Theses and Dissertations

First Chapter Title: Impact of the Change in Payments on the Actual and Perceived Behaviors of Medical Care Providers.Research Question: This paper asks if and how medical care providers change their treatment plans when there is a change in the income they receive from their patients. Taking this question further, this paper asks if there are any changes in thepatients' perception of the behaviors of their medical care providers, as the income received by the medical providers change.

This dissertation explores the health and labor market effects of spousal and parental choices. First chapter of this dissertation studies international marriages in Europe. The effect of international marriage - a union between a country native and an immigrant - on social and family outcomes is endogenous due to the selection into marriage markets and non-random spousal choice. In this paper I use European Union membership and availability of cheap travel as region-specific instrumental variables that increased the probability of intermarriage in Europe.

This dissertation examines the economic effects of occupational regulation of dietitians and nutritionists (DNs) and social workers (SWs). Both occupations require a bachelor's degree, employ high percentages of female, part time, and institutional workers, have strong occupational associations, and are subject to different types of regulation in different states.

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay evaluates restaurant wine pricing. Many restaurants offer extensive lists of wines in bottles and limited selections of wines by the glass. In this essay, I empirically examine wine prices by the bottle at New York City restaurants. The empirical results, which control for both the quality of wine and the restaurant, suggest that restaurants offering wine by the glass tend to set the same bottle prices as the restaurants that do not offer wine by the glass.

According to the fetal origins hypothesis, adverse events that occur while a fetus is in-utero may have lasting impacts throughout the duration of the individual's lifetime. Therefore, from a policy standpoint, understanding the factors that affect prenatal health are of utmost importance. The purpose of this study is to examine how prenatal exposure to sulfur dioxide (SO2), one of six criteria pollutants monitored by the U.S. EPA, affects infant health at birth.