Essays in Applied Microeconomics

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three chapters that use applied microeconomic methods to investigate the impact of public policies. In Chapter 1, I study the relationship between food insecurity among U.S. households and state sales taxes on food. Households that experience food insecurity are either unable or uncertain that they can acquire enough food to meet their nutritional needs. On average an estimated 10.5 percent (13.7 million) of U.S. households were food-insecure at least some time during the year 2019. Food insecurity is also larger for more vulnerable groups, such as low-income households, and minorities. Few studies explore how grocery food sales taxes affect food insecurity prevalence in the US. This study contributes to the literature by drawing upon newly constructed data from various sources on changes in state food sales taxes policies over time, and implementing a difference-in-differences and fixed-effects ordered logit models to estimate impact of food tax changes on self-reported food insecurity. I find that decreases in the food sales tax decreases the likelihood of being a food insecure household by 4.93 percentage points and increasing the food sales tax increases the likelihood of being a food insecure household by 9.77 percentage points. Decreasing food sales taxes contributes to an improvement in a household’s food security levels. Conversely, food sales tax increases result in a decrease in self-reported food security.In Chapter 2, I study housing displacement and evictions in the context of third-party policing nuisance property ordinances. Third-party policing laws are policies in which police attempt to persuade or force third parties, such as landlords, to take some level of responsibility in preventing criminal activities. The most prevalent of which are nuisance property ordinances. These require landlords to regulate tenant behavior to eliminate behaviors which are classified as a “nuisance” generally through enacting some form of an abatement program. The adverse effects of such laws have yet to be examined from an economic perspective. This study examines how these laws may affect the levels of both legal and extralegal evictions in cities and counties in which they are used. Using data from a variety of sources a difference-and-difference model is used to discover the impact of these nuisance ordinances. A selection of large US cities which have initiated the use of these ordinances will be examined within the time frame available with the data. It is the aim of this study to discover what effect if any these laws have on individuals housing displacement. It finds that legal evictions decrease sometime within two years following the treatment of the nuisance ordinances, and that renter tenure exhibits a positive spike in the levels of tenants who had recently moved into their current rental residences within that period. This supports the hypothesis of some kind of extra-legal displacement of renters following the enactment of these laws.In Chapter 3, I review the EPA’s Priority Program using data from chemical manufacturing to examine the impact of the program on regulatory compliance of discharge limits. The EPA’s Priority Program increased monitoring, enforcement actions, and incentive programs for certain industrial manufacturing sectors in an attempt to abate water pollution. Using difference-in-differences, and synthetic control methods the study addresses three questions: First did facilities included in the significant sector perform better relative to no status? Second did facilities included in the priority sector perform even better than the significant sector? Finally did facilities continue to perform better after the Priority Program ended? I find that inclusion as a significant sector was effective at reducing discharges and improving compliance, whereas inclusion as a priority sector did not significantly improve compliance. Once the Priority program ended there were no statistically significant effects on compliance