Chapter 1: If patients can be persuaded to switch between licensed providers on the basis of authoritative opinions, policy-makers can harness such reporting as a tool to implement incentives for high-quality care. I employ the landmark Flexner Report (1910) medical school evaluations to show that existing consumer beliefs and market-specific...
This dissertation contains two topics. The first topic focuses on how to use information design to minimize costs of implementing a policy that guarantees 100% passing rate of all participants by providing enough compensation for the their effort. The second topic explores an auction setting which involves financially distressed business...
This thesis consists of three chapters: two are empirical studies of policy design in small-business lending markets, while the final is a large-scale retrospective of retail mergers. Chapter 1 examines moral hazard in loan guarantee programs. To address credit constraints in small-business lending markets, policymakers frequently rely on loan guarantees,...
This dissertation studies three aspects of healthcare market regulation.
Chapter 1 studies the optimal design of quality scores for health insurance plans. Regulators often generate quality scores to help consumers with limited information about product quality, as in schooling, healthcare, and financial markets. When designing scores, regulators must not only...
Individual responses are an important determinant of public policy effectiveness. Development policies often try to remove barriers that limit the ability to make the preferred choices, hoping that this will lead to prosperity at the individual and aggregate levels. However, removing some, but not all, barriers can lead to undesirable...
In most markets, consumers of goods and services have vastly more options available to them than they will consider closely. At the point of making a decision, consumers are choosing between only a small subset (i.e., a consideration set) of all possible alternatives. The preceding process that forms these consideration...
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...
Political stability is fundamental for economic development. Understanding the determinants and consequences of political stability is thus an important topic in development economics and political economy. This dissertation studies how political or economic instability influences economic development and, in turn, how economic factors influence political stability. In Chapter 1, I...
This dissertation comprises three essays that study dynamic decisions under uncertainty--in particular, ambiguity. The first two chapters develop new decision models that emphasize the role of making statistical inferences in decisions. The third chapter highlights, in the context of persuasion, how different decision models can lead to distinct conclusions in...
The first chapter of this dissertation looks at strategic complementarities among investors inpooled investment vehicles where fund managers and investors have different objectives. Could
lessening strategic complementarities among the investors of a fund make investing in the fund
less appealing? Exploiting the 2014 Reform of the money market mutual fund...
This dissertation consists of three essays on housing and macroeconomics. The first chapter explores the impact of demographic change on housing price using a heterogeneous agent overlapping generations model. The second chapter examines the relationship between the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) and the housing choice. The third chapter presents...
This dissertation consists of three chapters on empirical industrial organization. The first chapter explores how a seller uses a public reserve price to signal her private info about the object’s value to the bidder. The second chapter studies how a behavioral consumer preference called “price reference effect” could overturn the...
In the first Chapter of this Dissertation, I develop an integrated reasoning model of expectations formation to describe how people learn the effects of novel macroeconomic policies. My model of expectations has two key elements. First, people have a limited ability to understand the general-equilibrium effects of a new policy....
Chapter 1 proposes and tests a model where a country aligns with a foreign power to obtain its support and reduce its geopolitical risks, which also depend on the country's exposure to the other foreign powers. We show that the country's alignment with a given foreign power is increasing in...
This thesis revisits classic optimal tax theory, recognizing that most people live in multi-person households. We derive optimal tax schedules for married agents, seriously taking the distinction between interpersonal and interhousehold inequality. After showing how individual-oriented utilitarianism typically leads to a misalignment between the households’ and the government’s objectives, which...
This dissertation consists of three chapters that each study the interaction between government policy and real estate markets. All three chapters are connected by a broad interest in renters, landlords, and rental markets. Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between place-based policies and real estate and rental markets empirically by studying...
The three essays composing this dissertation are unified by their focus on the macroeconomic aspects of economic development. In Chapter one titled "Land Property Rights, Financial Frictions, and Resource Allocation in Developing Countries'', I study the effects of weak land property rights and limited access to finance on aggregate productivity...
Models of recursive preferences are commonly associated with a preference for early resolution of uncertainty, often regarded as an important economic channel in applications. This dissertation provides a different understanding of recursive preferences based on attitudes toward correlation, and in particular aversion to intertemporally correlated risks. Part 1 provides a...
Economic activity is mostly performed by groups of agents that form organizations and collectives. In this dissertation I explore the effects of two frictions, namely conflicting preferences and contracting with externalities, on the characteristics of agents that jointly constitute a given organization or collective. First, in many professional environments workers...
This dissertation consists of three chapters on contract theory. In Chapter 1, ``Agency in Hierarchies: Middle Managers and Performance Evaluations'', I study the optimal joint design of incentives and performance rating scales in a principal-manager-worker hierarchy. The principal wants to motivate the manager and the worker to exert unobservable effort....