Essays in Social Economics.

The central idea in social economics is that an individual's actions are influenced by the choices and characteristics of peers. This occurs because group (network) membership provides information and shapes beliefs (norms). For both researchers and policymakers, the interest in social economics stems from its ability to explain a range of phenomena including the persistence of urban poverty and the spatial distribution of crime. This dissertation contributes to the literature by providing new empirical evidence on the effects of social interactions. Specifically, the first two chapters examine the impact of neighborhood peers on children by studying housing policy reforms in Chicago using novel administrative data. The third chapter (joint with Lasse Brune and Jason Kerwin) studies how coworkers affect workplace productivity using data from a field experiment.PhDEconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133263/1/ericchyn_1.pd

Fuzzy Portfolio Model with Application to Business Cycles Analysis

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Family, learning environments, learning approaches, and student outcomes in a Malaysian private university

This paper presents the quantitative findings from a mixed methods study of students and faculty at a private medical university in Malaysia. In particular, the relationships among students’ individual characteristics, general self-efficacy, family context, university and classroom learning environments, curriculum, approaches to learning, and measures of students’ academic achievement, self-directed learning readiness and mental health at the student level. Data were collected from 392 students attending a private medical university in Malaysia. The findings from the partial least square path (PLSPATH) suggest that: (a) parental involvement continues to impact and influence student learning process, and related student outcomes, at the university level, and (b) a surface approach to learning is related to poor quality processes and outcomes and a deep approach to learning is related to high quality processes and outcomes

Green Performance Assessment for Retail Industry in Taiwan

[[abstract]]The retail industry in Taiwan plays an important role in people's lives and influences consumers' purchasing behavior. Due to global warming and the depletion of energy and other resources, most retailers are required to obey the green policy of reuse, recycling, and reduction in their operational process, service, and products. Therefore, we first evaluated the environmental performance of retailers using selected green criteria. Then, we assessed the performance of sustainable environmental practices among ten selected retailers using grey relation analysis and the entropy method to derive objective weights for the selected criteria. Next, for continuous improvement of retailers' green performance, we extracted and summarized a self-assessment checklist selected from the questionnaire. Retailers can use the checklist for guidelines for continuous improvement.[[notice]]補正完

Fees, Framing, and Financial Literacy in the Choice of Pension Manager

A growing literature shows how consumers make mistakes in a variety of different settings pertinent to financial decision-making. Using data from a randomized experiment in Chile, we show how different ways of presenting pension management fees shape consumer choices, and how responses to pension fee information varies by level of financial literacy. Our results indicate that, in choosing pension funds, those with lower levels of education, income, and financial literacy rely more on employers, friends, and coworkers, than on fundamentals. We also find that such individuals are more responsive to information framing when interpreting the relative benefits of different investment choices

The Great Migration and Educational Opportunity

This paper studies the impact of the First Great Migration on children. We use the complete-count 1940 Census to estimate selection-corrected place effects on education for children of Black migrants. On average, Black children gained 0.8 years of schooling (12 percent) by moving from the South to the North. Many counties that had the strongest positive impacts on children during the 1940s offer relatively poor opportunities for Black youth today. Opportunities for Black children were greater in places with more schooling investment, stronger labor market opportunities for Black adults, more social capital, and less crime

Extralinguistics in Malay language mastery by international students at a private institution of higher learning

This study examined the relationship between learning strategies and extralinguistic factors in Malay language mastery by international students at a private institution of higher learning in Malaysia and also evaluated the effectiveness of the learning strategies applied in the learning of the Malay language. The study sample was international students who had followed the National Language (B) for 14 weeks. A total of 114 paper-based questionnaires were analyzed quantitatively. Microsoft Excel 2007 was used to process the raw data and SPSS version 18 was used for the quantitative analysis. Based on the Language Learning Strategies Model (Mohamed Amin Embi, 2000) and the Socio-psychological Theory (Gardner, 1985), the 59 strategies listed in the questionnaires were divided into two categories: learning in formal and informal situations. The Malay language learning strategies were identified through the calculation of percentage, frequency and the mean value (average) of the Likert scale. This study is considered necessary due to the reason that the influencing or motivating factors for foreign speakers in learning the Malay language differ significantly compared to the locals. This is because not all the language skills are needed by foreign students. Hence, efforts to develop effective study methods are limited due to the lack of comprehensive studies that focus on the learning of the Malay language as a foreign language, especially for international students studying at private institutions of higher learning. According to the findings, the strategy most preferred and practiced formally is 'students give full attention when the teacher is teaching'. Contrastingly, for informal strategies, ‘students will try to repeat aloud the vocabulary so that it is easy to remember' is the most preferred strategy. Overall, the foreign speakers seemed passive in learning the Malay language and depended very much on the extralinguistic factors, namely the encouragement of the lecturers who act as motivators. Lecturers play an important role in guiding them so that they apply the appropriate and effective strategies to improve their Malay language mastery process, not only to meet the academic requirements but also to carry out daily social activities in Malaysia

The causal impact of removing children from abusive and neglectful homes

Este documento analiza cómo impacta en el desempeño escolar la reubicación de niños en servicios de cuidado tutelar, tras investigaciones familiares por maltrato infantil. Para estimar el efecto causal de la reubicación, se construye una variable instrumental. Dicha variable es la propensión a reubicar a otros niños de cada investigador de servicios de protección infantil. La muestra analizada se concentra en los niños involucrados en investigaciones antes de que cumplan seis años, y del análisis se desprende que reubicar a las niñas ocasiona un aumento significativo de sus notas escolares y reduce su probabilidad de repetir un grado. Por el contrario, no hay efectos significativos en los niños. Las diferencias de género en los resultados no se explican por la heterogeneidad en las características de los niños antes de ser reubicados, el tipo de establecimiento en el que son albergados, o las características de sus escuelas. Los resultados respaldan la hipótesis de que las niñas responden de manera más receptiva a ser reubicadas que los niños.This paper measures impacts of removing children from families investigated for abuse or neglect. We use removal tendencies of child protection investigators as an instrument. We focus on young children investigated before age six and find that removal significantly increases test scores and reduces grade repetition for girls. There are no detectable impacts for boys. This pattern of results does not appear to be driven by heterogeneity in pre-removal characteristics, foster placements, or the type of schools attended after removal. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that development of abused and neglected girls is more responsive to home removal