Three Essays of Applied Microeconometrics in Human and Natural Resources
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Saeliw, Kannika
Abstract
This dissertation is a collection of three independent empirical essays in economic resources using data from Taiwan and Thailand. The first chapter contributes to the field of human resources. As an increasing trend in cross-border marriages has been a unique social phenomenon in East Asia countries, this study contributes to this research topic by examining the differences in academic performance of the elementary school children between Taiwanese and foreign spouses family. Using a unique dataset of the school children drawn from one specific public elementary school with a high proportion of children from foreign spouse families in Taiwan, we investigated the differences in students’ academic performance in language, mathematics, and social studies from these two types of families. Results indicated that school children of the foreign spouse families had lower academic performance, and this finding was more pronounced for language class. In addition, the differences in maternal education between the foreign spouses and Taiwanese families accounted for a significant proportion of the overall gap in students'' academic performances between the two groups. The next two chapters contribute to the field of natural resources. The second chapter provides a possible explanation of why different product prices can exist in an industry consisting of many small firms with perfectly identical products. we underscore the importance of the spatial competition on price determination using a survey data of bottled Liquefied Petroleum Gas firms in Taiwan. A spatial lag model was estimated to empirically test whether spatial differentiation results in strategic interdependence in price determination among many small wholesalers after controlling for firm characteristics, cost and demand conditions. We found evidence of pricing power from spatial differentiation in local wholesale markets even though the industry is highly competitive. Results showed a positive spatial interaction of firms'' competition behaviors. Specification test showed that firms were more likely to engage in strategic interaction in pricing with nearby firms, especially with its four-closest rivals. Moreover, the variations in wholesale prices were driven by market conditions and spatial competition in local market rather than firms'' marginal costs. The third chapter provides an empirical evidence of efficiencies of waterworks in Thailand and discusses the spatial heterogeneity of the effects of the determinants of technical efficiency of waterworks. We used a unique dataset of 211 waterworks operating in Thailand from 2007-2011 to analyze factors contributing to inefficiency in Thai waterworks and then test whether the effect of these factors significantly vary across locations. Our findings indicated that all waterworks were not technically efficient and there is dispersion in efficiency levels across waterworks. We found that user density, capacity usage rate, and size had positive impact on the level of technical efficiency. The parameter estimates varied significantly across the study region and revealed some pattern. In particular, these effects were stronger in the northern area and some areas of north-eastern than in the southern area.
Subjects
Foreign spouse
Academic performance
Spatial lag model
Bottled liquefied petroleum gas
Spatial competition
waterworks
technical efficiency
Stochastic frontier model
Geographically weighted regression
Thailand
Taiwan
Type
thesis
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