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)...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
This dissertation examines three empirical questions related to human capital in developing countries. Chapter 1 studies the educational and labor market impacts of the telesecundarias, Mexican secondary schools that use televisions to deliver instruction. In areas where there is an insufficient supply of qualified teachers, delivering instruction through technology may...
As the global population grows, consumption of water, energy, and food will also increase, placing stresses on these sectors, raising the importance of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus (WEFN). However, operation of WEFN systems are currently not sustainable. It is thus crucial to design WEFN systems to be sustainable from local to...
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...