasted value at the end of their
life. This thesis identifies the potential opportunities for using CE in the built environment.
It first calculates the magnitude of C&D waste and its main streams, highlights the top
C&D materials based on weight and value using data from various regions, identifies the
top C&D materials’ current recycling and reuse rates, and finally estimates a potential
financial benefit of $3.7 billion from redirecting C&D waste using the CE concept in the
United States.