ESSAYS ON APPLIED MICROECONOMICS IN HEALTH AND LABOR
Date
2023
Authors
Contributor
Advisor
Department
Instructor
Depositor
Speaker
Researcher
Consultant
Interviewer
Narrator
Transcriber
Annotator
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Volume
Number/Issue
Starting Page
Ending Page
Alternative Title
Abstract
This dissertation applies econometric techniques to topics in health and labor economics in Colombia, the United States, and India. The first chapter examines the relationship between domestic violence legislation in Colombia and intra-household bargaining power for women. I use the Demographic Health Survey (DHS) Waves V to VII with a difference-in-difference strategy to causally identify the relationship between the implementation of a gender policy from the law and an increase in the household bargaining power of women. I find evidence of an overall positive relationship, indicating potential spillover effects. As intra-household bargaining power is traditionally hard to influence, this could signal an indirect strategy to influence this and other modes of female empowerment.The second chapter is in collaboration with Rachel Inafuku on the effects of economic down- turns on labor market outcomes 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 charac- teristics (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 within economics. Further- more, there is not a clear consensus within the economics literature that determines how the labor market outcomes of workers varies across personality traits. Using the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), this study looks at how economic downturns impact labor market outcomes differentially across the “Big Five” personality traits. We find that those who report higher levels of emotional instability tend to see more unemployment insurance take up and fewer weeks of employment during economic down- turns 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 workers with higher levels of emotional instability are less productive during recessions.
The final chapter assesses the impact of ethnic networks on healthcare use in India. Simply increasing availability of healthcare services alone does not increase usage, but investigation into ethnic networks may provide insight into the mechanisms of decision making regarding the services. Using cross-sectional data from Wave 4 (2015-2016) of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), I explore how networks affect usage for maternal health services, repeating regressions for language-district, language-social, and district-social groups. I find evidence of network influence for all delivery and prenatal care outcomes for the language- district network definition, evidence for institutional delivery and prenatal care as well as a first trimester prenatal checkup for district-social groups, and little evidence for network effects for the language-social groups network definition. This suggests that ethnic networks are used for some maternal healthcare decisions, but that the definition and construction of that network for the analysis matters. District appears to be an important factor in networks that affect healthcare use, while social groups (as defined by the data) seems to not capture networks as well.
Description
Keywords
Economics, domestic violence, health, household bargaining, labor, networks, personality
Citation
Extent
Format
Geographic Location
Time Period
Related To
Related To (URI)
Table of Contents
Rights
All UHM dissertations and theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission from the copyright owner.
Rights Holder
Local Contexts
Collections
Email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.