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Title: Essays in Empirical Economics
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2023
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Abstract: This thesis contains three chapters in empirical economics. In Chapter 1, I use administra- tive data from British Columbia, Canada, to study the short-term effects of a parental layoff on children’s academic performance in grades 4, 7, and 10. I find that households where a parent suffers a layoff, earn approximately $8,000 - $10,000 less in after- tax income in the year after the layoff. In spite of such a large loss in financial resources, I find no significant short-term effects on childrens test scores due to parental job loss. My estimates for grade 4 and grade 10 rule out negative treatment effects larger than 3.5% of a standard deviation at the 95% confidence level, and the estimates for grade 7 rule out negative treatment effects larger than 5.3% of a standard deviation. In Chapter 2, I exploit close city council elections in California from 1996 to 2017 to imple- ment a regression discontinuity design and study the causal effects of a nonwhite candi- date’s victory against a white candidate. I find that in cities where the nonwhite candidate won (treatment), compared to cities where the nonwhite candidate lost (control), more new white candidates run in the next election. Heterogeneity analysis shows that this effect is driven by cities that have gone through bigger demographic changes over the past few decades, which suggests that changes in the racial composition of the city and the associ- ated perception of threat to the dominant status of whites within the city are an important factor in driving the main result. Chapter 3 is based on my joint work with Louis Bélisle and Vivek Nandur. We compare two prominent methods used to estimate production functions in the literature. We estimate total factor productivity for firms in four manufacturing industries in India for the time period 2005-2012 using both estimation methods and using two different intermediate inputs as proxies. We find large discrepancies in the distribution of estimated total factor productivity for firms depending on the estimation method and the proxies used.
Url: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/130065/1/Somani_Aly_Farhad_202311_PhD_thesis.pdf
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Authors: Somani, Aly Farhad
Institution: University of Toronto
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Pages: 1-158
Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Work, Family, and Time
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