Title:
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Essays in applied microeconometrics
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This thesis comprises three related essays in microeconometrics. Motivated by trends in
prices, purity and supply disruption in the US markets for cocaine and heroin over the past
thirty years, the first essay conducts an applied theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact
of seizures on retail market conditions. The main finding is that rising supply disruption
may be directly responsible for falling prices. This occurs since seizures raise the cost
of wholesale narcotics, incentivising sellers to dilute their product. This leads to declines in
purity, reducing demand and causing prices to fall.
The second and third essays make a greater methodological contribution, focussing on
identification of spillover (or peer) effects. Each seeks to address a shortcoming of existing
identification strategies. The second essay studies identification of spillover effects in the
absence of network data, using panel data instead. Identification conditions are derived under
which both spillovers, and the underlying network, are either partially or fully identified.
The approach is applied to study research and development (R&D) spillovers between US
firms, finding evidence of underinvestment in R&D.
The third essay studies identification of spillover effects if the researcher does not observe
a source of strictly exogenous variation in the outcomes. Instead, variation in the variance
and covariance of the outcomes over the network is exploited. The essay derives testable
identification conditions, which hold for generic networks and fail only in special cases. The
method is applied to study spillovers in education, finding evidence of strong, positive peer
effects in mathematics test scores for first year kindergarten students in the US.
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