The United States spends 16% of its GDP on Healthcare, but it still has the most, inefficient, and fragmented system of care in the world. This project strives to assess the current health care system’s shortcomings, and at the same time, show the effectiveness of the health care reform, which is the original version of Obama’s Affordable Care Act that Massachusetts (MA) enacted in 2006. By addressing the government’s core regulation, the “three legged stools” of reform in MA respectively, the three policies and their effectiveness will also be analyzed at both the state level and comparing the state and the nation as a whole, since the system of ACA resembles MA’s reform closely. By comparing various properties of MA to the U.S. as a whole, such as comparing population’s income distribution, proportion of people with different levels of education background, health care expenditure from various income individual or families, poverty rate, etc., we can see whether the national application of health care reform will be successful as it is in Massachusetts. The result is that the prediction of expanding the MA health care reform national wide may not lead to as impressive changes as MA’s due to vastly different variables. Also since it is now mandatory for people to be covered by health insurance, the government may put itself into a position of long-term deficit by paying premiums for the “poor”, which will end up with higher budget deficit. Though “three legged stools” effectively implemented at the state’s level, it conceals more potential risk and obstacles in the States with a much larger scale, and may end up with less effective result with much more diverse populations.

This paper exanimates how the contribution of education to individual’s earning changes under economic recession. Previous economists have established the Employer Learning Model, which demonstrates that the relation between education and earning is strong at the start of one’s career but weakened through time. This paper compares this relation between education and earning during recession and non-recession periods. The study is based on the cross-sectional data from National Longitudinal Surveys that include comprehensive information about individuals’ working and educational experience. The study applies a difference in means test that builds upon a regression of individual’s education, ability (estimated by AFQT score) and years of working experience on earning. By comparing the difference in causal effects between recession and non-recession periods, this paper shows that under recession the impact of education on earning is weaker at the beginning of one’s career and diminishes faster through time. The result suggests that in economic downturn, the signal factors such as years of schooling, race and gender have less impact on individuals’ earnings. Individual’s true ability is revealed faster too. One of explanations of this result that the paper discussed is that under recession, firms have more incentives to observe employee’s productivity actively and efficiently both before and after hiring. Other inferences of the result are also included in the paper.

Over 25,000 undergraduates at the University of Washington register for courses each quarter using an online system. This project attempts to improve the university’s registration mechanism through theoretical and empirical analysis. Registering for college courses is an instance of the multiunit assignment problem, where heterogeneous agents are assigned combinations of different goods, in this case seats in courses. In addition to college course allocation, multiunit assignment has applications in industries ranging from aerospace (airstrip scheduling) to human resources (job shifts). Standard criteria for evaluating assignment mechanisms are efficiency, or whether there are any changes that can be made to students' allocations which leave some people better off and nobody worse off; strategyproofness, or whether students can get a better result if they lie about their preferences; and fairness, or how evenly the mechanism distributes the courses. We use simulations and theoretical analysis to evaluate the UW mechanism’s performance based on these criteria. We compare it to several prominent multiunit assignment mechanisms and provide recommendations regarding potential improvements to the university’s registration system.

Most discussions on the effect of in-migration on the local labor market have focused on causation flowing from migration to wages. The “textbook model” assumes a labor supply increase without a movement in the demand for labor, and holds that in-migration will cause the labor market to clear at a lower wage level. This conventional model makes the unlikely assumption that migration does not also expand local labor demand. We identify four channels through which migration will increase the demand for local labor: residential and non-residential construction and private and public demand for non-traded goods and services. In the moderate run, construction will move the labor demand curve more than any other factor. The elasticity of response of construction to changes in population differs across metropolitan areas. In the long run, construction will be completed; at all runs, both the private sector and public sector will expand purchases of non-traded goods and services to meet the needs of an expanded population. We then explore the factors that affect the magnitude of the response of labor demand through each of these channels, with particular emphasis on building supply elasticity as a key variable that characterizes different responses across different regions. We produce empirical estimates of the magnitude of induced labor demand through each of these channels, with the goal of measuring the effect of in-migration on labor demand. In some regions, preliminary estimates indicate that in the moderate run multipliers will produce an increase in labor demand greater than the increase in labor supply – a potentially destabilizing force for boom and bust.

The abolition of capital and exchange controls in the UK in 1979 and the series of reforms and deregulations at the London Stock Exchange in October 1986, collectively termed the ‘Big Bang’, played vital roles in the revitalization of London as an international financial center. Beginning in the 1970’s with the revitalization of international finance, there were several key regulatory changes that impacted the relative competitive positioning of major stock exchanges. The first was the abolition of the historical cartel agreements for fixed trading commissions in the US in 1975. With the abolition of capital and exchange controls in the UK, competition from New York forced the unfixing of trading commissions, the allowance of dual capacity trading operations in financial institutions, the opening of the London Stock Exchange to foreign investors, and the implementation of new trading technologies. In this study, I will evaluate the impact that these deregulations had on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and other major equity markets in terms of changes in trading volume. Using historic trading records of major cross-listed companies, I will conduct an event study to infer whether major shifts in trading volume between exchanges occurred as a result of these deregulations. I will also estimate the price elasticity of demand among the stock exchanges using data on commissions in different markets. I anticipate that a shift away from the LSE after 1979 to the lesser-regulated NYSE was due largely to the lifting of exchange controls in the UK. Similarly, I predict that the large-scale deregulations that came with the Big Bang will show to have caused the LSE to reclaim much of this lost trading volume and to grab order flow from neighboring European exchanges.

In the United States, the average woman intends to have 2.5 children, yet the US total fertility rate is just 1.89. Demographers and economists worry that below-replacement level fertility rates will impede economic growth and render the US incapable of supporting its aging population. To combat this problem, some governments in developed countries have implemented pronatalist policies to encourage women to have more children. This research seeks to discern whether such approaches are sound by analyzing the effect of the availability of more social services, especially childcare and health care, on a woman’s intention to have children. My data set consists of the 2008/2009 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one of the most comprehensive surveys in labor and family economics. My model consists of a multivariate linear regression with fertility as the dependent variable, and the availability and cost of social services, such as healthcare, childcare, and schooling, as well as demographic variables like age, ethnicity, and religion, as independent variables. I aim to show the impact of policy incentives on fertility at the individual level, and to discern what demographic factors make women more or less likely to have children. Furthermore, by using a recent data set, I hope to make timely and relevant conclusions and predictions about the childbearing intentions of young women in the United States that can inform current policy debates.

The Federal Reserve wields enormous financial power through both policy and press. It is commonly understood in economics that the rational expectation of - and ensuing reaction to - an expected market phenomenon can be as impactful as the actual occurrence of the phenomenon itself. When the Federal Reserve helped form market-wide expectations of a “tapering” of their $85 billion per month quantitative easing program in September 2013 and then did not follow through, the overarching criticism from analysts was that the Federal Reserve “lost credibility” as a result of its apparent reneging. My goal is to quantify and measure the effect of such a change in credibility, should it exist, as its economic implications are immense in both theoretical and practical application. I aim to measure this change in credibility through changes in market volatility and inflationary expectations following a particular FOMC minutes release where the policy was considered to be "unexpected" as compared to historical time series data available. I expect recent data of unexpected decisions to show a trend of less "lost credibility" than previous data due to the differing and lesser known nature of the policy being exerted (quantitative easing as opposed to traditional monetary policy before the recession) and the inherent assumption of the temporariness of quantitative easing as recessionary policy. Should this prove to be the case, one could argue that quantitative easing has additional effectiveness as recessionary economic policy due to the Fed's ability to boost the economy with lesser inflationary horizons through expectation management as compared to the longer lasting inflationary horizons present in traditional monetary policy.