Essays in Applied Economics

by Oliver-Ken Haase
Doctoral thesis
Date of Examination:2020-05-22
Date of issue:2020-12-08
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Bernhard Brümmer
Referee:Dr. Stephan Prof Von Cramon-Taubadel
Referee:Prof. Dr. Xiaohua Yu
Persistent Address: http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-8360

 

 

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Abstract

English

The first essay of the thesis analyzes the productive efficiency of dairy farms located across the rural-urban transition area of the Southern Indian city of Bangalore. For that purpose a stochastic frontier analysis is conducted on a primary data set comprising 418 dairy farms. This essay employs an instrument-free approach to cope with unobserved characteristics that are correlated with the observable inputs. The results reveal an overuse of high protein content feed which may have critical implications for animal welfare and sustained milk production. The second essay extends the literature on the productivity effects of labor market institutions by means of a semiparametric production function approach to 191 European regions (NUTS-2) over the period from 1995 to 2008. Rather than focusing exclusively on one particular institution progress is made by examining the effects of a whole set of labor market characteristics. The results indicate that stronger presence of unions, higher firing costs and more generous unemployment benefit payments tend to have detrimental marginal productivity effects, while hetergeneous findings on the effect from higher union coverage depend on the degree of centralization of wage bargaining processes. The third essay applies the new translog gravity model by Novy (2013) to investigate the heterogeneous effects of food standards on agricultural trade flows. In contrast to existing works, this essay argues that standards affect trade but even more so for countries that trade smaller volumes. The reasoning is simple but hopefully intuitive; bigger trading partners find it more profitable to invest in meeting the costs of importer-specific standards. Consistent with the predictions of the model, the results from the conventional CES model support our argument. However, the crucial difference lies in the capability of the translog model to endogenously explain the standards effect on trade .
Keywords: Technical efficiency; Productivity; Agricultural trade
 
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