I examine economic design issues in the realm of dynamic organ allocation for transplantation and behavioral market design/contract theory. The second and third chapters focus on two issues in the design of the U.S. deceased-donor organ allocation system, which represents the majority of transplants performed in the U.S. In contrast...
In my dissertation I explore several applications of collective household models with limited commitment to study the behavior of singles and couples in the modern US marriage markets in presence of endogenous risk of divorce. In the first chapter, I show that the model is capable of rationalizing the patterns...
This dissertation is divided into three chapters. Chapter one studies changes in market concentration and productivity growth in the United States from the 1990s to the 2010s. Chapter two measures the impact of a banking crisis, the British Panic of 1825, on non-financial firms. Chapter three examines how women's employment...
Chapter 1: Despite the rapid growth of passive ownership over the past 30 years, there is no consensus on how or why passive ownership affects stock price informativeness. This paper provides a new answer to this question by examining how passive ownership changes investors' incentives to acquire information. I develop...
This dissertation consists of three essays on spatially differentiated markets. Generally, I explore how firms and consumers behave in such markets using structural modeling, causal inference and machine learning techniques, as well as high-resolution spatial data. In the first chapter, I study the efficiency of firm location configurations in the...
This thesis considers identification, estimation, and inference in nonparametric settings. Special attention is given to identification with instrumental variables of small support, and in time series via the ergodic assumption. Chapter 1 considers a nonparametric instrumental regression model in which the regressor and instrument are discretely distributed. Here, we strengthen...
This dissertation comprises three essays in distinct areas of economic theory. The first chapter is co-authored with Gregorio Curello. We identify a new and pervasive dynamic agency problem: that of incentivising the prompt disclosure of productive information. To study it, we introduce a model in which a technological breakthrough occurs...
This dissertation contains two studies. In Chapter 1 we investigate the relationshipbetween expansionary credit events and firms’ employment decisions. To overcome the
endogeneity coming from the supply side of credit we exploit the legal and political framework
in Mexico to examine the effects of local governments’ prepayment of loans, a...
This thesis consists of three chapters on macroeconomics with heterogeneous households. In the first chapter, I document that spousal labor supply substantially mitigates the impact of cyclical labor income risk on married households. Motivated by this evidence, I present a macroeconomic model with incomplete markets in which households are heterogeneous...
This dissertation consists of three chapters on topics in economic theory. In Chapter 1, "Subjective Complexity Under Uncertainty", I propose and axiomatize a model of choice under uncertainty in which the size of the partition with respect to which an act is measurable arises endogenously as a measure of subjective...
AbstractThis dissertation consists of three papers examining economic issues in developing countries.
The first paper studies how export activity affects prices in domestic consumer markets. Using extensive, spatially disaggregated data from India’s rice markets and exploiting a natural experiment provided by India’s rice export restrictions during 2007-2011, I show that,...
Economic development is a complex and multi-faceted process. Among its many causes, two are particularly consequential: government and technology. By shaping the landscape of economic incentives, they impact how agents interact, invest, and innovate, which in turn affects the creation of wealth. In this dissertation I explore how this interaction...
This dissertation contains three chapters. In Chapter 1, I study the effects of bank leverage ratio restrictions in a general equilibrium model of the macroeconomy where lenders can anticipate bank runs. This framework allows the analysis of the tradeoffs associated with bank capital requirements - while unlimited leverage allows capital...
This dissertation is a collection of three studies on topics in economic history and labor economics, in Italy and the United States. The chapters are ordered chronologically, based on the period of interest. In the first chapter, I investigate the causes and consequences of public spending on primary education in...
When demand is volatile and uncertain, prices often cannot adequately respond to demand shifts because these shifts are not known when prices are set. In this dissertation, I use the hotel industry--- an industry with a high degree of demand uncertainty and capacity constraints, which amplify the cost of setting...
Recognizing the significance of social interactions in shaping human behavior and development, policies and programs often rely on peers and social relationships as mechanisms for inducing positive change. Yet, even in randomized control trials, social spillover can make an effective program appear ineffective, and measuring peer effects poses identification...
This dissertation studies three aspects of health insurance market regulation and design. Chapter 1 (which is joint work with Steve Cicala and Ethan Leiber) studies a regulatory mechanism used to constrain insurer market power. The mechanism targets health insurers' Medical Loss Ratio, which is the share of premiums spent on...
This dissertation addresses questions in the fields of household finance and corporate finance. In Chapter 1, I use a quasi-experiment in Norway to examine how households respond to capital taxation. The introduction of a new wealth assessment methodology in 2010 led to geographic discontinuities in household exposure to wealth taxes,...
I analyze a new mechanism through which changes in aggregate income can result in changes in the labor income distribution. This mechanism arises from heterogeneity in the expenditure elasticity of different sectors and in their employment composition. Once total income increases the mechanism suggests that consumption will be re-allocated towards...
Perhaps because of the influence of the central limit theorem, it is common for scientists to assume distributions in the real world are singly peaked and unimodal. However, many quantities in nature are actually better represented by multimodal distributions. One must provide an explanation for this disconnect between the central...