Essays in Applied Microeconomics

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three independent essays. The first essay develops an urban spatial model with heterogeneous worker groups and incorporating travel to consume non-tradable goods and services. It estimates the model using detailed farecard and administrative data from Singapore to quantify the impact of the Downtown Line. It estimates large welfare gains for high-income workers, but near zero gains for low-income workers. All workers benefit from improved access to consumption opportunities, but low-income non-tradable sector jobs move to less attractive workplaces. Abstracting away from consumption travel results in a five-fold underestimation of the inequality effects and failure to capture the spatial re-organization of low-income jobs in the city. The second essay studies the consequences of letter grades serving as noisy measures of academic achievement. It exploits a regression-discontinuity design with marks as the running variable and finds that receiving a better grade in a single class results in $32 USD greater monthly earnings post-graduation. The effects are larger than expected from a corresponding cumulative grade point average increase via "employer-signaling", suggesting that future changes in behavior and outcomes may be important. It then finds that marginal students who receive a worse grade take significantly "easier" courses and earn lower grades in future semesters. The third essay uses administrative data from Karnataka, India on the universe of good shipments between any two establishments to measure the extent to which firms own and utilize production links for sourcing physical inputs. It calculates that 11% of input value can be potentially sourced from integrated upstream establishments and that 38% of products are sourced exclusively from within the firm. It compares its methodology to the literature and highlights two sources of bias in previous studies. Finally, it quantifies the extent to which firm boundaries serve as a barrier to trade and looks at factors associated with within-firm sourcing.