Three essays on labor and development economics

Abstract

My dissertation comprises three chapters. The first chapter analyzes how economic shocks from the housing market impact the labor market and family formation decisions in the US. The second chapter explores the determinants of household fuel choices in India accounting for women bargaining and village infrastructure. The third chapter assesses impact of China's Belt and Road Initiative on the bilateral trades.

The first chapter assesses the impact of housing cycles in the USA on the family formation decisions. Pooling together information from datasets such as the Current Population Survey (CPS), Vital Statistics Natality data, the FHFA Housing Price Index (HPI), I construct outcomes at the Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) level for various years, and exploit the variation in change in housing demand across MSAs to study the impact of housing demand shocks experienced by MSAs on the family formation outcomes in the MSAs. Recognizing the endogeneity of housing shocks, I use the magnitude of structural breaks in housing prices as instrument for housing shocks experienced by an MSA. The result support the hypothesis that increased employment opportunities during housing boom make men more marriageable but the impact of increased employment opportunities for women remain ambiguous because of countervailing positive and negative income and independence effect.

The second dissertation chapter investigates the fuel choice behavior of households using a large nationally representative panel data in India. Recognizing that the household choices are not independent over time, I use multinomial random and fixed effects models. The improvement over existing literature come from not only use of panel data, but also use of various women bargaining information and village level infrastructure. Women's education attainment and financial independence increase the plausibility of household using clean fuel. The existence of paved road is also an important determinant of household's decision in adopting clean fuel.

In the third chapter, I examine the impact of being connected to Silk Road railways on the 13 destination countries bilateral trade with China. To address the issue of endogenous placement of railways, I utilize the generalized synthetic control method. I find that the railway connections do not have significant impacts on either gross import or gross export of destination countries. The results are robust to alternative methods, across product categories, and different grouping of destination countries based on whether they share boundary with China.