Economics electronic theses and dissertations (MU)
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The items in this collection are the theses and dissertations written by students of Department of Economics. Some items may be viewed only by members of the University of Missouri System and/or University of Missouri-Columbia. Click on one of the browse buttons above for a complete listing of the works.
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Item Institutions of inclusion and exclusion : evidence from gun laws, voting rights, and welfare policy(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Cirillo, Brendan Michael; Milyo, Jeffrey; Street, BrittanyI examine how state-level policy interventions shape access to core institutions of American life: public safety, political participation, and social welfare. Across three essays, I analyze the behavioral and social consequences of institutional change using modern causal inference methods applied to administrative and survey data. The first chapter investigates permit-to-purchase (PTP) firearm licensing laws, which require individuals to obtain a license before purchasing a gun. Using synthetic control methods, I estimate the effects of PTP adoptions and repeals in Connecticut, Maryland, and Missouri on gun acquisition and criminal misuse. Maryland's adoption of PTP generated large and immediate effects, reducing self-sourced crime guns by 9.4 percentage points and lengthening time-to-crime by 3.3 years, though no shortrun mortality effects were detected. In contrast, Missouri's repeal led to a 12.9% rise in background checks, a 22 percentage point increase in self-sourced crime guns, and a 37.9% increase in firearm homicides, while Connecticut's earlier adoption showed similar patterns to Maryland. Across all three states, effects emerge rapidly in urban areas but more gradually in rural regions. The second chapter studies the introduction of drug testing requirements for applicants to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Leveraging a stacked difference-in-differences design with annual state-level data, I find that the adoption of drug testing policies reduced TANF caseloads per capita by roughly 30%, driven by declines in both adult and child recipients. Spillover effects to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) suggest an additional 10% decline in caseloads. The third chapter evaluates the effects of Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which removed federal preclearance requirements for election law changes. Using Cooperative Election Study data (2008-2022) and a triple-difference framework, I find no widening of the Black-White turnout gap but suggestive evidence, depending on specification, of an increase in the Hispanic-White gap in states identified as potential ‘bad actors' under the proposed John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Campaign contact rates do not increase in previously covered or ‘bad actor' states, suggesting a lack of countermobilization efforts that might otherwise offset any effects.Item The economics of crime deterrence(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2025) Mellouli, Moenes; Street, Brittany[EMBARGOED UNTIL 08/01/2026] This dissertation investigates the public safety impacts of restrictive police pursuit policies in the United States, with particular attention to how policy design influences deterrence and crime outcomes. While high-speed vehicle pursuits pose significant risks to public safety, especially for bystanders, there is limited causal evidence on the broader consequences of pursuit bans, particularly for crimes like auto theft. To address this gap, the dissertation comprises two empirical studies using quasiexperimental methods. The first study examines a panel of U.S. cities that adopted pursuit policies restricting vehicle chases to violent felonies. Using a stacked difference-in-differences approach, the study estimates the effects of these reforms on auto theft and fatal pursuit-related accidents. The findings suggest that restricting pursuits is associated with a decrease in fatal accidents and no effect on vehicle thefts overall, which seems to mask important heterogeneity observed in the supplementaty synthetic control analysis of select cities. The second study evaluates Washington State's House Bill 1054 (HB 1054), a statewide law that went into effect in July 2021 and imposed a categorical prohibition on most police pursuits, including for property crimes. Unlike the departmental policies studied in the first chapter, HB 1054 removed officer discretion entirely. Applying the Synthetic Control Method, this chapter estimates the law's causal impact on auto theft and traffic fatalities relative to a synthetic control unit constructed from other U.S. states. Results indicate a sharp and sustained increase in auto thefts following the policy's enactment, with no corresponding change in traffic fatalities. The analysis accounts for potential confounders, including COVID-19 disruptions and the nationwide spike in Kia and Hyundai thefts. Although we investigate restrictive pursuit policies in these two studies, the findings diverge. This is due to many factors, such as: differences in policy design (the Washington law categorically removed officer discretion). Also, enforcement intensity, baseline crime trends, and the variation in methodology may also contribute. Taken together, the studies provide evidence that while restrictive pursuit policies may reduce direct harms, they can also undermine deterrence.Item Essays on theoretical and applied econometrics(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2024) Zhao, Wei; Kaplan, DavidInstead of having a "yes" or "no" result from a test of the global null hypothesis that a function is increasing, I propose a multiple testing procedure to test at multiple points in Chapter 1. If the global null is rejected, then this multiple testing provides more information about why. If the global null is not rejected, then multiple testing can provide stronger evidence in favor of increasingness, by rejecting the null hypotheses that the function is decreasing. With high-level assumptions that apply to a wide array of models, this approach can be used to test for monotonicity of a function in a broad class of structural and descriptive econometric models. By inverting the proposed multiple testing procedure that controls the familywise error rate, I also equivalently generate "inner" and "outer" confidence sets for the set of points at which the function is increasing. With high asymptotic probability, the inner confidence set is contained within the true set, whereas the outer confidence set contains the true set. I also improve power with stepdown and two-stage procedures. Simulated and empirical examples (income-education conditional mean, and IV Engel curve) illustrate the methodology. Using the same confidence set idea as in Chapter 1, I set up two methods to provide evidence that one latent distribution is "better" than another when only ordinal data are available in Chapter 2. One is to figure out a set of quantile values for which the first latent distribution's quantiles are above the second. Another is to find out a range of latent values on which there is restricted stochastic dominance of the first latent distribution over the second. Specifically, these two methods are proposed to construct "inner" confidence sets for the corresponding quantiles and latent values. With high probability, the inner confidence set from the first method is contained within the true set of quantile values for which the first latent distribution's quantiles are above the second. With high probability, the inner confidence set from the second method is contained within the true set of latent values at which the first distribution dominates the second. These methods are applied to assess how life satisfaction is associated with marital status. Chapter 3 studies the translation from the changes in the outcome/consumption distribution to the changes in the utility distribution under certain assumptions. Much empirical research and econometric methods learn from data about differences in consumption, but essentially people care more about welfare/utility changes. I compare two extreme cases where the results are the contrary. One is the simplest setting (utility homogeneity), the consumption and utility move in the same direction; Specifically, the expected utility becomes higher if the consumption distribution becomes better (in the first order stochastic dominance sense). In contrast, under random utility function and arbitrary dependence assumption, I find a job allocating example that shows subpopulations' expected utility increases even if the new consumption distribution is stochastically dominated, i.e., the consumption and utility move in an opposite direction. I also consider other three different assumption settings: utility function and consumption are independent, they have arbitrary dependence but with rank invariance, they have fixed dependence without rank invariance. The results of all these three cases are same, i.e., first order stochastic dominance in consumption implies higher expected utility.Item Essays on money and credit(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2024) Park, Hyungjin; Gu, ChaoMy dissertation analyzes the private currency system and credit market. In the first chapter, I investigate a situation where a private entity supplies money without a central bank. In Somalia, after the central government collapsed, private money suppliers emerged and provided money, resulting in the stable economy. Plus, Somalis used both Somali currency and dollar as a medium of exchange. We discuss the role of foreign currency for which sellers perfectly recognize the value and the condition of the adoption of dual currency system. In the second chapter, I analyze the credit market with heterogeneity in labor productivity. Variations in labor productivity lead to information asymmetry, potentially resulting in reduced contract sizes. I demonstrate the existence of separating, non-default pooling, and default pooling equilibria, which depend on the level of monitoring and the population distribution across two different productivity level. I also identify multiple equilibria and refine the equilibrium space by applying the undefeated equilibrium concept developed by Mailath, Okuno-Fujiwara, and Postlewaite (1993)Item Essays on retail gasoline pricing(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2024) Kim, Seon Yong; Ni, ShawnThis dissertation investigates retailers' pricing behavior by focusing on the retail gasoline market in Seoul, South Korea. The study consists of two chapters. The first chapter presents an empirical analysis of how gasoline stations change prices. One common feature of retail price changes is their periodic and lumpy nature. Various theories have been proposed to explain why retail prices are sticky, each focusing on different factors that influence how retailers set prices. Studies in macroeconomic theory indicate that optimal price adjustment patterns depend on the nature of costs involved in price adjustment. If a price change incurs a fixed cost (e.g., a "menu cost"), optimal price changes occur when the change in state variables exceeds a threshold, resulting in state-dependent price changes. Alternatively, if there is a fixed cost associated with acquiring information, it is optimal to make price adjustments with periodic regularity (time-dependent). Studies in industrial organization emphasize the role of market power and strategic interactions among retailers. Some studies in marketing science argue that retailers are more likely to maintain certain prices based on consumer psychology (e.g., those ending with the digit 9). Do some or all of these theories explain how Seoul's gasoline retail price changes? In the first chapter, I examine the empirical significance of time-dependent pricing, state-dependent pricing, market power, and psychological pricing in the estimation model and examine how these factors are correlated with each other. The estimation results show that the most dominant factor affecting pricing decisions is the time dependent pricing rule, and this tendency to follow the time-dependent pricing rule varies with retailers' local market power. The analysis of how frequently gas stations change prices helps to better understand another common empirical phenomenon concerning asymmetric changes in retail gasoline prices in response to changes in wholesale prices. Many studies find that increases in costs (such as oil prices) are passed through more quickly to retail prices than decreases in costs, a pattern known as "rockets and feathers". This literature is mostly based on the error correction model that assumes retail prices are a linear function of costs. The pricing behavior examined in the first chapter implies that changes in retail prices are nonlinear in changes in costs, as gas stations keep daily prices mostly unchanged despite continuous changes in costs. In the second chapter, I demonstrate the potential bias arising from using daily data for the "rockets and feathers" study. Recent studies on "rockets and feathers" tend to rely more on high-frequency data to avoid bias arising from the temporal aggregation of data. In this study, I investigate price adjustment patterns by estimating an error correction model using daily station-level data from the Korean gasoline market. I find that compared to those based on weekly data, the estimated adjustment patterns based on daily data exhibit greater variation, which may be attributed to model misspecification that fails to account for the essential feature of daily-level data: censored responses to cost changes. The empirical findings emphasize the need for careful model specification when investigating the price adjustment pattern with daily-level data. In additional analyses, I explore the effect of consumer search on adjustment patterns and find that consumer search may not be a primary driving factor behind asymmetric price adjustments.