I study three topics in applied microeconomics. My first chapter concerns the effect of daily school start times on academic achievement in Florida. Exploiting the sharp discontinuity in school start time relative to sunrise, I track children who move between schools on either side of the time zone boundary in...
Households in emerging markets hold significant amounts of dollar deposits while firms have significant amounts of dollar debt. Motivated by the perceived dangers, policymakers often develop regulations to limit dollarization. In this paper, I draw attention to an important benefit of dollarization, which should be taken into account when crafting...
Understanding the role of heterogeneity across agents is crucial in predicting how the macroeconomic outcomes are affected by these differences. This dissertation presents three papers in which I study labor market outcomes of different segments of the population according to their choice of education and how labor market characteristics affect...
We tackle two important theoretical problems in macroeconomics and international economics. First, in macroeconomics, especially monetary economics, the models with a standard Taylor rule have multiple equilibria. This multiplicity is problematic since we do not have a theory to determine a price level. We propose a theory to pin down...
This dissertation studies three topics in labor and public economics. The first chapter examines the local economic consequences of prisons using two complementary approaches. The first uses the openings of 230 prisons during the 1990s across the entire United States, and the second uses a quasi-experimental strategy that compares winning...
According to contemporary estimates, the 1933 Soviet famine killed six to eight million people, more than two million of them in Ukraine. This dissertation studies causes and consequences of this famine. ', 'Chapter one evaluates the causes of the 1933 famine offered by historians in Ukrainian context. Three main explanations...
This dissertation consists of three essays in Microeconomic Theory that study the interplay between mechanism and information design, provide insights into the design of efficient dispute resolution mechanisms for partnerships, and analyze the stability of fractional matchings in two-sided markets.', "In the first chapter, we study the optimal disclosure policy...
This dissertation is a collection of three essays that study (dynamic) incentive provision in multi-agent settings with asymmetric information: delegation of projects in organizations, dynamic matching on a platform, and arbitration between partners in a dispute.', "The first chapter studies dynamic delegation of heterogeneous projects to agents with diverse capabilities....
My dissertation consists of two chapters that empirically study policy-related questions in applied microeconomics by using structural econometric modeling developed in industrial organization. In the first chapter, I study the welfare effects of a cap-and-trade program. I develop an equilibrium framework that incorporates forward-looking behavior and transaction costs. In the...
This dissertation contains three chapters on two broad topics in labor economics: the determinants of early career outcomes and the impact of an aging population (and related policies). The first chapter investigates how the retirement slowdown among older Americans has affected the labor market prospects of younger Americans in recent...
I describe a novel panel dataset on the U.S. primary care physician population, as well as the institutions and measurement strategies used to study physician behavior in the marketplace. I document several facts on primary care markets and supplier location decisions, the types of patients physicians accept, the scale of...
Endogenous growth theory has long recognized innovation as one of the key drivers of growth. Understanding what factors encourage or discourage innovative activities and how, in turn, these affect our communities is therefore crucial to inspire policies that promote inclusive growth. This dissertation tries to broaden our comprehension of the...
I study how electricity generation firms exert market power, raising price above marginal cost. Typical studies of market power in electricity markets focus on how firms sustain markups in the short-run energy market. I explore other channels electricity generation firms use to strategically maximize profits. First, I analyze strategic investments...
This dissertation studies the forces that drive the allocation of patients to hospitals in the United States. Even though it seems there is some market discipline in the hospital industry, we observe that many patients go to hospitals far from the quality frontier and we still do not have a...
The first two chapters of my thesis are related to health economics, and explore how individual decisions affecting health can be impacted by different factors, including by government policy. The third chapter of my thesis (coauthored with Heyu Xiong) focuses on public economics in the Chinese context.
>In the first...
This dissertation consists of two papers united by a common element: they both study the behavior of heterogeneous agents across the business cycle.
In Chapter 1, I consider: what is the link between the drop in consumer credit during the Great Recession and increased unemployment? I build a heterogeneous household...
This dissertation looks at the consequences of three different government regulatory policies---the nondistribution constraint (which prohibits managers of nonprofit organizations from distributing profits generated by the nonprofit organization to themselves), the 100/0, 85/15, and 90/10 rules (which restrict the fraction of revenue for-profit colleges and universities can receive from Title...
While it is the ongoing growth in healthcare spending that has been making headlines, improving and maintaining healthcare quality is a critical goal of healthcare policy. In this dissertation I answer three questions relating to healthcare quality: does physician-hospital financial integration improves healthcare quality; how physician-hospital financial integration improves healthcare...
This dissertation analyzes the role of price advertising in the retail grocery setting, first exploring how consumers use price advertising in their shopping location decisions, and then considering ways in which retailers use price advertising to maximize store traffic and profits, given consumer use of information. Chapter 2 provides a...
In the first part of the dissertation, I investigate the nature of retail coupons, a popular tool for non-price competition. The widely expressed view that coupons are primarily a tool to allow price discrimination has received mixed empirical supports. I depart from the static framework of the price discrimination theory...
Game Theory is the branch of applied mathematics that studies the strategic interaction among intelligent agents. So far, standard Game Theory literature has interpreted "intelligent agents" exclusively as "rational agents". This work points out that this interpretation is an important limitation since intelligence consists of more abilities, some of which...
We first introduce the concept of copulas and advocate its use for multivariate option pricing. We focus on four types of bivariate options: basket, rainbow-max, rainbow-min, and spread options. We derive expressions for these options as a function of the copula. We then construct pricing bounds for these bivariate options...
Chapter 1: (Bounds on the Counterfactual Revenue Distributions in Auctions with Reserve Prices) In first-price auctions with interdependent bidder values, the distributions of private signals and values cannot be uniquely recovered from bids in Bayesian Nash equilibria. Non-identification invalidates structural analyses that rely on exact identification of the model primitives....
The main theme of this dissertation are departures from standard assumptions in economic theory, specifically, departures from the model of subjective expected utility in decision theory.
Part 1 axiomatizes the robust control criterion of multiplier preferences introduced by Hansen and Sargent (2001). The axiomatization shows that the class of multiplier...
Several semiparametric estimators recently developed in the econometrics literature are based on the rank correlation between the dependent and explanatory variables. Examples include the maximum rank correlation estimator (MRC) of Han (1987), the monotone rank estimator (MR) of Cavanagh and Sherman (1998), the pairwise-difference rank estimators (PDR) of Abrevaya (2003),...
This thesis is organized into three essays, each with particular insights involving public policy and family formation:
In the first essay, I address the well-documented correlation between the prestige of the university and the labor market income of its graduates by investigating whether a possible medium for this effect is...
The expansion of public education at the beginning of the twentieth century had a profound effect on the American economy. This dissertation explores the impact of changing educational institutions on both individuals and communities with a study of Iowa during its introduction of modern grammar schools and high schools during...
I show that the speed of price adjustment to aggregate technology shocks is substantially larger than to monetary policy shocks. In the context of large Bayesian Vector Autoregression models, I establish that aggregate and disaggregate prices adjust very quickly to technology shocks, while they only respond sluggishly to monetary policy...
In the first chapter we analyze profits and efficiency implications of a relation between an upstream duopoly and downstream monopoly in Hotelling linear city model. While exclusive contracts maximize the monopolist's profit, at the same time socially they are inefficient. Linear prices, while more efficient, usually also do not achieve...
This dissertation consists of three essays on the identification analysis of econometric models.
The first essay explores the identification question in semiparametric binary response models when all regressors have discrete support. I suggest a recursive procedure that finds sharp bounds on the parameter of interest and can be applied to...
In the first part of the dissertation I study mechanism design under limited communication. Chapter 1 offers a detailed analysis of auctions with simultaneous limited communication. I solve for both welfare and revenue maximizing equilibria. The striking feature of optimal equilibria is that they are asymmetric even when the setup...
The goal of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of the driving forces behind short-term movements in important aggregate variables such as exports, imports, the trade balance, output, investment, and employment. The first chapter contrasts the cyclical behavior of the trade balance and trade flows in a group of...
This dissertation is composed of three chapters, each contributing to different aspects of the literature of partially identified econometric models.
In the first chapter, I introduce a bootstrap procedure to perform inference in the class of partially identified econometric models defined by finitely many moment equalities and inequalities. I provide...
Ethicity, race and gender play an important role in labor markets; labor market outcomes such as hiring and compensation are very different across different social groups. These differentials are partly the result of differences in productivity and preferences and partly the result of discrimination. Chapter two uses an audit study...
Institutions are an important determinant of a society's economic performance. To understand why institutions affect economic activity we have to understand how they affect people's incentives in the economy. The patterns of social interaction and beliefs in a society determine the choice of institution. This dissertation focuses on societies where...
I study the problem of choice between two treatments for a population of observationally identical individuals based on statistical evidence about average treatment effects that does not reveal the best treatment with certainty. I approach the problem from the perspective of statistical decision theory, derive treatment rules that minimize maximum...
This dissertation formulates, solves and estimates dynamic stochastic games to answer various questions that arise in Industrial Organization. First chapter is a "theoretic" investigation of learning-by-doing and organizational forgetting that shows them to be distinct economic forces whose interplay gives rise to aggressive pricing behavior, market dominance, and multiple equilibria....
This dissertation analyzes how individuals choose college majors. The choice of college major is treated as one made under uncertainty. Understanding any decision under uncertainty requires one to study how expectations and preferences are used to make the choice. However, since observed choices may be consistent with many combinations of...
Chapter one investigates the impact of agents' expectations about future fundamental economic disturbances (news) on macroeconomic dynamics. Several intuitive tests provide insight into the information content of the yield curve and its' ability to identify these 'news' disturbances. Bayesian estimation of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model using conventional...
The three empirical analyses in this dissertation study the effects of workers' compensation benefits on individual behavior and household consumption as well as the impacts of workplace injuries and illnesses on economic outcomes for affected workers.
In Chapter 2, I study incentive effects of state workers' compensation programs, exploiting substantial...
In the first chapter of my dissertation, I study the effects of an exogenous increase in government spending in models incorporating price and wage nominal rigidities. I find that the effects of price stickiness on the output multiplier depend crucially on the behavior of the monetary authority. If the monetary...
This collection of essays on horizontal merger enforcement and dynamic contract breach addresses the question of what role, if any, should government play in enforcing the contracts of private parties? The government's appropriate role in these various settings depends, among other things, on the nature of the competition between private...
This dissertation explores price differences observed in the market. While some differences are necessitated by market conditions, the others are strategic. I illustrate the former in a study of electricity spot markets in Italy and the latter for the video rental industry.
The first project examines the welfare gains from...
This dissertation develops dynamic models to examine markets with product differentiation where both firm conduct and consumer behavior is jointly influenced by switching costs, network effects and technological innovation. In Chapter 1 I propose a structural model of competition where firms set prices, introduce new products and scrap obsolete models....
This study investigates the causes and welfare consequences of unravelling in two-sided matching markets. "Unravelling" arises when agents contract with one another at an early stage, before much of the relevant information is available. Such early matches may lead to ex-post inefficiencies and are perceived as socially harmful. This study...
This dissertation analyzes the decision process of firms along two dimensions which are central to the field of macroeconomics. First, we study the pricing decision of the firm in a framework where customer base matters. Surveys of managers show that the main reason why firms keep prices stable is that...
The ready-mix concrete industry is a fascinating laboratory for the study of industry dynamics. Concrete plants produce a single homogeneous product with technology and equipment that has changed little over the last 50 years. Building a plant entails substantial sunk costs since the machinery used to produce ready-mix cannot easily...
This thesis comprises three essays addressing theory and evidence on the household response to tax-favored saving incentive schemes, with a particular emphasis on household risk taking. The US tax code and related regulatory institutions offer a variety of incentives to encourage US households to save and participate in risky investment...
I study several aspects of a game-theoretic model of persuasion. A speaker attempts to persuade a listener to take an action which is highly ranked by the speaker. The listener knows the speaker's preference but is uncertain about what the speaker can say. The listener can commit to a persuasion...