Essays in Applied Microeconomics
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2022
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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This dissertation is composed of three chapters that apply econometric techniques to solve questions in the health and labor economics fields. The first chapter assesses the impact of obesity on labor market outcomes over economic downturns. Specifically, I measure labor market differentials between obese and healthy weight workers over business cycle fluctuations using two national surveys. I find that when unemployment increases, obese individuals experience larger declines in income relative to those who are not obese. These findings are robust to the inclusion of occupation fixed effects, suggesting the findings cannot be fully explained by obese workers selecting careers that tend to have greater sensitivity to business cycle fluctuations. The second chapter of this dissertation is joint work with Timothy Halliday, Lester Lusher, and Aureo de Paula. This study pairs variation stemming from volcanic eruptions with panel data on the census of Hawai`i public student test scores to estimate the impact of pollutants on student performance. We first precisely estimate a small drop in average test scores. Then, utilizing Hawai`i's rich diversity across schools in baseline exposure, we estimate sharp nonlinearities - effects for schools with PM 2.5 levels above 9 units are nearly five times the magnitude as for schools below. Lastly, we find that the drop in test scores for economically disadvantaged students is nearly four times the magnitude of their advantaged counterparts. This performance gap across student type arises from within school variation, suggesting the gap cannot be explained by differences in school resources. The final chapter of this dissertation is in collaboration with Maya Ward. In this study, we use the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to analyze the effect of economic downturns on labor market outcomes differentially across the Big Five personality traits. There is still a large amount of unexplained variation in various labor market outcomes after accounting for observable characteristics (age, gender, education, etc) indicating that unobservable characteristics (personality, work ethic, etc) may also play an important role. While the psychology literature has investigated the relationship between personality and labor market outcomes, there are far fewer studies that incorporate personality traits in the economics literature. Furthermore, findings that assess the impacts of the Big Five on economic outcomes are mixed due to differences in the data used. We find that those who report higher levels of emotional instability tend to see larger unemployment insurance take up and fewer weeks of employment during economic downturns relative to those who are more emotionally stable. Additionally, the effects do not seem to be driven by employer discrimination, as it may be that higher levels of emotional instability cause workers to be less productive during recessions.
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Labor market--Econometric models, Discrimination in employment--Econometric models, Educational tests and measurements, Labor turnover--Psychological aspects
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