In this thesis, I explore how accountability relationships affect policymaking in two institutional contexts: internal executive branch operations and electoral contests. The overarching insight is that the potential for removal creates reputation concerns to demonstrate skill that, in turn, affect policymaking. For political appointees serving at the pleasure of the president, this means a reputation for management skill or technocratic policy expertise, whereas for elected representatives, this means maintaining a reputation for competent leadership with voters. The main result is that oversight creates both pathological policymaking incentives for accountable officials, but also potentially unintuitive selection by a principal\u2014either the president or voters.
\r\n\r\nIn Chapters 1 and 2, I explore political appointees\u2019 dual roles as agents of the president and managers of the bureaucracy. This view of appointee-careerist relations complicates standard notions of presidential control and bureaucratic power, by recognizing that appointees are reliant on presidential support to maintain their position within an administration. To cultivate a good reputation with the president, appointees may cede control to the bureaucracy. However, to understand how control is transferred to the bureaucracy, I argue that we must fully account for appointees\u2019 strategic roles in the administrative presidency\u2014and that, to do so, requires differentiating between types of appointments.
\r\n\r\nPresidential appointments that require Senate confirmation (PAS) and noncareer members of the Senior Executive Service (SES-NA) occupy positions that require direct oversight and management of subordinate career civil servants. As managers, these appointees must rely on the expertise, pragmatic or otherwise, and efforts of bureaucrats to implement the president\u2019s policies. I argue that presidents select these appointees primarily on the basis of their management skills. In contrast, Schedule C appointees occupy confidential or policymaking roles and serve directly under a political appointee. These appointees may substitute for the expertise of career bureaucrats. I argue that presidents select these appointees on the basis of policy expertise.
\r\n\r\nHowever, central to my argument is the idea that the president may still be uncertain of an appointee\u2019s management skill or policy expertise\u2014despite appointing him or her in the first place. This means there is scope for the president to learn about an appointee\u2019s ability based on how they perform or behave on the job. It is this residual uncertainty about an appointee\u2019s capabilities, along with the president\u2019s formal removal power, that create reputation concerns for appointees: appointees care about maintaining their position and to do so they must preserve their reputation with the president.
\r\n\r\nI argue that these reputation concerns shape how appointees manage interactions with the bureaucracy. Appointees in managerial roles may make more policy concessions to the bureaucracy than the president would like in order to ensure bureaucratic cooperation and avoid revealing managerial weaknesses. Instead, appointees in positions of policymaking authority may fail to empower or involve bureaucrats in policymaking. Both of these actions undermine the president\u2019s policy goals by either creating policies that increasingly reflect the views of the bureaucracy or by failing to create policies that reflect bureaucratic expertise. This suggests limitations of political control over the bureaucracy that cannot be alleviated through the exercise of formal administrative powers, namely appointment and removal powers.
\r\n\r\nUltimately, the agency issues I explore in this context follow from a fundamental and immutable constraint on presidential control: the president simply cannot unilaterally manage the executive branch. The demands of the presidency are too great for the president to preside over all operations. This means delegation is necessary\u2014and, even when the president delegates to advisors of \u201cher own choosing,\u201d some loss of control is inevitable.
\r\n\r\nIn Chapter 3, I explore how majority selection operates in an environment in which politicians prefer to pursue particularistic policies. If special interest coalitions are sufficiently strong, a majority may expect that political expertise will be used to select policies that generate rents for narrow constituencies at the expense of its own welfare. I develop a model in which a majority prefers to elect the less competent politician in order to undermine the incumbent\u2019s ability to pursue the special interest agenda and derive the implications for accountability in this setting. The results demonstrate that the majority\u2019s attempts to reassert control over policy through its retention decisions impede social welfare maximizing reform and distort aggregate welfare by either encouraging (i) inefficient policy selection or (ii) inefficient candidate selection. Even if politicians choose policies that maximize social welfare doing so may only worsen aggregate welfare by providing voters with more information about candidate competence, which enables the majority to better select inept politicians.
", "doi": "10.7907/68tp-4t84", "publication_date": "2024", "thesis_type": "phd", "thesis_year": "2024" }, { "id": "thesis:16429", "collection": "thesis", "collection_id": "16429", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:05282024-055813959", "primary_object_url": { "basename": "huey_joanna_2024.pdf", "content": "final", "filesize": 1939375, "license": "other", "mime_type": "application/pdf", "url": "/16429/1/huey_joanna_2024.pdf", "version": "v4.0.0" }, "type": "thesis", "title": "Institutional Design of Criminal Justice Processes", "author": [ { "family_name": "Huey", "given_name": "Joanna Nanami", "orcid": "0009-0000-5934-9184", "clpid": "Huey-Joanna-Nanami" } ], "thesis_advisor": [ { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "orcid": "0000-0001-5166-9853", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" } ], "thesis_committee": [ { "family_name": "Katz", "given_name": "Jonathan N.", "orcid": "0000-0002-5287-3503", "clpid": "Katz-J-N" }, { "family_name": "Palfrey", "given_name": "Thomas R.", "orcid": "0000-0003-0769-8109", "clpid": "Palfrey-T-R" }, { "family_name": "Rosenthal", "given_name": "Jean-Laurent", "clpid": "Rosenthal-J-L" }, { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "orcid": "0000-0001-5166-9853", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" } ], "local_group": [ { "literal": "div_hss" } ], "abstract": "This dissertation contains three essays that contribute to ongoing debates about the design of institutions and procedures related to criminal justice.
\r\n\r\nChapter 1 investigates how peremptory challenges in the jury selection process affect the diversity of and outcomes from juries. A game-theoretic model of attorneys\u2019 decisions to strike potential jurors finds that the process 1) can lead selected jurors from a majority group to be a skewed sample and 2) can increase minority representation, contrary to common intuition. The first theoretical finding about the skew is supported by empirical analysis of data from jury selection transcripts: a novel measure of the pro-defense lean of jury pool members is developed, and selected White jurors are found to be more pro-defense than the average White pool member.
\r\n\r\nChapter 2 develops a game-theoretic model of decisions about the verdict and sentence in a criminal trial, considering both single-actor and two-actor versions of this two-step process. Restrictions on sentencing discretion can lead to nullification where an actor with acquits who would have convicted under full discretion. When actors care about the lawfulness of their own actions, a two-actor process may lead to additional convictions, as the convicting actor can free ride off of a separate sentencing actor who will pay the cost of sentencing away from the lawful sentence. The model also leads to non-monotonic effects on the verdict when lawfulness or the expected sentence change.
\r\n\r\nChapter 3 (joint work with Alexander V. Hirsch) uses mechanism design to examine single-threshold information escrows in a workplace setting. In this setting, reports of misconduct by a manager are kept secret until the number of reports exceeds a threshold and the manager is fired. When the firm designing the system wishes to minimize misconduct, a single-threshold mechanism leads to optimal results when misconduct reports are costless. In contrast, costly misconduct reports can make truthful reporting impossible under certain threshold values, raising the threshold above the firm\u2019s ideal or even eliminating the possibility of any truthful mechanism. We find that single-threshold mechanisms are generally worse for the firm than mechanisms that mix two thresholds and can be worse than choosing whether to fire the manager without eliciting any information about misconduct.
", "doi": "10.7907/3gjk-mh19", "publication_date": "2024", "thesis_type": "phd", "thesis_year": "2024" }, { "id": "thesis:16429", "collection": "thesis", "collection_id": "16429", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:05282024-055813959", "primary_object_url": { "basename": "huey_joanna_2024.pdf", "content": "final", "filesize": 1939375, "license": "other", "mime_type": "application/pdf", "url": "/16429/1/huey_joanna_2024.pdf", "version": "v4.0.0" }, "type": "thesis", "title": "Institutional Design of Criminal Justice Processes", "author": [ { "family_name": "Huey", "given_name": "Joanna Nanami", "orcid": "0009-0000-5934-9184", "clpid": "Huey-Joanna-Nanami" } ], "thesis_advisor": [ { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "orcid": "0000-0001-5166-9853", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" } ], "thesis_committee": [ { "family_name": "Katz", "given_name": "Jonathan N.", "orcid": "0000-0002-5287-3503", "clpid": "Katz-J-N" }, { "family_name": "Palfrey", "given_name": "Thomas R.", "orcid": "0000-0003-0769-8109", "clpid": "Palfrey-T-R" }, { "family_name": "Rosenthal", "given_name": "Jean-Laurent", "clpid": "Rosenthal-J-L" }, { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "orcid": "0000-0001-5166-9853", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" } ], "local_group": [ { "literal": "div_hss" } ], "abstract": "This dissertation contains three essays that contribute to ongoing debates about the design of institutions and procedures related to criminal justice.
\r\n\r\nChapter 1 investigates how peremptory challenges in the jury selection process affect the diversity of and outcomes from juries. A game-theoretic model of attorneys\u2019 decisions to strike potential jurors finds that the process 1) can lead selected jurors from a majority group to be a skewed sample and 2) can increase minority representation, contrary to common intuition. The first theoretical finding about the skew is supported by empirical analysis of data from jury selection transcripts: a novel measure of the pro-defense lean of jury pool members is developed, and selected White jurors are found to be more pro-defense than the average White pool member.
\r\n\r\nChapter 2 develops a game-theoretic model of decisions about the verdict and sentence in a criminal trial, considering both single-actor and two-actor versions of this two-step process. Restrictions on sentencing discretion can lead to nullification where an actor with acquits who would have convicted under full discretion. When actors care about the lawfulness of their own actions, a two-actor process may lead to additional convictions, as the convicting actor can free ride off of a separate sentencing actor who will pay the cost of sentencing away from the lawful sentence. The model also leads to non-monotonic effects on the verdict when lawfulness or the expected sentence change.
\r\n\r\nChapter 3 (joint work with Alexander V. Hirsch) uses mechanism design to examine single-threshold information escrows in a workplace setting. In this setting, reports of misconduct by a manager are kept secret until the number of reports exceeds a threshold and the manager is fired. When the firm designing the system wishes to minimize misconduct, a single-threshold mechanism leads to optimal results when misconduct reports are costless. In contrast, costly misconduct reports can make truthful reporting impossible under certain threshold values, raising the threshold above the firm\u2019s ideal or even eliminating the possibility of any truthful mechanism. We find that single-threshold mechanisms are generally worse for the firm than mechanisms that mix two thresholds and can be worse than choosing whether to fire the manager without eliciting any information about misconduct.
", "doi": "10.7907/3gjk-mh19", "publication_date": "2024", "thesis_type": "phd", "thesis_year": "2024" }, { "id": "thesis:14346", "collection": "thesis", "collection_id": "14346", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:08272021-193158262", "type": "thesis", "title": "Agency Problems in Political Science", "author": [ { "family_name": "Devdariani", "given_name": "Saba", "orcid": "0000-0001-5737-4052", "clpid": "Devdariani-Saba" } ], "thesis_advisor": [ { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "orcid": "0000-0001-5166-9853", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" } ], "thesis_committee": [ { "family_name": "Palfrey", "given_name": "Thomas R.", "orcid": "0000-0003-0769-8109", "clpid": "Palfrey-T-R" }, { "family_name": "Gibilisco", "given_name": "Michael B.", "orcid": "0000-0002-6484-1314", "clpid": "Gibilisco-M-B" }, { "family_name": "Pomatto", "given_name": "Luciano", "orcid": "0000-0002-4331-8436", "clpid": "Pomatto-L" }, { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "orcid": "0000-0001-5166-9853", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" } ], "local_group": [ { "literal": "div_hss" } ], "abstract": "This dissertation consists of three chapters analyzing agency problems in political science. More specifically the role of different/additional information available to the principal or the agent.
\r\n\r\nIn Chapter 2 we analyze the effect of the politician's knowledge of the external shock on his policy decisions on unrelated issues. Elected politicians cannot control some external shocks, even if they can still anticipate their occurrence better than the general public. How can politicians use these types of anticipated external shocks to their benefit? How do they change their pandering incentives? And how does a rational voter incorporate these seemingly irrelevant external shocks in her voting decision? We build on the political accountability model of Canes-Wrone Herron, Shotts (2001), adding the ability to the voter to observe her utility, which is affected by an external shock. The shock is observed by the incumbent politician but not by the voter. Our analyses show that for high or low enough magnitude external shocks, a politician's ability to anticipate them eliminates his pandering incentives in equilibrium. For medium negative shocks, pandering could be a \"gamble for resurrection,\" while for medium positive shocks, it acts as an \"insurance\" to guarantee the reelection. We show that both of these pandering regions emerge in equilibrium. The politician's knowledge of the shock, overall, decreases the voter's welfare in equilibrium.
\r\n\r\nIn Chapter 3 we endogenize the information acquisition for the voter to study what types of policy decisions voters pay attention to, and why, and how rational voter attention affects the behavior of politicians in office. We extend the Canes-Wrone, Herron, Shotts (2001) model of electoral agency to allow the voter to rationally choose when to ``pay attention'' to an incumbent's policy choice by expending costly effort to learn its consequences. When attention is moderately costly the voter generally pays more of it after the ex-ante unpopular policy than the ex-ante popular one. Rational attention may improve accountability by encouraging the politician to be truthful. In some cases, it may also severely harm accountability both by inducing a strong incumbent to ``play it safe'' with a policy that avoids attention, or a weak incumbent to ``gamble for resurrection'' with a policy that draws it. Finally, rational attention can induce or worsen pandering but never ``fake leadership''.
\r\n\r\nChapter 4 analyzes delegated information acquisition with a biased agent who also has private information about the state of the world. The information acquired is public and its informativeness increases with costly effort. Equilibria are characterized for two cases: when the agent decides an effort level and when a principal imposes formal requirements on it. The analysis demonstrates that even when the principal cannot commit to an arbitrary decision rule, he benefits from imposing formal requirements by getting as much public information as possible and correctly aligning the biased agent's incentives. In the optimal mechanism, the principal incentivizes the low-type agent to truthfully reveal her private information by requiring a relatively low amount of costly effort, while the high private report has to be followed by the maximum effort in the public signal.
", "doi": "10.7907/frhb-rn17", "publication_date": "2022", "thesis_type": "phd", "thesis_year": "2022" }, { "id": "thesis:14950", "collection": "thesis", "collection_id": "14950", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:06062022-181748014", "type": "thesis", "title": "Three Essays on Survey Methods and their Applications to Measuring Political Behavior and Attitudes", "author": [ { "family_name": "Li", "given_name": "Yimeng", "orcid": "0000-0003-3855-0756", "clpid": "Li-Yimeng" } ], "thesis_advisor": [ { "family_name": "Alvarez", "given_name": "R. Michael", "orcid": "0000-0002-8113-4451", "clpid": "Alvarez-R-M" } ], "thesis_committee": [ { "family_name": "Katz", "given_name": "Jonathan N.", "orcid": "0000-0002-5287-3503", "clpid": "Katz-J-N" }, { "family_name": "Alvarez", "given_name": "R. Michael", "orcid": "0000-0002-8113-4451", "clpid": "Alvarez-R-M" }, { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "orcid": "0000-0001-5166-9853", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" } ], "local_group": [ { "literal": "div_hss" } ], "abstract": "In this thesis, I develop survey methods and apply them to measure political behavior or attitudes more accurately. Two of the challenges to researchers in measuring political behavior or attitudes are respondents\u2019 reluctance to respond to sensitive questions truthfully and respondents' inattention to providing accurate responses. I contribute to advancing survey methodology to tackle these challenges.
\r\n\r\nEliciting truthful answers from respondents on sensitive issues is a difficult problem in surveys, and list experiments emerge as the most popular indirect questioning technique to do so among political scientists and sociologists. The analysis of list experiments depends on two assumptions, known as \"no design effect\" and \"no liars.\" The no liars assumption is strong and may fail in many list experiments. In Chapter II (published in Political Analysis), I relax the no liars assumption and develop a method to provide bounds for the prevalence of sensitive behaviors or attitudes under a weaker behavioral assumption. I apply the method to a list experiment on the anti-immigration attitudes of California residents and a broad set of existing list experiment datasets. My results indicate that the bounds tend to be narrower when the list consists of items of the same category, such as multiple groups or organizations, different corporate activities, and various considerations for politician decision-making. The contribution of my paper is to illustrate when the full power of the no liars assumption is most needed to pin down the prevalence of the sensitive behavior or attitudes, and to facilitate analysis of list experiments robust to violations of the no liars assumption.
\r\n\r\nOver the past two decades, the environment in which respondents participate in surveys and polls has changed, with shifts from interviewer-driven to respondent-driven surveying, and from probability to nonprobability sampling. One consequence of these technological changes is that survey respondents in these environments may be less attentive to survey questions. In Chapter III (published in Political Analysis), co-authored with R. Michael Alvarez, Lonna Atkeson, and Ines Levin, we study respondent attention and its implications using data from a self-completion online survey that identified inattentive respondents using instructed-response items (IRIs), a simple attention check that received little scholarly attention. Our results demonstrate that ignoring attentiveness provides a biased portrait of the distribution of critical political attitudes and behavior of both sensitive and more prosaic nature, and results in violations of key assumptions underlying experimental designs. We discuss four approaches to dealing with inattentiveness in surveys and when these approaches are appropriate.
\r\n\r\nAttention checks, in the form of instructional manipulation checks (IMCs) or instructed response items (IRIs), are useful tools for survey quality control. However, due to the lack of ground truth information, these previous works rely on various post hoc measures to evaluate the performance of attention filters. For the same reason, it has also been impossible to evaluate the performance of different statistical approaches to dealing with inattentive respondents. In Chapter IV, co-authored with R. Michael Alvarez, we conduct a first validation study by analyzing a large-scale post-election survey following the November 2018 General Election and validating survey responses at the individual level using administrative records. Our results show that for each type of attention check, respondents failing the check provided responses with lower accuracy than respondents passing it. We compare the performance of different approaches to dealing with inattentive respondents in the study of turnout and voting method, two variables of substantive interest that are available from the administrative record, and conclude that the best strategy depends on a bias-variance trade-off that also accounts for the correlation between respondent attention and the outcome variables of interest.
", "doi": "10.7907/32kq-yy36", "publication_date": "2022", "thesis_type": "phd", "thesis_year": "2022" }, { "id": "thesis:14320", "collection": "thesis", "collection_id": "14320", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:08102021-053655419", "primary_object_url": { "basename": "Zhang_Shiyu_2022.pdf", "content": "final", "filesize": 4182101, "license": "other", "mime_type": "application/pdf", "url": "/14320/1/Zhang_Shiyu_2022.pdf", "version": "v4.0.0" }, "type": "thesis", "title": "Three Essays in Applied Economics", "author": [ { "family_name": "Zhang", "given_name": "Shiyu", "orcid": "0000-0002-7517-9717", "clpid": "Zhang-Shiyu" } ], "thesis_advisor": [ { "family_name": "Rosenthal", "given_name": "Jean-Laurent", "clpid": "Rosenthal-J-L" } ], "thesis_committee": [ { "family_name": "Ewens", "given_name": "Michael J.", "clpid": "Ewens-M-J" }, { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "orcid": "0000-0001-5166-9853", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" }, { "family_name": "Sherman", "given_name": "Robert P.", "clpid": "Sherman-R-P" }, { "family_name": "Rosenthal", "given_name": "Jean-Laurent", "clpid": "Rosenthal-J-L" } ], "local_group": [ { "literal": "div_hss" } ], "abstract": "This thesis consists of three papers, two studying the effectiveness of policy interventions curbing the opioid crisis, and one studying the value of network ties in the Chinese bureaucracy. The two chapters on the opioid crisis are coauthored with Daniel Guth, a fellow Caltech graduate student.
\r\n \r\nThe first chapter studies the effectiveness of the OxyContin reformulation in reducing opioid misuse and overdose. Purdue Pharma reformulated OxyContin in 2010 to make it more difficult to abuse. Previous research argued that OxyContin misuse fell dramatically and OxyContin users switched directly to heroin. Using a novel and fine-grained source of all oxycodone sales from 2006-2014, we show that the reformulation led users to substitute from OxyContin to generic oxycodone and the reformulation had no overall impact on opioid or heroin mortality. In addition, the chapter finds that generic oxycodone, instead of OxyContin, was the driving factor in the transition to heroin in recent years. These findings highlight the important role generic oxycodone played in the opioid epidemic and the limited effectiveness of a partial supply-side intervention.
\r\n\t\r\nThe second chapter studies the spatial spillover effect of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs). PDMPs seek to potentially reduce opioid misuse by restricting the sale of opioids in a state. This chapter examines discontinuities along state borders, where one side may have a PDMP and the other side may not. We find that electronic PDMP implementation, whereby doctors and pharmacists can observe a patient's opioid purchase history, reduces a state's opioid sales but increases opioid sales in neighboring counties on the other side of the state border. We also find systematic differences in opioid sales and mortality between border counties and interior counties. These differences decrease when neighboring states both have PDMPs, which is consistent with the hypothesis that the differences were caused by cross-border opioid shopping. Our work highlights the importance of understanding the opioid market as connected across counties or states, as we show that states are affected by the opioid policies of their neighbors.
\r\n\t\r\nThe third chapter examines the value of patronage ties at lower levels of Chinese bureaucracy. A growing literature shows that connection with the right higher-level politicians is beneficial for advancements in the Communist Party of China. In this chapter, I use a self-collected data set to examine the value of patronage ties in the city committees, a previously overlooked but important level of the Chinese government. I present empirical evidence that the party secretaries are involved in the appointment of committee members. But upon departure, the party secretaries' career success does not improve the committee members' future promotion likelihood. This work highlights that the value of interpersonal connection in China is highly dependent on which level of the government is under inspection.
", "doi": "10.7907/ahsc-p250", "publication_date": "2022", "thesis_type": "phd", "thesis_year": "2022" }, { "id": "thesis:14320", "collection": "thesis", "collection_id": "14320", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:08102021-053655419", "primary_object_url": { "basename": "Zhang_Shiyu_2022.pdf", "content": "final", "filesize": 4182101, "license": "other", "mime_type": "application/pdf", "url": "/14320/1/Zhang_Shiyu_2022.pdf", "version": "v4.0.0" }, "type": "thesis", "title": "Three Essays in Applied Economics", "author": [ { "family_name": "Zhang", "given_name": "Shiyu", "orcid": "0000-0002-7517-9717", "clpid": "Zhang-Shiyu" } ], "thesis_advisor": [ { "family_name": "Rosenthal", "given_name": "Jean-Laurent", "clpid": "Rosenthal-J-L" } ], "thesis_committee": [ { "family_name": "Ewens", "given_name": "Michael J.", "clpid": "Ewens-M-J" }, { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "orcid": "0000-0001-5166-9853", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" }, { "family_name": "Sherman", "given_name": "Robert P.", "clpid": "Sherman-R-P" }, { "family_name": "Rosenthal", "given_name": "Jean-Laurent", "clpid": "Rosenthal-J-L" } ], "local_group": [ { "literal": "div_hss" } ], "abstract": "This thesis consists of three papers, two studying the effectiveness of policy interventions curbing the opioid crisis, and one studying the value of network ties in the Chinese bureaucracy. The two chapters on the opioid crisis are coauthored with Daniel Guth, a fellow Caltech graduate student.
\r\n \r\nThe first chapter studies the effectiveness of the OxyContin reformulation in reducing opioid misuse and overdose. Purdue Pharma reformulated OxyContin in 2010 to make it more difficult to abuse. Previous research argued that OxyContin misuse fell dramatically and OxyContin users switched directly to heroin. Using a novel and fine-grained source of all oxycodone sales from 2006-2014, we show that the reformulation led users to substitute from OxyContin to generic oxycodone and the reformulation had no overall impact on opioid or heroin mortality. In addition, the chapter finds that generic oxycodone, instead of OxyContin, was the driving factor in the transition to heroin in recent years. These findings highlight the important role generic oxycodone played in the opioid epidemic and the limited effectiveness of a partial supply-side intervention.
\r\n\t\r\nThe second chapter studies the spatial spillover effect of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs). PDMPs seek to potentially reduce opioid misuse by restricting the sale of opioids in a state. This chapter examines discontinuities along state borders, where one side may have a PDMP and the other side may not. We find that electronic PDMP implementation, whereby doctors and pharmacists can observe a patient's opioid purchase history, reduces a state's opioid sales but increases opioid sales in neighboring counties on the other side of the state border. We also find systematic differences in opioid sales and mortality between border counties and interior counties. These differences decrease when neighboring states both have PDMPs, which is consistent with the hypothesis that the differences were caused by cross-border opioid shopping. Our work highlights the importance of understanding the opioid market as connected across counties or states, as we show that states are affected by the opioid policies of their neighbors.
\r\n\t\r\nThe third chapter examines the value of patronage ties at lower levels of Chinese bureaucracy. A growing literature shows that connection with the right higher-level politicians is beneficial for advancements in the Communist Party of China. In this chapter, I use a self-collected data set to examine the value of patronage ties in the city committees, a previously overlooked but important level of the Chinese government. I present empirical evidence that the party secretaries are involved in the appointment of committee members. But upon departure, the party secretaries' career success does not improve the committee members' future promotion likelihood. This work highlights that the value of interpersonal connection in China is highly dependent on which level of the government is under inspection.
", "doi": "10.7907/ahsc-p250", "publication_date": "2022", "thesis_type": "phd", "thesis_year": "2022" }, { "id": "thesis:10231", "collection": "thesis", "collection_id": "10231", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:05312017-141442186", "primary_object_url": { "basename": "Mayskaya_Tatiana_2017.pdf", "content": "final", "filesize": 3141859, "license": "other", "mime_type": "application/pdf", "url": "/10231/1/Mayskaya_Tatiana_2017.pdf", "version": "v5.0.0" }, "type": "thesis", "title": "Essays on Information Collection", "author": [ { "family_name": "Mayskaya", "given_name": "Tatiana S.", "orcid": "0000-0003-1445-4612", "clpid": "Mayskaya-Tatiana-S" } ], "thesis_advisor": [ { "family_name": "Echenique", "given_name": "Federico", "orcid": "0000-0002-1567-6770", "clpid": "Echenique-F" } ], "thesis_committee": [ { "family_name": "Echenique", "given_name": "Federico", "orcid": "0000-0002-1567-6770", "clpid": "Echenique-F" }, { "family_name": "Cvitani\u0107", "given_name": "Jak\u0161a", "orcid": "0000-0001-6651-3552", "clpid": "Cvitani\u0107-J" }, { "family_name": "Gillen", "given_name": "Benjamin J.", "clpid": "Gillen-B-J" }, { "family_name": "Agranov", "given_name": "Marina", "orcid": "0000-0002-0642-7975", "clpid": "Agranov-M" }, { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "orcid": "0000-0001-5166-9853", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" } ], "local_group": [ { "literal": "div_hss" } ], "abstract": "This thesis is devoted to the problem of information collection from theoretical and experimental perspectives.
\r\n\r\nIn Chapter 2, I characterize the unique optimal learning strategy when there are two information sources, three possible states of the world, and learning is modeled as a search process. The optimal strategy consists of two phases. During the first phase, only beliefs about the state and the quality of information sources matter for the optimal choice between these sources. During the second phase, this choice also depends on how much the agent values different types of information. The information sources are substitutes when each individual source is likely to reveal the state eventually, and they are complements otherwise.
\r\n\r\nIn Chapter 3, co-authored with Li Song, we conducted an experiment which demonstrates that even in a simple four person circle network people appear to fail to account for possible repetition of information they receive. Moreover, we show that this phenomenon can be partially attributed to rational considerations, which take into account other people\u2019s deviations from optimal behavior.
\r\n\r\nIn Chapter 4, co-authored with Marcelo A. Fern\u00e1ndez,we model overconfidence as if a decision maker perceives information as being more precise than it actually is. We show that the effect of overconfidence on the quality of the final decision is shaped by three forces, overestimating the precision of future information, overestimating the precision of past information and overestimating the amount of information to be collected in the future. The first force pushes an overconfident decision maker to collect more information, while the second and the third forces work in the other direction.
", "doi": "10.7907/Z9DV1GWC", "publication_date": "2017", "thesis_type": "phd", "thesis_year": "2017" }, { "id": "thesis:10231", "collection": "thesis", "collection_id": "10231", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:05312017-141442186", "primary_object_url": { "basename": "Mayskaya_Tatiana_2017.pdf", "content": "final", "filesize": 3141859, "license": "other", "mime_type": "application/pdf", "url": "/10231/1/Mayskaya_Tatiana_2017.pdf", "version": "v5.0.0" }, "type": "thesis", "title": "Essays on Information Collection", "author": [ { "family_name": "Mayskaya", "given_name": "Tatiana S.", "orcid": "0000-0003-1445-4612", "clpid": "Mayskaya-Tatiana-S" } ], "thesis_advisor": [ { "family_name": "Echenique", "given_name": "Federico", "orcid": "0000-0002-1567-6770", "clpid": "Echenique-F" } ], "thesis_committee": [ { "family_name": "Echenique", "given_name": "Federico", "orcid": "0000-0002-1567-6770", "clpid": "Echenique-F" }, { "family_name": "Cvitani\u0107", "given_name": "Jak\u0161a", "orcid": "0000-0001-6651-3552", "clpid": "Cvitani\u0107-J" }, { "family_name": "Gillen", "given_name": "Benjamin J.", "clpid": "Gillen-B-J" }, { "family_name": "Agranov", "given_name": "Marina", "orcid": "0000-0002-0642-7975", "clpid": "Agranov-M" }, { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "orcid": "0000-0001-5166-9853", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" } ], "local_group": [ { "literal": "div_hss" } ], "abstract": "This thesis is devoted to the problem of information collection from theoretical and experimental perspectives.
\r\n\r\nIn Chapter 2, I characterize the unique optimal learning strategy when there are two information sources, three possible states of the world, and learning is modeled as a search process. The optimal strategy consists of two phases. During the first phase, only beliefs about the state and the quality of information sources matter for the optimal choice between these sources. During the second phase, this choice also depends on how much the agent values different types of information. The information sources are substitutes when each individual source is likely to reveal the state eventually, and they are complements otherwise.
\r\n\r\nIn Chapter 3, co-authored with Li Song, we conducted an experiment which demonstrates that even in a simple four person circle network people appear to fail to account for possible repetition of information they receive. Moreover, we show that this phenomenon can be partially attributed to rational considerations, which take into account other people\u2019s deviations from optimal behavior.
\r\n\r\nIn Chapter 4, co-authored with Marcelo A. Fern\u00e1ndez,we model overconfidence as if a decision maker perceives information as being more precise than it actually is. We show that the effect of overconfidence on the quality of the final decision is shaped by three forces, overestimating the precision of future information, overestimating the precision of past information and overestimating the amount of information to be collected in the future. The first force pushes an overconfident decision maker to collect more information, while the second and the third forces work in the other direction.
", "doi": "10.7907/Z9DV1GWC", "publication_date": "2017", "thesis_type": "phd", "thesis_year": "2017" }, { "id": "thesis:9807", "collection": "thesis", "collection_id": "9807", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:05272016-213755050", "primary_object_url": { "basename": "montero_sergio_2016.pdf", "content": "final", "filesize": 1179579, "license": "other", "mime_type": "application/pdf", "url": "/9807/1/montero_sergio_2016.pdf", "version": "v2.0.0" }, "type": "thesis", "title": "Essays in Econometrics and Political Economy", "author": [ { "family_name": "Montero", "given_name": "Sergio", "clpid": "Montero-Sergio" } ], "thesis_advisor": [ { "family_name": "Shum", "given_name": "Matthew S.", "clpid": "Shum-M-S" }, { "family_name": "Snowberg", "given_name": "Erik", "clpid": "Snowberg-E" } ], "thesis_committee": [ { "family_name": "Shum", "given_name": "Matthew S.", "clpid": "Shum-M-S" }, { "family_name": "Snowberg", "given_name": "Erik", "clpid": "Snowberg-E" }, { "family_name": "Echenique", "given_name": "Federico", "clpid": "Echenique-F" }, { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" } ], "local_group": [ { "literal": "div_hss" } ], "abstract": "This dissertation comprises three essays in Econometrics and Political Economy offering both methodological and substantive contributions to the study of electoral coalitions (Chapter 2), the effectiveness of campaign expenditures (Chapter 3), and the general practice of experimentation (Chapter 4).
\r\n\r\nChapter 2 presents an empirical investigation of coalition formation in elections. Despite its prevalence in most democracies, there is little evidence documenting the impact of electoral coalition formation on election outcomes. To address this imbalance, I develop and estimate a structural model of electoral competition that enables me to conduct counterfactual analyses of election outcomes under alternative coalitional scenarios. The results uncover substantial equilibrium savings in campaign expenditures from coalition formation, as well as significant electoral gains benefitting electorally weaker partners.
\r\n\r\nChapter 3, co-authored with Benjamin J. Gillen, Hyungsik Roger Moon, and Matthew Shum, proposes a novel data-driven approach to the problem of variable selection in econometric models of discrete choice estimated using aggregate data. Our approach applies penalized estimation algorithms imported from the machine learning literature along with confidence intervals that are robust to variable selection. We illustrate our approach with an application that explores the effect of campaign expenditures on candidate vote shares in data from Mexican elections.
\r\n\r\nChapter 4, co-authored with Abhijit Banerjee, Sylvain Chassang, and Erik Snowberg, provides a decision-theoretic framework in which to study the question of optimal experiment design. We model experimenters as ambiguity-averse decision makers who trade off their own subjective expected payoff against that of an adversarial audience. We establish that ambiguity aversion is required for randomized controlled trials to be optimal. We also use this framework to shed light on the important practical questions of rerandomization and resampling.
", "doi": "10.7907/Z9MS3QQZ", "publication_date": "2016", "thesis_type": "phd", "thesis_year": "2016" }, { "id": "thesis:8908", "collection": "thesis", "collection_id": "8908", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:05282015-204221403", "primary_object_url": { "basename": "ThesisChapmanJonathanFinal.pdf", "content": "final", "filesize": 873048, "license": "other", "mime_type": "application/pdf", "url": "/8908/1/ThesisChapmanJonathanFinal.pdf", "version": "v5.0.0" }, "type": "thesis", "title": "Death or Taxes? The Political Economy of Sanitation Expenditure in Nineteenth Century Britain", "author": [ { "family_name": "Chapman", "given_name": "Jonathan Neil", "clpid": "Chapman-Jonathan-Neil" } ], "thesis_advisor": [ { "family_name": "Hoffman", "given_name": "Philip T.", "clpid": "Hoffman-P-T" } ], "thesis_committee": [ { "family_name": "Hoffman", "given_name": "Philip T.", "clpid": "Hoffman-P-T" }, { "family_name": "Snowberg", "given_name": "Erik", "clpid": "Snowberg-E" }, { "family_name": "Rosenthal", "given_name": "Jean-Laurent", "clpid": "Rosenthal-J-L" }, { "family_name": "Hirsch", "given_name": "Alexander V.", "clpid": "Hirsch-A-V" } ], "local_group": [ { "literal": "div_hss" } ], "abstract": "This thesis consists of three papers studying the relationship between democratic reform, expenditure on sanitation public goods and mortality in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period decisions over spending on critical public goods such as water supply and sewer systems were made by locally elected town councils, leading to extensive variation in the level of spending across the country. This dissertation uses new historical data to examine the political factors determining that variation, and the consequences for mortality rates.
\r\n\r\nThe first substantive chapter describes the spread of government sanitation expenditure, and analyzes the factors that determined towns' willingness to invest. The results show the importance of towns' financial constraints, both in terms of the available tax base and access to borrowing, in limiting the level of expenditure. This suggests that greater involvement by Westminster could have been very effective in expediting sanitary investment. There is little evidence, however, that democratic reform was an important driver of greater expenditure.
\r\n\r\nChapter 3 analyzes the effect of extending voting rights to the poor on government public goods spending. A simple model predicts that the rich and the poor will desire lower levels of public goods expenditure than the middle class, and so extensions of the right to vote to the poor will be associated with lower spending. This prediction is tested using plausibly exogenous variation in the extent of the franchise. The results strongly support the theoretical prediction: expenditure increased following relatively small extensions of the franchise, but fell once more than approximately 50% of the adult male population held the right to vote.
\r\n\r\nChapter 4 tests whether the sanitary expenditure was effective in combating the high mortality rates following the Industrial Revolution. The results show that increases in urban expenditure on sanitation-water supply, sewer systems and streets-was extremely effective in reducing mortality from cholera and diarrhea.
\r\n", "doi": "10.7907/Z93T9F5F ", "publication_date": "2015", "thesis_type": "phd", "thesis_year": "2015" } ]