APPLYING EMPIRICAL TECHNIQUES FROM ECONOMICS TO THE STUDY OF INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL WELFARE
Date
2023
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Abstract
This dissertation consists of three essays on the application of empirical techniquesfrom economics to the study of decision making, both at the individual and
societal level. The first two essays, which are single-authored, focus on individual
decision-making in the context of marriage. The third essay, co-authored with
Professor Michael Roberts, Matthias Fripp and Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, studies
optimal decisions for society in the context of the environment.
The first essay estimates the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce (ITD) in
China. Using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, I identify that
children with a divorced parent are 93% more likely to get divorced than those with
parents who have never divorced, and the ITD is larger from mothers to daughters
and fathers to sons. Controlling for community fixed effects reduces the magnitude
of the ITD by only 14%, suggesting that transmission takes place via parent-child
interactions, not just community-level influences.
The second essay estimates the effect of children on parental divorce. I find that
a higher number of biological children is negatively associated with the chance of
divorce. To identify causality, I use an instrumental variables strategy which exploits
geographic variation in the roll-out of the “Later, Longer, Fewer” (LLF) policy – a
family planning policy initiated in the 1970s to lower fertility in China. The IV model
yields the opposite conclusion of the OLS results; that is, more children increase the
chance of divorce.
The third estimates the importance of transmission for decarbonization of the
electricity sector in US. Solar and wind power are now cheaper than fossil fuels but
are intermittent. The extra supply-side variability, paired with great geographic heterogeneity in land, wind, and solar resource potential, could make long-distance
transmission between regions considerably more valuable in a decarbonized electricity
system as compared to conventional systems dominated by controllable thermal
power plants. We evaluate the potential gains of optimizing transmission within and
between the three major interconnects of the United States using a high-resolution
model that jointly optimizes investments in transmission, storage, production, and
hourly operations for the contiguous United States. We find that optimally expanding
transmission within each interconnect reduces total cost of electricity by 3.4%
in a fully decarbonized system and by 0.1% in a least-cost system that still employs
fossil fuels. Further opptimizing transmission between the three interconnects reduces
total cost of electricity by an additional 1% in a fully decarbonized system as
compared to 0.2% in a least cost system. The extra savings from transmission in a
decarbonized system derives mainly from savings of battery storage and very little
from reduced generation capacity. Overall, the comparison of capacity expansion
results show that between grid connection reduces the cost of 100 percent decarbonization
by 1.6%.The value of within interconnect transmission is 3 times of the
value for between interconnect transmission addition.
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Economics
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91 pages
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