Browsing by Subject "Applied microeconomics"
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Item The economics of beautification and beauty(2013-05) von Bose, Caroline Marie; Wiseman, Thomas E., 1974-The first chapter examines adolescent beauty as a potential originator of the observed wage premium for adult beauty and finds that adolescent beauty has its own separate effect on adult wages. Adolescent beauty also affects early human capital development, as evidenced by its significant impact on educational outcomes. Changes in beauty over time are shown to be positively correlated with changes in wages for full-time workers, and changes in beauty are generally not correlated with appearance-related choice variables. I explore the possibility that self-confidence and social capital are potential mechanisms through which adolescent attractiveness affects future wages but find that these do not change the magnitude of the effects of adolescent beauty, although they are of themselves significant determinants of wages. The second chapter examines the effects of personal grooming behaviors on earnings and shows evidence that these effects are due to persistent differences in preferences or productivity between workers displaying different grooming choices and not statistical discrimination on the part of employers. In a longitudinal sample of lawyers graduating from the same law school, men who wear glasses and men with facial hair face an earnings penalty in first-year income and to some extent in subsequent years. Some grooming behaviors are positively correlated with income in the 1970's cohort and negatively correlated with income in the 1980's cohort (and vice versa), suggesting that fashion signals change relatively quickly. I also find that grooming behaviors are correlated with beauty ratings and that the beauty premium is unaffected by earnings, but the estimated effects of some grooming behaviors partially result from their correlation with beauty. I do not find evidence that grooming behaviors act as a signaling mechanism in the labor market. The third chapter evaluates the claim that design piracy is beneficial to certain status-goods firms. It builds on Pesendorfer's model of fashion cycles by introducing the possibility of design imitation for a market in which designs are used as a signaling mechanism. There exist equilibria in which both the designer and imitator are active in the market, but there are no conditions under which imitation is profitable to the designer. Under some conditions the presence of a potential imitator will ensure that the designer does not produce at all.Item Three essays in health economics(2011-05) Komonpaisarn, Touchanun; Dusansky, Richard; Hamermesh, Daniel S.; Abrevaya, Jason; Warner, David C.; Trejo, Stephen J.; Chiburis, RichardThis dissertation consists of three studies in the field of health economics. The first chapter studies the market situation of the U.S. nursing home industry. It uses the most recent data available from the Annual Survey of Nursing Homes conducted in Wisconsin. In this study, we derive theoretical predictions from an optimization problem of a representative nursing home under various assumptions. We introduce a new measure, a home's bed-utilization rate, in our empirical strategy and find evidence of excess demand from Medicaid patients in Wisconsin. A positive relationship between Medicaid payment rates and private-pay prices is found in homes with high bed utilization. Additionally, we find strong adverse effects of higher reimbursement rates on quality measures. These findings prove there is an excess demand from Medicaid patients in Wisconsin. This conclusion has direct implications for the quality of care that a nursing home provides for its patients. The second study takes advantage of the "natural experiment" features of the major health care reform in Thailand in 2002 in order to estimate the price elasticity of health care demand among Thai citizens. We use the difference-in-difference technique to capture the pure effect of the reform on the health care utilization behavior of those who were directly affected by the reform. In order to capture any secular trend in health care utilization, we use data from a group of people who were not affected by the reform. We find that the reduction in health care price immediately induced those who lacked health insurance coverage to increase their visits to a public health care facility, although similar trends were not found a few years after the reform. The estimated change in visits is used to calculate the price elasticity of demand, which falls in the range of -1.36 to -0.58. The last study examines the relationship between risky behaviors among Americans aged 50-65 and their health insurance coverage. Despite the fact that moral hazard behaviors are predicted by economic theory, the study finds that health insurance has no significant effect on certain risky behaviors such as smoking. Surprisingly, we find a significantly positive relationship between health insurance coverage and healthy behaviors such as exercising regularly. This finding reflects the importance of health insurance companies in providing its customers with more health information that could encourage health-oriented attitudes.