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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
This dissertation investigates how public disclosure of quality information affects the behavior of firms. The first chapter uses a quality disclosure policy, the Nursing Home Quality Initiative (NHQI), to examine how quality "report cards" affect firms' choices of multidimensional product quality. I show that after the introduction of NHQI: (1)...
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 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...
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...