Essays on public policy and political economy
Abstract
This compilation dissertation investigates empirically questions related to public policy and political economy, using microeconometric methods and various large datasets including administrative, survey, and text data. In the first two sub-studies, the focus is on evaluating the impact of public policy using administrative data, whereas the last two sub-studies analyze policy-making and mainly utilize text-based data, which is analyzed quantitatively. The last study also utilizes some survey data.
The first essay examines the causal effects of the decentralization of public employment services (PES) on services offered, municipal behavior, and job seekers’ employment, using the difference-in-differences method. No effects on employment, earnings or labor mobility are observed, but decentralization affected placements in activation services. The results of the first essay are also consistent with municipalities shifting costs to the central government.
In the second essay, the effects of regional and occupation-specific exemptions from labor market testing requirements are studied. In this essay, the effects are estimated in a staggered difference-in-differences framework. Effects on wages, labor flows, and other relevant labor market outcomes are examined. The results of the essay suggest that LMT exemptions have negative wage impacts at the bottom of the earnings distribution while most occupations are unaffected.
In the third essay, the difference-in-differences method is used to investigate the effects of media presence on the behavior of politicians. The specific context of the study is the introduction of TV broadcasting of plenary sittings in 1989 to only some of the sittings, which can be utilized to estimate the effects using difference-indifferences. The results suggest TV cameras did not affect the left-right polarization but increased tensions between the government and the opposition. In the study, it is also observed that the attendance of MPs increased as a result of TV broadcasting.
The fourth essay analyzes the evolution of speech differences in parliamentary speeches between various groups over a period of more than 100 years. It is observed that speech differences by gender and education have been large and statistically significant during most of the century, while speech differences by other background variables, such as age (old/young) or place of residence (capital region/other) are not statistically different from the placebo series we estimate.
Publication Information
Nieminen, J. (2024), Essays on public policy and political economy, Annales Universitatis Turkuensis, Series E 112.
- ISSN: 2343-3159 (Print), 2343-3167 (Online)
- ISBN: 978-951-29-9651-3 (Print), 978-951-29-9652-0 (Online)
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- Jeremias Nieminen
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