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...
Conventional methods in industrial organization assume that firms are strategically sophisticated and set prices as best responses to their competitive environment. In the first two chapters of this dissertation, I use a detailed dataset of retail and wholesale prices from the newly legalized cannabis industry in Washington state to show...
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 thesis investigates various aspects of productivity. In the first chapter I investigate the role of consumer demand in generating productivity dispersion. In particular, I study how differences in consumer preferences across the household income distribution generate dispersion in markups across the Indian manufacturing sector. I find that this consumer...
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...
Many estimation and inference procedures rely on asymptotic approximations for quantities that are unknown to researchers. While often convenient, such approximations can be poor in practice, even when the number of observations is ostensibly large. One response is to eschew asymptotics in favor of finite sample bounds. While remarkable progress...
This dissertation contains two chapters. The first one is on microenterprises in developing countries and how they face competition from large corporations. The second one is on estimating the causal effect of childcare availability on the formation and persistence of gender gaps in the Mexican labor market. The first chapter...
This dissertation explores two topics in macroeconomics related to aggregation assumptions and microfoundations. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the representative agent aggregation assumption in the context of open economies, using both an empirical as well as a theoretical approach. Chapter 3 on the other hand, deals with the microfoundations...
Contest theory is an area of game theory that studies environments in which agents make sunk investments in order to get a prize. These investments could be money, effort, time, etc. Contest theory is used to study a wide range of applications, like political contests, research and development, advertisement campaigns,...