Essays in applied spatial microeconomics

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dc.contributorAllaway, Arthur
dc.contributorCassidy, Traviss
dc.contributorJohnson, Erik
dc.contributorLee, Junsoo
dc.contributor.advisorRoss, Amanda
dc.contributor.authorHerndon, James Dennis
dc.contributor.otherUniversity of Alabama Tuscaloosa
dc.date.accessioned2020-09-30T17:24:55Z
dc.date.available2020-09-30T17:24:55Z
dc.date.issued2020
dc.descriptionElectronic Thesis or Dissertationen_US
dc.description.abstractIn the first essay, I examine the price behavior of consumer goods in the strategically vital country of Pakistan. Results show that prices converge both temporally and spatially. A wage-adjusted Consumer Price Index shows that Pakistani cities have converging costs of living. Finally, a novel measure of cointegration ranks the most and least economically integrated cities. Divergence does not occur along provincial, linguistic, or ethnic boundaries. In the second essay, paper I examine private sector job growth in cities across the United States from 1990 to 2018. Defining “concentration” as a city’s sectoral Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, I find that cities with greater economic concentration subsequently experience more job growth than comparable cities with less concentration. However, the skewed distribution of job growth by sector means that cities face a trade-off between risk and reward analogous to an investment portfolio. In the third and final essay, we examine how changes in rainfall affect the persistence of conflict in Africa using fine-grained grid cell level data. Using Markov transition matrices, we examine the persistence of conflict in grid cells across the African continent and the likelihood of transitioning into and out of conflict. We incorporate the Markov probabilities into a panel logit model to analyze how monthly variations in rainfall affect the probability that an area transitions from peace to conflict. We find that peace is highly persistent across Africa, while violence is more transient. We also find that insufficient rainfall early in the wet season is associated with conflict in several regions.en_US
dc.format.extent73 p.
dc.format.mediumelectronic
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.otheru0015_0000001_0003620
dc.identifier.otherHerndon_alatus_0004D_14083
dc.identifier.urihttp://ir.ua.edu/handle/123456789/7019
dc.languageEnglish
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Alabama Libraries
dc.relation.hasversionborn digital
dc.relation.ispartofThe University of Alabama Electronic Theses and Dissertations
dc.relation.ispartofThe University of Alabama Libraries Digital Collections
dc.rightsAll rights reserved by the author unless otherwise indicated.en_US
dc.subjectEconomics
dc.titleEssays in applied spatial microeconomicsen_US
dc.typethesis
dc.typetext
etdms.degree.departmentUniversity of Alabama. Department of Economics, Finance, and Legal Studies
etdms.degree.disciplineEconomics (Business)
etdms.degree.grantorThe University of Alabama
etdms.degree.leveldoctoral
etdms.degree.namePh.D.

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