| This thesis consists of three self-contained essays in applied microeconomics. The first chapter is coauthored with Hunt Allcott, the second chapter is solely authored, and the third chapter is coauthored with Jesse Rothstein.;The first chapter tests whether automobile market equilibria respond to changes in gasoline price expectations in a way that is consistent with privately optimizing consumers. We use a nested logit discrete choice model of automobile demand, which accounts for changes in market shares and allows for substitution between similar vehicles. The model is estimated using market level and micro data on automobile transactions and characteristics. We find that consumers are willing to pay just ;The second chapter documents the dispersion of used automobile prices in the United States. I find that prices vary substantially across locations for the same model, but these price differentials are not systematic. I show evidence that they are likely to be caused by rapid changes in the supply of used automobiles. Unlike in cross-country analyses, there is little evidence of price discrimination based on local differences in demand elasticities or supply costs. I also document within-location variation in prices and show that using sample mean prices as a proxy for a location's market price can lead to an increase in measurements of cross-location dispersion.;The third chapter identifies the black-white test score gap conditional on permanent income. Typically only a current income measure is available in commonly used datasets, so we develop methods to identify the conditional gap using an auxiliary data set to estimate the reliability of current income. Current income explains only about half as much of the black-white test score gap as does permanent income, and the remaining gap in math achievement among families with the same permanent income is only 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations in our two samples. |
