Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

810

Date

2013

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Business Administration

Concentration

Economics

Committee Member

Sandra Richardson

Committee Member

Ebenezer O George

Abstract

My dissertation comprises three essays in theoretical economics and applied microeconomics. They touch on societal, health and environmental issues from an economic perspective, with the goal of promoting sustainable development and equity. The first essay probes the sources of regional disparities in population health outcomes. I identify the drivers of alternative measures of health outcomes, using data from two specific US regions (the South, which has relatively lower health status; and the Northeast, which enjoys relatively higher health status). Then, using the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, I analyze these differences in health outcomes and explore their policy implications. The second essay, exclusively theoretical, models the behavioral reactions of economic agents to climatic change in a stochastic framework. Their reaction toward increasing uncertainties about the damages caused by their pollution levels, as well as the corresponding Pareto equilibrium and its policy implications are computed and discussed. Lastly, the third essay investigates the drivers of prescription drug consumption separately in selected states with low, average, and high prescription drug consumption US states. The noticeable geographic variations in core drivers of health care costs motivate the need to consider separate econometric models. Also to control for the non-normality of healthcare data, the variance stabilizing Box-Cox transformations model is applied.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

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