Essays on Applied Microeconomics

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three chapters in the fields of applied microeconomics. The first chapter, co-authored with Reshmaan Hussam, uses a field experiment in rural Bangladesh to provide empirical evidence of behavioral transmission. Behavior change programs often assume positive transmission of behavior across contexts and therefore evaluate effects only at the site of intervening. We randomize an edutainment program in Bangladeshi schools to trace school-to-home transmission of handwashing and find that children are induced to wash more at school but less at home. This negative transmission impacts non-school days and other household members, yielding a net negative effect of the program. We replicate the conceptual experiment by randomizing the proportion of students receiving handwashing resources at home and tracking home-to-school transmission. Children induced to wash more at home likewise wash less at school. We propose crowd-out and cue-based habit formation as the potential mechanisms that may explain the negative transmission we find.

In the second chapter, I examine how women running for office affect the donations to, and the voting of, the competing candidates. Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits close primary races, I estimate the impact of women running for the U.S. House of Representatives office between 1980–2014 on the competing candidates. I find that Republican candidates receive more support from socially conservative groups when they run against Democratic women versus men. This impact lasts beyond the election and the winning Republican candidates continue to vote more conservatively on reproductive rights in Congress. Democratic candidates show no change in campaign finances but vote more liberally on women’s issues after running against Republican women versus men. These results suggest that the presence of women on the ballot may lead to a backlash against the very policy issues they stand for. Running but failing to win office may be costly for women, making the effort toward political representation a double-edged endeavor.

The third chapter, co-authored with Raffi E Garcia, studies how firms adjust their employment decisions around the time of big change. We use an extensive database of Chilean manufacturing plants to study how newly exporting firms change their labor structure and gender composition around the time of entry into the exporting market. We adopt a staggered difference-in-differences design with heterogeneous treatment effects and find that entrants' decisions around the time of entry differ from the long-run decision paths of the exporters. We find that while exporters tend to employ more labor relative to non-exporters across different categories of labor including owners and directors, permanent white-collar, permanent non-white-collar, and female labor, new exporters do not adopt these behaviors around the period of entry, supporting learning through experience under the existence of sunk costs to exporting.