Essays in Empirical Microeconomics

Abstract

This collection of essays performs causal inference to questions of employment, health, and education using empirical strategies developed in modern empirical economics.

Chapter 1 studies why the incidence of long-term employment relationships has been declining in the U.S. labor market. This chapter asserts that an employment protection, which is likely to be more favorable to workers who have spent longer period of time with their employers, can incentivize employers to refrain from employing such workers in order to avoid the regulation and hence can be a reason for the decline in long-term employment relationships. Using cross-state and over-time variation in the timing of the law adoption, this chapter finds that the employment protection accounts for about 40 percent of the observed decline in long-term employment relationships.

Chapter 2 empirically tests whether religious participation can improve health conditions, which has been widely discussed in various fields of social science. Using repeals of regulations on secular activities on Sundays by state governments as an exogenous source of variation in religious participation, the chapter concludes that strong correlations between religious participation and health outcomes reported in previous studies are likely to have been driven by selectivity bias rather than reflecting a causal relationship.

Chapter 3, which is collaborated with Changhui Kang, examines a causal effect of receiving private tutoring on academic performance of students. This chapter finds that the mean effect of private tutoring on test scores is at most modest, while the distributional effects are positive for students whose test scores are located at upper percentiles of test score distribution but statistically insignificant from zero for those at lower percentiles of the distribution. These results suggest that private tutoring is not an effective remedial educational measure for students left behind, although it seems to have a modest effect of facilitating learning processes of students in good standing.