This paper aims to explore the gender wage gap in the University of Washington. We use data collected from College of Arts and Sciences to analyze how faculty members' salary might be affected by different factors. The number of women who entered into the labor market grew exponentially after the Second World War and women tended to spend longer hours for work. But this fact did not eliminate the existence of gender wage gap. Researching the gender wage gap in academia is unique because academics employed usually obtain relatively homogeneous education and job trainings such as earning Ph.D. degree. The factors we examine which may have an impact on the salary difference include gender, department, and the years of attainment of Ph.D. degree. This observational document study also intends to show how the number ratio of female faculty members and male faculty members differ in different department and discuss whether implicit discriminations exist. Women may spend longer time to complete Ph.D. degree due to that female's presentations and works somehow seem to face more biased judgments comparing with male by mentor or adviser and thus have less potential job experience. Women professors may experience more years in the process of tenure promotion which can lead to direct salary increase than male peers. 

This study evaluates the relationship between collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) and average teachers’ wages with econometric analysis. The literature suggests that teachers’ pay impacts the quality of educational provision, teacher retention, and quality of educational staff. Hence, understanding the determinants of teachers’ salaries is of critical policy importance. Using Washington and Idaho state as the geographic frame for my research, I collected and compiled data from 143 school districts from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the Washington State Report Card, the American Community Survey (ACS), the Washington State Department of Education, and the Idaho State Department of Education. I proposed several regression models and used a CBA dummy variable to explain the variation in teachers’ wages, controlling for other relevant factors including student teacher ratio, expenditure per pupil, etc. The estimation results show that the presence of a CBA predicts a 6.1 to 6.7% increase in average WA/ID teachers’ salaries. This result is consistent with the findings in the literature that a CBA predicts a minor increase in average teachers’ salaries. This study extends the literature by verifying the importance of CBAs in the Washington/Idaho geographic area. The findings could be useful to educational stakeholders in salary negotiations, budget forecasting, and educational administration.

This paper investigates the impacts that asymmetric information has on private pediatric health insurance coverage. In order to do so, I use the Rothschild and Stiglitz model of equilibria in perfectly competitive insurance markets and apply it to pediatric health insurance. It examines the shifts that occur in the model due to exogenous changes from asymmetric information between insurers and parents. These information problems occur in three forms; moral hazard, when people consume more care because they have health insurance; the principal-agent problem, when a task is delegated to an agent and the principal cannot directly observe the agent's actions; and adverse selection, when the consumer of health insurance has more information than the provider. These information asymmetries affect the behavior of both consumers and suppliers of pediatric health insurance, and so results in changes of supply and demand of insurance contracts. Ideally, in an equilibrium contract, consumers would recieve maximum utility, firms would make non-negative profits, and no other possible contracts would have the potential to make the firms greater non-negative profits. However, due to the changes in supply and demand from asymmetric information, this efficient outcome can become harder to obtain. By examining the changes that happen in the market with the modified Rothschild and Stiglitz model, I examine the the existence of equilibrium points, as well as the anticipated effects on health insurance coverage and health insurance prices. Because there are so many possible events that can occur, such as changes in parental income and risk, and the uncertainty of the magnitude of those events, no concrete conslusions can be made. It can however, be said that pediatric health insurance coverage may change in the presence of asymmetric information. 

The Chinese housing market is rising so fast compared to other countries, such as South Korea and the United States. In China, skewed sex ratios caused by the "One-Child" Policy increase the intensity of the marriage market, motivating men to purchase more and better houses in the favor of enhancing their attractiveness in the competitive marriage market. In this paper, we explore the implications of the "Two-Child" Policy on the intensity of the marriage market, represented by the sex ratios (number of boys per 100 girls), and the correlation between the sex ratios and growth rate of house prices. To test the effects of the “Two-Child” Policy, we regress the logarithmic form of house prices on the sex ratios, inflation rates, and other independent variables through building a fixed-effects regression model with two fixed-effects variables, City Fixed Effects for each province in China and Year Fixed Effects for each year from 2002-2019. The result indicates that a 1-unit increase in the sex ratio would increase house prices by 3%. Therefore, we are certain that skewed sex ratios have a negative impact on the growth rate of house prices. High housing costs in China make it harder for future generations to live. Through taking local sex ratios into consideration of implementing the optimal property tax, we could slow down the growth rate of house prices and increase the welfare of the citizens.