Three essays in applied economics

The purpose of this dissertation is to verify which factors determine the decision maker's behavior in two different cases theoretically and empirically: contract between a baseball player and a team owner in baseball market and participating in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). The first paper considers the baseball player's decision-making procedure in determining whether to switch from a short-term contract to a long-term contract. I analyze shirking behavior in the baseball labor market after baseball players sign a long-term contract and verify empirically by using Major League Baseball (MLB) data. The second paper investigates parents' and children's decision-making procedures and the effects of those decisions on a child's Body Mass Index (BMI). A two-stage optimization problem involving the parent and their child is employed to analyze the child's food choice in school as limited by her parent's decision of whether to participate in the NSLP and I empirically demonstrate that the child's probability of being obese decreases when the child participates in the NSLP by employing data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K). Finally, the last paper extends the second chapter's theoretical model into a three-stage optimization problem between the parent and their child. The parent decides whether to participate in the NSLP in the first stage. They are able to observe their child's BMI after joining the program and can then decide whether to continue participating in the program or leave. And the result is tested by using ECLS-K data.