UC Irvine

This dissertation consists of three chapters, where I use a combination of empirical methods and model simulations to study topics in public economics and urban economics.

Chapter 1 studies inspector leniency as a challenge to regulation enforcement in the context of Los Angeles County restaurant hygiene inspections. Inspectors score restaurants numerically, but only letter grades reflecting wide score intervals are mandatorily disclosed. In this chapter, I show that inspector leniency has compromised the effectiveness of health grades in signaling restaurants' hygiene conditions, as restaurants whose grades are inflated to A have significantly worse hygiene conditions than restaurants who have earned their A. Moreover, I find that inspector leniency discourages hygiene improvements by preventing a re-inspection that a restaurant would likely request if they did not experience grade inflation. This chapter then uncovers a novel motive behind inspector leniency: inspectors avoiding work that does not increase promotion prospects, and proposes changes to the inspector performance evaluation policy as a remedy. Lastly, I evaluate the effects of policy interventions aimed at reducing inspector leniency on inspectors' grading and restaurants' sanitation efforts under a theoretical framework.

Chapter 2 develops an empirical framework to evaluate plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) charger sufficiency. With the transportation sector being the largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, states are actively planning the deployment of PEVs. Mass adoption of PEVs requires attracting potential buyers living in multi-unit dwellings (MUDs). Given the current low adoption rate of PEVs in MUDs and MUD residents’ reliance on public charging, this chapter studies whether there is a positive correlation between the number of public L2 chargers and MUD density (measured by total square footage of MUD per capita) across census block groups (CBGs) in LA County. The results show that high MUD-density CBGs and low MUD-density CBGs do not differ much in terms of the number of chargers. The charger-to-PEV-ratio range for MUD residents derived in this paper is below the ideal charger-to-PEV-ratio range in the literature. A direct policy implication is that more charging infrastructure should be made available to MUD residents.

Chapter 3 studies how people respond to freeway congestion along their commute to work in Greater Los Angeles. Traffic congestion is a growing problem in major metropolitan areas. This chapter develops a novel approach to measuring historical congestion by using open-sourced road network data augmented with historical speeds collected from freeway traffic detectors. Using annual data on tract-to-tract commute flows within Greater Los Angeles and congestion on the commute from 2010 to 2019, I find that the number of commuters on a given route decreases as congestion along the route increases. In addition, I find suggestive evidence that this decrease more likely results from workers changing jobs for a less-congested commute at the cost of lower pay, than from workers relocating their residences for a less-congested commute, or dropping out of the labor market.