Weinhardt, Felix Julian
(2012)
Does geography matter? an empirical investigation into neighbourhood, peer effects and electricity consumption.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This thesis consists of four distinct projects which sit at the crossroad between Labour,
Education and Environmental Economics. The underlying and unifying theme is the
examination of social and geographical inequalities using applied econometrics.
In the first project, I estimate the effect of moving into a deprived high-density social
housing neighbourhood on the educational attainments of teenagers in England. I
exploit the timing of moving, which can be taken as exogenous because of long waiting
lists for social housing in high-demand areas, to avoid the usual sorting problems.
Using this strategy, I find no evidence for negative effects.
The second project investigates the effect of neighbours' characteristics and prior
achievements on teenagers' educational outcomes. The study relies on mover-induced
variation in neighbourhood quality, whilst controlling for general gentrification trends
and other unobservables. The results provide little evidence for significant effects on
pupil test score progression.
The third project looks at the size, significance and heterogeneity of ability peer
effects in secondary schools in England. The methodological innovation is to identify
ability peer effects using within-pupil-across-subject variation in students' test scores
and peer prior achievements. The chapter shows that it is the low- and high-achievers,
who account for most or all of the effect of average peer quality on the educational
outcomes of other pupils and that this effect varies across genders.
The final project presents -to the best of my knowledge- the first nationwide
empirical assessment of residential electricity use in response to the timing of daylight
for the US. Employing Geographical Information Systems (GIS), I calculate the solar
times of sunrise and sunset for all locations in mainland US and show that two distinct
sources of geographical variation can be used to estimate county-level responses in
residential electricity consumption. Using both approaches I find that early sunrise is
associated with lower residential electricity use in the North, but higher consumption
in the South. This is a novel finding with potentially significant policy implications and
I offer some suggestions about how future research should examine the behavioural
channels that could cause these results.
Actions (login required)
 |
Record administration - authorised staff only |
Download statistics
Download statistics