Three essays in applied microeconomics

In this dissertation, I exploit spatial data to examine two questions. First, I estimate the effect of retail market competition on wholesale contracting propensity in a spatially differentiated and partially integrated industry. I perform this analysis using highly-detailed data on vertical relationships between firms participating in the Minnesota market for cremation services. As a preliminary matter, I estimate retail demand for cremation services and discuss the results in first essay of this dissertation. Although I find evidence for limited competition in some areas, the retail market is, in general, highly geographically segmented. In the second essay, I estimate wholesale demand for cremation services by unintegrated funeral homes. In estimating wholesale demand, I allow the degree of retail market competition between firms to influence the cost of forming a supply relationship. I use the distance between funeral homes owned by suppliers of cremation services and funeral homes seeking cremation services as a proxy for the intensity of competition between firms. I find that funeral homes seeking wholesale cremation services are less than half as likely to utilize crematories owned by firms that are retail market competitors. Consistent with foreclosure by integrated crematories, the magnitude of the impact of retail market competition on wholesale contracting is larger in those markets with few crematories. Using the pricing and demand model that I specify, I run a counterfactual to determine the effect of foreclosure in the wholesale market on prices and allocations.;In the second section of this dissertation, I examine policies used by law enforcement agencies to notify communities of the presence of sexual criminals. Although information regarding sexual criminals is generally accessible to individuals actively seeking it, some police departments employ direct notification, attempting to notify all immediate neighbors, including those not actively seeking the information. In this essay, I evaluate the effect of law-enforcement mediated direct notification on sexual crime incidence and housing prices. Using county-level data from Florida obtained during a notification policy survey, I describe patterns in notification policy adoption and exploit cross-county variation in policy adoption to estimate the impact of various forms of direct notification on sex crime incidence. I find weak evidence associating more aggressive notification policies with lower crime rates. Using housing transactions data from one county with a particularly aggressive, geographically delineated direct notification policy, I determine the impact of sexual criminal arrival on home prices. Although I am unable to identify a robust, significant price effect from notification, I find weak evidence that the arrival of criminals is associated with lower housing transactions prices.