Essays in applied microeconomics

Gualavisi Diaz, Melany

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122137 Copy

Description

Title

Essays in applied microeconomics

Author(s)

Gualavisi Diaz, Melany

Issue Date

2023-11-27

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Kleemans, Marieke

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Kleemans, Marieke

Committee Member(s)

• Deryugina, Tatyana
• Bartik, Alexander
• Marx, Benjamin

Department of Study

Economics

Discipline

Economics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Migration
• social networks
• poverty
• geographic targeting.

Abstract

This dissertation contains three chapters that study topics on applied microeconomics. Below are the individual abstracts. Chapter 1: Effects of Emigration on Labor Markets in Migrant Origin Areas: Evidence from Internal Migration in Indonesia This study examines the effects of internal emigration on income and labor supply of non-emigrants in Indonesia. Using a shift-share instrument based on labor demand shocks at destination areas weighted by historical emigrant shares, we find that a one percentage point increase in the share of emigrants leads to a 3.65% decrease in hourly income for non-emigrants. The impact is particularly pronounced in the formal sector, with a 4.5% reduction in hourly income. Low-skilled individuals in the formal sector experience a 5.5% decrease in hourly income. These findings suggest that the skills of non-emigrants are not perfect substitutes for those of emigrants, resulting in declining wages. Furthermore, we do not find effects on labor supply which may be explained by opposing effects on this variable after emigration occurs. For instance, we may observe a decrease in labor supply because non-emigrants choose not to work given that they may receive emigrants' transfers as an additional income. However, this effect may be counterbalanced by the increased labor force participation of non-emigrants motivated by the loss of potential local earnings from emigrants. In line with this, the overall impact on labor supply remains relatively unchanged. Chapter 2: The Effects of Proximity to Senior Colleagues on Productivity and Promotion Outcomes This paper examines the impact of physical proximity to senior faculty members, specifically full professors, on the productivity and promotion outcomes of their fellow faculty peers in economics. Using a panel dataset and an event study design, we compare the productivity and promotion outcomes of economists in departments that receive a new full professor (destination institutions) with those in departments that experience the departure of a full professor (origin institutions) after relocation. The findings show that the arrival of full professors positively affects the productivity outcomes of their local networks in the destination institutions, while negative effects or no significant change are observed in the origin institutions. Positive effects are observed for publication metrics, such as the number of publications, top publications, working papers, and solo-authored papers. Additionally, there are positive effects on promotion to associate professors but no significant effects on promotion to full professors. We observe no clear gender differences in the outcomes. These results contribute to the understanding of peer effects, knowledge spillovers, and the importance of physical proximity to senior colleagues in academia, with implications for talent attraction and gender disparities. Chapter 3: Integrating Survey and Geospatial Data for Geographical Targeting of the Poor and Vulnerable: Evidence from Malawi Generating timely data to identify the poorest villages in developing countries remains a fundamental challenge for existing data systems. This paper proposes tackling this problem in a cost-effective way by combining a standard household consumption survey, a partial registry, and publicly available geospatial indicators. The partial registry would contain data on proxy poverty indicators from all households in a small sample of villages. These proxies would be used to impute estimates of household per capita consumption into the partial registry, which would then be used to train a prediction model using publicly available geospatial data. This study simulates a partial registry by drawing a sub-sample of a census extract from 450 villages selected from a census extract from 10 poor districts of Malawi, encompassing approximately 4,500 villages. The predictions generated by the simulated partial registry are evaluated against an imputed reference village welfare measure constructed by imputing log per capita consumption from the 2016 integrated household survey into the full census extract, using the same gradient boosting model used to impute into the simulated partial registry. The partial registry approach is compared with three alternative methods for predicting a measure of village economic welfare: (1) the calculated proxy means test scores in the 2017 social registry, (2) the Meta Relative Wealth Index, and (3) employing predictions derived from a standard household survey and publicly available geospatial indicators. Incorporating the simulated partial registry greatly enhances the performance of the predictions. When utilizing the simulated partial registry, the rank correlation between the predicted and benchmark welfare measures is 0.75, while the rank correlations for the other three methods range from -0.02 to 0.2. Similar results are observed when examining the area under the curve. Importantly, this main result is robust to adding substantial Gaussian noise to the imputed village welfare measure used to train the geospatial prediction model. Overall, the results suggest that collecting partial registries of household-level proxy poverty indicators in low-income contexts can substantially improve the performance of machine learning models that integrate survey and satellite imagery data for village-level geographic targeting.

Graduation Semester

2023-12

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122137

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Melany Gualavisi Diaz

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