Mountain Scholar :: Browsing by Author "Zahran, Sammy, advisor"

Browsing by Author "Zahran, Sammy, advisor"

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Open Access
A county-level analysis of residential solar adoption in the United States
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2012) Kerschen, Matthew, author; Kling, Robert, advisor; Zahran, Sammy, advisor; Bond, Craig, committee member
This thesis set out to achieve two major objectives, with a third objective added at the end. The first was the update and analysis of the zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) model used by Zahran et al. (2008) in regards to its validity and robustness as a predictor of the count of solar using households in a county. The second objective was to use the model to provide an empirical measure of the effect financial and regulatory incentives have on the count of solar using households. The final objective was to explore and explain an unexpected decrease in the count of solar using households. This was done by using a ZINB regression to model the number of occupied housing units that use solar heating at the county level over the period from 2000 to 2009. In addition to analyzing the effects of the explanatory variables, geographic information systems (GIS) modeling was used to provide geographic mapping of the distribution of occupied housing units that use solar heating. The results indicate that Zahran et al.'s (2008) model is a robust and accurate predictor of the count of solar using households. Financial incentives were found to have an insignificant impact on the count of solar-using households, while regulatory incentives decreased the odds of a zero count in a county, but also decreased the expected count. A correlation was found between densely populated counties and the decrease in the count of solar using households.
Open Access
A STIRPAT model of sectoral CO2 emissions at the county scale
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Sztukowski, John, author; Zahran, Sammy, advisor; Peek, Lori, committee member; Betsill, Michele, committee member
Background: The scientific community agrees that the principal cause of increased surface temperature globally is the accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere, with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel combustion being most important among GHGs. Objectives: To analyze the spatial correspondences between CO2 emissions and anthropogenic variables of population, affluence, and technology in the United States. Methods: Ordinary least squares regression and spatial analytical techniques are used to analyze variation in CO2 emissions based on a modified version of the STIRPAT model. The unit of analysis is the county, with 3108 counties in the contiguous United States analyzed. The CO2 emissions of multiple sectors are analyzed as a function of total county population, income per capita, and climatic variation. Results: Population has a proportional relationship, the strongest association, with CO2 emissions. Affluence has a positive relationship with CO2 emissions with an attainable Environmental Kuznets Curve for the residential sector and total CO2 emissions. Climate, including average winter and summer season temperature, has a positive relationship with total CO2 emissions, although it has a negative relationship with the residential and commercial sectors of CO2 emissions. Technology acts as the residual in the model, accounting for net-positive and net-negative technology. Conclusion: Population growth, and to a smaller extent economic growth, are the driving forces of CO2 at the local level. These findings are consistent with global STIRPAT models. An increase in winter or summer temperature further exacerbates CO2 emissions. Understanding the relationships between these anthropogenic variables and environmental impacts at the local scale is a crucial step in the process of formulating mitigation strategies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions in the US.
Open Access
Essays in the economics of care
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Altringer, Levi A., author; Braunstein, Elissa, advisor; Zahran, Sammy, advisor; Mushinski, David, committee member; Hempel, Lynn, committee member
The Build Back Better legislation (H.R. 5376) currently being debated in Congress represents the first major attempt to build a care infrastructure that heavily invests in children and families, recognizing the value of care and care workers. The legislation (1) promotes recruitment, education, training, retention, and career advancements of direct care workers by providing competitive wages, benefits, and other support services to the direct care workforce; (2) establishes an entitlement program to provide qualifying families the opportunity to obtain high-quality child care; (3) allows states, almost entirely federally funded for the first three years, to provide universal preschool to 3- and 4-year-olds; (4) establishes universal paid family leave; (5) provides infrastructure grants to improve child care safety; (6) supplies child care wage grants for small businesses; (7) provides child care allowances as part of trade adjustment programs for workers; (8) makes permanent the expansion of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit provided by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021; and (9) establishes payroll tax credit for child care workers and tax credits for caregiver expenses. In their own way, each chapter of this dissertation speaks to policies outlined in this legislation. In Chapter 1, titled The Role of Care Policy in Procyclical Child Mortality, I investigate the impact of the business cycle on child mortality. I conceptualize care as being supplied by three sectors---household, private, and public---and argue that public investment and provision insulates children from cyclical fluctuations in the quantity and quality of care provided. I then hypothesize that, in so far as the care mechanism mediates procyclical child mortality, children who are most likely to be the beneficiaries of generous care policy will be less exposed to the mortality risks of economic boom. Employing a sample of 21 OECD countries over the period 1960-2015, I show that procyclical mortality is null for children 5 to 9 years of age. This is the age group for which all OECD countries in my sample have universal, publicly provided care---i.e., primary education. Among children 0 to 4 years old, however, economic expansions are associated with increased risk of mortality. I then show that procyclical mortality among the 0- to 4-year-old age group is attenuated, and even disappears, in increasingly generous care policy environments. In Chapter 2, titled The Contemporaneous Mortality Benefits of the Head Start Program, I investigate the impact of Head Start on population-level child mortality. Though widely perceived as a schooling program focused on cognitive development, I argue that the "whole child" services provided by Head Start act as a de facto investment into the health and safety of poor children. The Head Start Expansion and Quality Improvement Act of 1990 led to considerable variation in program funding across localities. Further, program age requirements meant that increases in funding were largely directed toward the enrollment of 3- and 4-year-old children. Employing a sample of 50 large labor market areas over the period 1983 to 2007, I estimate log-log and log-linear fixed-effect mortality regressions and find that, relative to 1- to 2-year-olds, increases in Head Start funding are associated with reductions in 3- and 4-year-old mortality, all else equal. Then, utilizing that fact that children must also be poverty-eligible for Head Start, I show that the potential mortality benefits of Head Start are pronounced in relatively poor and disproportionately Black communities, as expected. In Chapter 3, titled Revisiting the Wages of Virtue and the Relative Pay of Care Work, I extend and update previous research by investigating the relative pay of care work in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Research in feminist and labor economics provide several theoretical rationale as to why workers in care occupations might receive lower wages. I employ three separate measures of care work and show the continued existence of wage penalties among nurturant care occupations, while there appears to be no wage penalty for workers in reproductive care occupations, all else equal. Testing for heterogeneous care penalties across the occupational skill distribution, I find that the wage penalty for nurturant care work increases in relatively high-skill occupations among men. Alternatively, the wage penalty for nurturant care work is null, if not a slight wage premium, in relatively high-skill occupations among women. I explore potential explanations for the inconsistent behavior of these estimated care penalties across gender, such as occupational crowding and selection via occupational segregation, or sorting. The findings of this chapter have important implications for care penalty literature and motivate potential avenues of future research.
Open Access
Essays on entrepreneurship and social capital in the wake of a catastrophic disaster
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Levitt, Ryan J., author; Zahran, Sammy, advisor; Iverson, Terry, advisor; Weiler, Stephan, committee member; Manning, Dale, committee member
Research on the economics of disasters has seen a surge in interest in recent years following a series of high-profile events, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, and the 2010 Haitian Earthquake (Cavallo et al., 2011). In the United States, recent hurricanes such as Harvey, Irma, and Maria have continued to draw attention to the economic consequences associated with catastrophic natural disasters. Both global climate change and the shifting of people and economic activity towards coastal areas increase the likelihood of major climatic disasters occurring in the future (Nordhaus, 2010). This dissertation utilizes Hurricane Katrina as a case study to investigate the various ways in which disasters impact a community, and the factors that both attenuate and exacerbate these impacts. The first chapter describes a framework for identifying the effects of a disaster. Using the synthetic control method, originally proposed by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and Abadie et al. (2010), the chapter identifies the long-term population effects of Hurricane Katrina across the eight most damaged counties. Results highlight significant variation in terms of the magnitude of out-migration across these areas. Cross-county differences in population outcomes are largely the consequence of the severity of housing damage. Pre-existing county characteristics, such as the percent of the population with hazard insurance, were only weakly correlated with population outcomes. Results suggest a near unit-elastic relationship between the severity of housing damage and out-migration. Notable outliers include Jefferson and St. Tammany Parish, who experienced disproportionate out-migration due to the disaster. The paper argues that this is likely due to the significant amount of commuters that work in Orleans but reside in these two counties. The decision to return and rebuild one's home is dependent on whether one's neighbors plan to rebuild, if and when the government restores utilities and infrastructure, and whether surrounding businesses return. Because of the interdependent nature of these decisions, the process of disaster recovery is often characterized as a collective action problem, in which the degree of necessary coordination increases with the extent of out-migration. The second chapter seeks to test the hypothesis advanced by Storr et al. (2016) that entrepreneurs are important first movers in post-disaster environments. The chapter expands on the framework described in chapter one and applies the synthetic control method to all counties that experienced housing damages from Hurricane Katrina and/or Rita. Using these estimated effects as a dependent variable, the chapter explores the role of entrepreneurship in disaster recovery. Results indicate positive correlations between new firm formation and disaster recovery, both with respect to initial impacts, as well as throughout the recovery period. The final chapter investigates the impacts of Hurricane Katrina on social capital in the New Orleans Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Previous research has found that disasters often generate "therapeutic communities," in which altruism, trust, and charity increase following an event. However, the only empirical study to examine the impacts of Hurricane Katrina on social capital finds the opposite effect, in which the concentration of community-based organizations decreased after the disaster. Building on this work, I use the synthetic control method to identify the impacts of Hurricane Katrina on a social capital index, constructed using the concentration of community-based establishments and nonprofit organizations in the New Orleans MSA. The chapter finds that this index increased significantly after Hurricane Katrina, by approximately half a standard deviation relative to the level implied by the synthetic control. Additionally, the paper shows that this increase persists through the entire sample period, even as population levels recover in the area. Decomposing the index by its various components shows that this increase was fairly uniform across included establishment sectors and nonprofit organizations.
Open Access
Health and human capital effects of lead exposure
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Keyes, Christopher James, author; Zahran, Sammy, advisor; Mushinski, David, committee member; Cutler, Harvey, committee member; Manning, Dale, committee member
The legacy of lead in the United States is complex and intertwined with public health. As concerns over the toxicity of lead increased with time, policy makers responded with a series of national policies aimed at minimizing the risk of lead exposure across society. One such policy, the Clean Air Act (CAA), set a timeline for the removal of lead from gasoline beginning in 1975. This policy would target the anti-knock lead additive tetraethyl-lead (TEL), which was used to boost gasoline octane and improve engine performance (Needleman, 2000; Reyes, 2007). Over the following two decades, the flow of lead entering the environment from automobile emissions decreased precipitously. This dissertation exploits a natural experiment in lead exposure arising from the differential phase-out of leaded gasoline across states under the CAA. Though the policy was implemented at the national level, enforcement took place at the producer level, creating exogenous variation in lead emissions from automobile exhaust across states and over time. Since lead dust from automobile emissions was a significant source of lead exposure over the period, we leverage this spatial and temporal variation as a quasi-random vector of lead exposure. Chapter one summarizes the CAA, and the historical significance of the policy as it relates to public health. Using blood lead levels (BLLs) from The Second National Health Nutrition and Exercise Survey (NHANESII) as a bio-marker for lead exposure, this paper models the lead exposure effect of the policy. Combining annual gasoline sales and gasoline lead concentrations at the state level, the steps taken to construct the variables proxying for lead exposure following the CAA are detailed at length. The empirical strategy applied in this chapter is used to identify the causal effect of the phase out on lead exposure, and is carried over in the following two chapters. Much of the research focusing on the effects of lead exposure emphasize the risk faced by children, who are particularly susceptible to even minute quantities in the first five years of life. Chapter two tests the hypothesis that lead exposure in childhood impacts cognitive ability and the presence of abnormal latent preferences toward risk and uncertainty in adulthood. Applying the identification strategy detailed in Chapter one, to a nationally representative sample of individuals born during a period of significant reductions in leaded gasoline emissions, we find considerable evidence supporting the causal effect of childhood lead exposure and later in life outcomes. Across a series of tests, we find that BLLs in childhood are a significant predictor of: 1) IQ loss, measured with standardized test scores; 2) increased likelihood of low-IQ outcomes in exposure levels; and 3) increased abnormal risk response across a series of situations involving uncertain outcomes. The results presented in this paper illustrate the significance and persistent affect of early in life lead exposure. An underappreciated medium of child exposure to flow and legacy sources of lead is in-utero transmission of lead from mother to infant. Transmission of lead to the fetus occurs via diffusion across the placental barrier over the course of a pregnancy. Chapter three estimates the causal effect of maternal lead exposure on birth outcomes during the initial period of the phase out. Results show consistent evidence that fetal exposure to lead through the maternal blood lead pathway significantly depresses infant health. Our findings suggest that an increase in maternal blood lead: 1) decreases infant birthweight; 2) increases the risk of low and very low birthweight; 3) shortens gestation length; 4) increases the risk of prematurity; and 5) increases the risk of a low APGAR score. A back of the envelope calculation of the economic benefits of the phase-out of leaded gasoline through the reduction of healthcare-related costs involved in treating low birthweight infants, are in the tens of billions annually. It might be tempting to assume that lead exposure is a rear-view problem, at least in the United States, as BLLs in children have fallen since the 1990s, coincident with a series of actions that banned lead from paint, plumbing, food cans and automotive gasoline. However, the flow of lead into the environment continues from various point source polluters as well emissions from aviation gasoline used by an estimated 160,000 piston-engine aircraft (Kessler, 2013). Though the benefits to public health attributable to national policies are immense, the stock of legacy lead and present day flow sources of environmental lead remain a persistent threat to public health.
Open Access
Household carbon dioxide emissions in the United States: the role of demographic change
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Underwood, Anthony J., author; Kling, Robert, advisor; Zahran, Sammy, advisor; Iverson, Terrence, committee member; Costanigro, Marco, committee member
This dissertation is comprised of five chapters discussing the importance of the measurement of household carbon dioxide emissions and the demographic determinants of those emissions in developing an understanding of anthropogenic climate change and the potential for future carbon dioxide emissions mitigation strategies. Chapter 1 discusses the scientific consensus regarding the impact of human activities in generating global warming and the effects of this warming on the earth's climate. In Chapter 2, I first discuss the Consumer Expenditure Survey data compiled and the methodology used to measure household carbon intensity of expenditures and carbon dioxide emissions, combining economic input-output modeling with a life cycle assessment modeling to track industry to industry transactions and the corresponding resource use from extraction to end use disposal. Second, I show that carbon pricing policies are indeed regressive with lower income households having significantly higher carbon intensities of consumption. As suggested in the previous literature, this result stems from the allocation of household expenditures among direct and indirect uses of energy. This expenditure allocation decision is driven, not only by household income, but also by characteristics that vary over the life course, most notably household size and composition. Therefore, lastly I show that household carbon dioxide emissions and intensities follow distinct trajectories over the life cycle, independent of household income, resulting from a reallocation of expenditures necessitated by the evolving needs of households at different stages in the life cycle. In Chapter 3, I discuss the demographic characteristics that are the drivers of the variation in emissions and intensities among heterogeneous households and how these demographic characteristics have changed, on average, over the past few decades in the United States. Of these changes, most notable are changes in mean household size, the age of household head, and the proportion of one- and two-person households. As baby boomers begin to retire and young individuals choose delay or forego household formation, expenditure allocation decisions of the average household are evolving, thereby changing the relationship between population growth and carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. In Chapter 4, to formalize the channel through which these changing dynamics of population growth and CO2 emissions occur, I first generate age-emissions profiles to show the importance of the age of a household member in contributing to total household emissions. I find that children contribute dramatically less than an adult and elderly contribute relatively less than an adult, but more than a child; results which are consistent with findings in the previous literature. In other words, an individual follows a distinct trajectory of emissions over their lifetime. The magnitude of this emissions curve is being attenuated over time as a result of improvements in energy efficiency, but these reductions are becoming smaller in time, consistent with the concept of diminishing returns to technology. Second, to incorporate the ability of households to experience economies of scale in their emissions through cohabitation, I construct an equivalence scale model in which I adjust for both the size and composition of households in the estimation of household CO2 emissions. I find that the ability of the average household in the United States to experience economies of scale in emissions has decreased since 2003 resulting in a substantial increase in mean household emissions. Lastly, to quantify this effect I use counter-factual prediction to determine that mean household carbon dioxide emissions would be over ten percent lower in 2009 if the ability of households to experience economies of scale had remained constant at 2003 levels. Finally, in Chapter 5 I highlight the importance and policy implications of this research, most importantly regarding the consideration of the composition of the population when estimating and projecting greenhouse gas emissions. Given the differences in energy use and emissions among households of different sizes and compositions, if the proportions of these population groups change over the next century in the developing world, as they have in developed nations over the past century, then emissions projections using population growth and estimates of per capita emissions may result in misleading conclusions regarding mitigation strategies and adaptation policies in a changing global climate.
Open Access
Pharmaceuticals, physicians and money
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Aleksanyan, Yeva, author; Zahran, Sammy, advisor; Mushinski, David, advisor; Pressman, Steven, committee member; Alves Pena, Anita, committee member; Stallones, Lorann, committee member
Pharmaceutical companies have contributed tremendously to improving health and quality of life. Treatments unavailable decades ago now extend lives and eliminate the need for invasive medical procedures. New cures are developed every year through research and development. Pharmaceutical companies typically face high failure rates while investing in research and development, the size of which may reach as high as 2.56 billion dollars (Kakkar, 2015). To increase returns from the products that are finally in the market, pharmaceutical companies engage in medical marketing. Medical marketing, and particularly promotions to physicians, come with a hefty cost to a final consumer. Numerous studies have found associations between promotional payments and brand name prescribing (Yeh et al., 2016; Perlis and Perlis, 2016), even if equivalent low-priced products are available (Akande and Aderibigbe, 2007; Taylor et al., 2016). This dissertation explores pharmaceutical industry-physician relationships and examines the factors influencing the size and frequency of promotional payments to physicians. The dissertation also studies the behavior of physicians and considers why some physicians accept more in payments than others. Chapter one examines the behavior of pharmaceutical companies, the patterns of competition surrounding patent expiration, the generic entry, and the choice of promotional instruments. It discusses the strategies employed by pharmaceutical companies in their efforts to keep competition away from the market and enjoy longer periods of monopoly or duopoly power. The study argues that patent expiration and subsequent entry of generic competitors are strong predictors of promotional payments. Also, pharmaceutical companies drastically change the size and frequency of payments after FDA approval of new dosages or new uses of an existing drug for the purposes of shifting the market away from the generic competition and increasing revenues. Finally, the chapter discusses the issues surrounding the information and persuasion debate, showing that promotional payments serve both purposes. Chapter two examines the role of cultural norms and the regulatory environment in the acceptance of pharmaceutical promotional payments by foreign-trained internal medicine doctors. It shows that the home country's corruption norms and the host country's regulatory environment are both important predictors of corrupt behavior among foreign-trained physicians. In the absence of rules and regulations, physicians from different countries adopt somewhat similar behavior. However, the propensity to accept promotional payments decreases among physicians from less corrupt countries when a host country's regulatory environment restricts acceptance of such payments. The study also finds a strong relationship between tenure, physician gender, and propensity to accept promotional payments. It suggests considering different norms and cultural backgrounds when designing and integrating ethical training in the residency and fellowship curricula. It also recommends adopting more stringent conflict of interest policies in hospitals. Chapter three analyzes the relationship between medical school policies and the propensity of promotional payment acceptance later in a physician's career. It shows that some medical school policies affect the likelihood and the size of accepted promotional payment and interactions with the pharmaceutical representatives later in a physician's career. Restrictive medical school meal policies seem to be especially effective in reducing interactions and acceptance of food and beverage-related payments. The study also finds a strong relationship between tenure, physician gender, physician practice size, and propensity to accept promotional payments. It suggests adopting stringent medical school policies to influence payment acceptance behavior later in physicians' careers.
Open Access
The economic consequences of health shocks
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2018) McKee, Sophie, author; Zahran, Sammy, advisor; Mushinski, David, advisor; Pena, Anita, committee member; Stallones, Lorann, committee member
This dissertation is composed of three chapters which examine the extent of reverse causation or the causal pathway in going from health to financial components of social economics status (SES) on the heath-SES gradient in Western Europe. In Chapter 1, I construct two population health metrics for survey-based data suitable for analysis across time and populations. To do so, I combine objective health indicators with the information available in the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) dataset regarding health functioning and prognosis, and develop a strategy to assess and quantify a multidimensional concept of health that minimizes the influence of subjective factors (country, wave, age, and labor status) in the assessment process. The first variable, Health Stock, is an objective comprehensive health metric, which is a composite of an individual's level of function at a point in time as well as their expected transition to other levels of health in the future. The second variable - referred to as Functioning Stock – is restricted to the objective measures of an individual's level of function. In Chapter 2, I investigate the short term impacts of negative health shocks on the labor outcomes of working individuals across levels of education and country of residence in Western Europe. I propose a new definition of negative health shock as the onset of a decrease between two consecutive periods in the Functioning Stock, whose magnitude exceeds a given threshold (in percentage terms). The analysis identifies three countries (Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain) that are best at mitigating the occurrence of negative health shocks, other things held equal. I then show that on average in the European countries examined, labor outcomes are dose-responsive with the intensity of the health shock, and that the impact of a health shock is "U-shaped" across levels of education: compared to workers with a medium or high levels of education, the probability of having work as the only source of personal income ("working only") for low-skilled workers and for college-educated workers is less affected by the occurrence of a health shock. Assuming the loss of earned income is not fully compensated by benefits, we could infer that in the short term, reverse causation for negative health shocks could be steepening the slope of the SES-Wealth gradient for workers with the middle range level of education. I then investigate the cross-country variation in the magnitude of the impact of a health shock on the probability to continue "working only". First, we find that the rates of people left without labor income or benefits are extremely low in every country considered, indicating that social safety nets are effective. Without delving into the complexities of the country-specific social insurance systems and the associated variation in benefit generosity, it is impossible to conclude on the relative magnitude of reverse causation across countries. However, two groups of countries stand out by the way workers maintain a connection to employment following a decline in health. In Switzerland, where health impaired workers have the highest probability to continue working, the short term impact of reverse causation is smallest. A hybrid labor force status is prevalent in Sweden, Spain, Belgium, and to a lesser extent in France and Denmark, where a substantial fraction of health impaired workers start receiving benefits but do not sever ties completely with work. In Chapter 3, I investigate the determinants of the probability of working in the second period for middle-age male individuals in Western Europe, examining in particular the weight of their work force status in the first period. I show that the impact of the initial work force status is magnified in the case of an improvement in health: individuals whose mental or physical capacities improve and who were working while receiving benefits are about 25% more likely to have work as their only source of income in the following two-year period than comparable individuals whose health did not improve. By contrast, these numbers hover around zero for males who had severed all ties with work, confirming the existence of a benefit trap. Flexible benefit schemes that enable work and the receipt of benefits appear to perform the dual function of catch and release: such schemes cushion individuals from the impact of a decline in health with the receipt of benefits while maintaining an attachment work, allowing closer alignment of the individual’s work trajectory with their preferences and capacities. As European populations age and become more frail, results from this dissertation suggest that the impact of reverse causation should steepen the health-wealth gradient, particularly for individuals with secondary school education. To limit this effect, public policies should (1) mitigate the occurrence of health shocks in the first place, (2) support individuals who wish to continue working as long as they are physically and mentally able, and (3) offer hybrid solutions that incentivize work together with the receipt of benefits to health impaired individuals. Other European countries could draw on the experiences of Switzerland and Sweden, who have proven to be most successful at implementing such policies.
Open Access
Three essays on welfare, well-being, and labor
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Chin, Sayorn, author; Zahran, Sammy, advisor; Mushinski, David, advisor; Miller, Ray, committee member; Bayham, Jude, committee member
This dissertation explores several topics in welfare, well-being, and labor economics, with a focus on: (1) health, wealth, and racial and ethnic welfare inequality; (2) the natural environment and well-being; and (3) whether labor markets place a wage premia for jobs that require workers to consume disamenities. To achieve these goals, the study utilizes three distinct datasets and applies a range of machine learning and econometric techniques, including natural language processing algorithms, as well as dynamic panel data estimators, natural experiments, and microsimulations. In Chapter 1, titled "Beyond Income: Health, Wealth, and Racial/Ethnic Welfare Gaps Among Older Americans'', we estimate racial and ethnic disparities in well-being among the older U.S. population using an expected utility framework that incorporates differences in consumption, leisure, health, mortality, and wealth. We use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) supplemented with data from the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey (CAMS). Together, these provide a long and rich panel (1992-2016) for our analysis. Our measure broadly indicates that racial and ethnic inequality is larger than suggested by other welfare metrics such as income or consumption. We also find health, mortality, and wealth gaps are important in explaining the level of racial and ethnic welfare inequality among the older Americans in our sample, with leisure playing a comparatively minor role. Our decomposition exercises show that a majority of the estimated welfare gaps are determined by age sixty initial conditions as opposed to racial and ethnic differences in dynamic processes after age sixty. Our morbidity counterfactuals further suggest that eliminating common heath risk factors such as hypertension or diabetes in late-life only marginally closes overall welfare gaps. These simulations suggest that policies aimed at closing racial and ethnic gaps in late-life may be more successful and efficient if targeted earlier in the life-cycle. In other words, outside of direct wealth transfers, it may largely be too late to target such interventions directly at older populations. In Chapter 2, titled "The Morning Advantage: Differential Returns to Sunlight Exposure on Well-Being'', we estimate the effect of sunlight exposure on well-being by mimicking a natural experiment that utilizes the transition to daylight savings time as an external shock to the reallocation of sunlight between the morning and evening induced by differences in sunrise and sunset times across space, and time. We combine a collection of geolocated and timestamped tweets from Twitter with Natural Language Processing algorithms to create a comprehensive panel dataset of well-being (2014-2022) for the United States. Our findings show that the returns to sunlight on sentiment are stronger in the morning than in the evening. These results contribute significantly to the ongoing debate about whether to continue or abandon the practice of daylight savings. Specifically, the positive turn of sentiment in the morning highlights the underappreciated benefits to human well-being. Therefore, the potential shifting to darker mornings and brighter evenings following the proposed Sunshine Protection Act may do more harm than good. In Chapter 3, titled "The Compensation of Conscience: Evidence from the U.S. Labor Market'', we investigate compensating differentials in the U.S. labor market related to the degree of moral compromise required in different occupations. Specifically, we explore whether jobs that require workers to compromise their moral values offer higher compensation to compensate for the disamenities that contradict their moral beliefs. To conduct our analysis, we utilize data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) and supplement it with data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) job descriptor, which allows us to develop a continuous measure of moral index across occupations. This data provides a rich and extensive panel spanning from 1997 to 2017 for our analysis. Our findings, obtained through the use of two-ways fixed-effects and first-difference models, indicate that jobs that require workers to compromise their moral principles are associated with higher compensation. This suggests that there is indeed a compensating differential for engaging in disamenities that conflict with a worker's moral values. Additionally, we observed that workers with a college education receive higher pay in jobs that require moral compromise, indicating that individuals with a college degree may have more employment opportunities and greater bargaining power, influencing their compensation preferences. Furthermore, we discovered evidence supporting an asymmetric relationship between changes in the occupational moral index and total hourly compensation. This relationship appears to be responsive to the intensity of moral compromise in the job.

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