CentER

Charles Bellemare

Abstract:
MICROECONOMETRIC ESSAYS ON MIGRATION, TRUST, AND SATISFACTION is a collection of essays demonstrating how the combination of behavioral assumptions and better data can help identify economically relevant parameters. These issues are illustrated by analyzing the migration duration decision of immigrants, the determinants of individual trust and trustworthiness attitudes, and the estimation of household equivalence scales.

One of the important findings is that very little assumptions need to be imposed to identify the economic performance of immigrants who leave a region when such departures are not observed in panel data sets. It is also shown that the evaluation of the determinants of an individual's trust and trustworthiness can greatly benefit from the combination of survey and experimental data. This combination is shown to reveal interesting insights on how individual actions do not necessarily match their stated attitudes. Finally, the final essay demonstrates how stated answers to questions on income satisfaction allow the identification and estimation of household equivalence scales using estimation techniques relaxing conventional statistical assumptions.