ESSAYS IN CAMPAIGN FINANCE, VACCINATION CHOICE AND ADVERTISING

Eric Dunaway

I examine topics across the field of microeconomics. Chapter 2 (co-authored with Félix Muñoz-García) develops a model where candidates for an elected office choose their optimal policy positions while anticipating responses from potential donors and voters. Chapter 3 examines the strategic interaction between parents when choosing whether to vaccinate their children; and the resulting human capital levels children acquire given their resulting health status. Chapter 4 develops a model where a firm can appeal to a social issue to reduce their own advertising expenses. In chapter 2, we extend previous work on the role of politically motivated donors who contribute to candidates in an election with single dimension policy preferences. In a two-stage game where donors observe candidate policy positions and then allocate funding accordingly, we find that reducing the cost of donations incentivizes candidates to position closer to one another, reducing policy divergence. Furthermore, we find that as donations become more effective at influencing voter decisions, candidates respond less to voter preferences and more to those of donors. In chapter 3, I develop a human capital accumulation model where, in the first stage, parents decide whether to vaccinate their children. In the second stage, nature determines if a child is infected with a disease, and they make human capital investment decisions. In the third stage, children participate in the labor market. I find that when the severity of a disease is low, no parents vaccinate their children. Furthermore, I find that parents with high health risk children are more likely to vaccinate their children, while parents with high perceptions of vaccination risk are less likely to vaccinate their children. In chapter 4, I examine a monopolist serving a horizontally differentiated market where consumers are differentiated based on their stance on a social issue. I find that a monopolist has no incentive to appeal to its own stance on the social issue without the ability for consumers to respond to the monopolist's position. When the potential appeal from a social issue is high, a monopolist has incentives to embrace it fully, achieving full subsidization of his advertising expenditures.

ESSAYS IN CAMPAIGN FINANCE, VACCINATION CHOICE AND ADVERTISING

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