The three chapters of this dissertation use tools of applied microeconomics to study topics related to education and regulation. The first chapter, "Where Doctors Work," studies how openings and closures of medical schools in the United States have affected the geographical distribution of doctors. The principal contribution is the…

This dissertation focuses on microeconomic topics in the fields of public, labor and education. Particularly, this dissertation evaluates state policies in higher education and develops a global measure for job quality. Chapter 1 studies how state merit aid programs affect undergraduate degrees earned in Science, Technology, Engineering and…

Since information theory was developed by Claude E. Shannon, in addition to its primary role in communications and networking, it has broadened to find applications in many other areas of science and technology, such as microeconomics, statistics, and neuroscience. This thesis investigates the application of information theoretic viewpoints to two…

Education today is inseparable from the accumulation of human capital. "The New York Times" called human capital the most important asset in our portfolio. In my dissertation, I analyze the effectiveness of different educational policies and programs in Mexico and the United States. In the first chapter of my dissertation I study the…

I study three separate questions in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I develop and estimate a structural dynamic model of occupation and job choice to test hypotheses of the importance of wages and non-wages and learning in occupational transitions, and find that wages are approximately 3 times as important as non-wage benefits in decisions and…

This study examines the level of a student's performance based on incoming knowledge in an intermediate macroeconomic and microeconomic course at a major mid-western university. Analysis of student understanding of specific economic concepts was accessed through the Test of Understanding College Economics, 4th Edition (TUCE) (Walstad,Watts &…

In the first chapter, I measure the impact of student loan debt on young, college-educated workers' decisions regarding labor supply and enrollment in graduate school. I exploit variation in student loan debt driven by the formulas that determine Federal Student Aid in order to identify these effects. Instrumental variable estimates indicate…

Each chapter of this dissertation studies a different question within the field of Applied Microeconomics. The first chapter examines the mid- and long-term effects of the 1998 Asian Crisis on the educational attainment of Indonesian children ages 6 to 18, at the time of the crisis. The effects are identified as deviations from a linear trend for…

In this dissertation, I study economics textbook markets as an example of durable goods monopoly. Textbooks are protected by copyrights, and from a student's point of view, different textbooks are not good substitutes because students wish to use the textbook adopted by their instructors. Therefore sellers have market power. Textbooks can be…

Web-conferencing software was chosen for course delivery to provide flexible options for students at a two-year technical college. Students used technology to access a live, synchronous microeconomics course over the internet instead of a traditional face-to-face lecture. This investigation studied the impact of implementing web-conferencing…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of process-oriented and product-oriented worked example strategies and the mediating effect of prior knowledge (high versus low) on problem solving and learner attitude in the domain of microeconomics. In addition, the effect of these variables on learning efficiency as well as the…

Economics education has been a topic of research interest to many economists. In addition, the philosophical and ethical content of economics and its role in economics education has been an issue of discussion. Chapter 1 of my dissertation addresses what topics should be ignored in a principles of microeconomics class, what the goal of the…

My dissertation research concentrates on the causes, motivations, and results of electricity restructuring, and research on the effectiveness of economic teaching and retention. The first chapter looks at motivations for electricity restructuring in the United States in terms of the Interest Group and Public Interest setting. The second chapter…

Scope and Method of Study: This study develops, implements, and evaluates a new economics teaching pedagogy based on the U.S. Army's systems approach to training model. Using the approach, tasks are identified that compose the task domain for the Principles of Microeconomics course. From the 130 identified tasks, 73 are used by Economics of…