Three essays in applied macroeconomics

This dissertation is composed of three chapters presenting different topics in applied macroeconomics. In the first chapter, I use hourly bank card transaction data to study shopping congestion during the COVID-19 pandemic in Shanghai. I focus on consumers' choice of shopping time in response to congestion. During a pandemic, consumers can change their shopping time patterns to avoid crowds and reduce the risk of infection. However, the regression, controlling for endogeneity, shows that general consumers do not significantly change their behavior, and the disutility from the risk of infection is not significant. However, infrequent restaurant visitors significantly change their shopping patterns to avoid crowds. Counterfactual analysis shows that the average number of offline consumers would be 6.31% higher if there were no congestion. The second chapter studies the patent quality. In particular, using Google's PageRank algorithm, a measure of centrality that accounts for the quality of a citation and the citation network structure, I find that the PageRank score can better approximate the importance or impact of a patent for a sample of all digitized U.S. patent data from 1976 to 2018 than a simple count of citations does. After matching patents to different companies, I find that some companies applied only for important patents. In addition, the number of patents with high PageRank scores is a better measure of the quality of a company's research outcomes than the number of patents with a high number of citations. Additionally, the driving force behind a company's future productivity is not the total number of patents granted but the number of important patents granted. The third chapter is joint work with Greg Howard. We propose a model that can match gravity patterns of U.S. interstate migration based on persistent and spatially-correlated preferences. The model also matches many untargeted dynamic moments of migration, previously a challenge for the literature. From the model, we learn five lessons with implications for regional evolutions, migratory insurance, and macroeconomic misallocation: moving costs need not be large to generate gravity patterns; return migration patterns can be the result of persistent preferences; short-run elasticities of migration vary by distance; bilateral migration flows are informative of population elasticities to local shocks; short- and long-run population elasticities are the same.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Economics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Shao, Hansen

Contributors dc:contributor

• Howard, Greg
• Kahn, Charles
• Lemus, Jorge
• Xie, Shihan

• Consumer Behavior
• COVID-19
• Congestion
• PageRank
• Patent Citation
• Productivity
• Regional Evolutions
• Migratory Insurance
• Misallocation
• Gravity Equation
• Labor Mobility

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Hansen Shao

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115684

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115684