This thesis comprises three essays addressing theory and evidence on the household response to tax-favored saving incentive schemes, with a particular emphasis on household risk taking. The US tax code and related regulatory institutions offer a variety of incentives to encourage US households to save and participate in risky investment...
I study several aspects of a game-theoretic model of persuasion. A speaker attempts to persuade a listener to take an action which is highly ranked by the speaker. The listener knows the speaker's preference but is uncertain about what the speaker can say. The listener can commit to a persuasion...
Social networks play an important role in the labor market. Various surveys document that 30-60% of jobs are found through friends or relatives. To better understand how networks operate in the labor market, I examine how networks that were formed involuntarily as a result of the American Civil War and...
In this dissertation we analyze, using standard formal imperfect competition models from the literature, two central public policy issues in the deregulated wholesale electricity markets. The first issue is the regulatory rules around generator ownership of transmission companies or transmission rights in general. The second issue we look into is...
Should the government subsidize entry to promote competition? In theory, free entry does not guarantee the socially optimum number of entrants. In differentiated product markets, free entry can result either in excessive or insufficient entry. Quantifying this inefficiency and identifying the optimal subsidy level require an empirical framework that combines...
The patent system seeks to strike the ideal balance between competition and the rate of innovation – not to maximize innovation unconditionally. Clearly there must be limits on the manner and degree to which patents are used to diminish competition. A critical complication, however, is that this boundary is often...
This dissertation comprises three essays on industrial organization. In Chapter 1 I study the productivity effects of corporate diversification, where productivity is understood as a measure of sales per input at the productive unit level, and diversified firms are defined as firms that operate in different industries. I develop and...
Both chapters of this dissertation relate to the aggregate value of corporations in an economy. In particular, they relate to the ratio of the aggregate total market value of corporations over the replacement cost of their recorded capital. The first chapter introduces a model that can explain why this ratio...
This dissertations consists of three chapters. The first chapter is on the topic of environmental economics and studies the question of the effects of air pollution on students’ school absences, finding significant and positive effects for air pollution, and PM10 in particular, on school absences. The second chapter is on...
We argue that a country’s level of wealth inequality can be viewed as a reflection of the quality of its housing rental market. Using the ECB’s Household Finance and Consump- tion Survey (HFCS), we document that the aggregate homeownership rate and various measures of wealth inequality are negatively correlated across...
The first chapter of this dissertation develops a two-stage inference method for structural parameters in the linear instrumental variables model. In the first stage, a new statistic is used to detect whether the correlation between the structural error and the reduced form error is small. In the second stage, a...
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,...
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...
The fact that informational asymmetries impose a significant barrier in path of smooth functioning of markets has been well known in Economics since the 1970s. Communication and information exchange allow to mitigate these barriers to a certain extent. The existing Economic literature allows to get a good grasp of static...
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...
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...
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...
Regulations often impose quality restrictions on firms, which in turn can influence prices and welfare in a theoretically ambiguous manner. To study such quality restrictions, my coauthor and I examine the Wright Amendment by analyzing its full repeal in 2014 as a natural experiment, and the analysis is documented in...
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...
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 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,...
This thesis consists of three papers studying applied microeconomics and economic history. The chapters are broadly organized around two different topics: the political effects of media and the consequences of disruption to human capital. In the first chapter, joint with Susan Ou, we study the role of media in the...
In this dissertation I examine issues related to uncertainty and robustness in game theory. In Chapter 1 a strategic setting is analyzed where players face Knightian uncertainty about the strategic choices of their opponents. That is, in contrast to the usual Bayesian framework and in line with experimental evidence, players...
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 dissertation is composed by three chapters. Chapter one is about productivity hysterisis in the U.S. after the Great Recession. The United States has been experiencing a slowdown in productivity growth for more than a decade. I exploit geographic variation across U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) to investigate the link...
This dissertation consists of three chapters about education policies in developing countries. The first chapter examines two extrapolation approaches to make out-of-sample predictions using cash transfer experiments in Malawi and Morocco. The second chapter evaluates India's workfare program in terms of targeting efficiency and effects on school enrollment, in comparison...
Economic and political processes are heavily intertwined. Political processes put constraints on economic activity while economic development influences the way the political system operates. This interconnection is especially tight in developing countries and transition economies with less secure property rights, less stable political institutions, and more rapid economic changes. In...
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 focuses on two topics in international macroeconomics: the identification of the international spillovers of US interest rate shocks, and the study of its main transmission channels. In Chapter 1, I present the Spillover Puzzle of US Monetary Policy - the fact that in response to a US interest...
This dissertation focuses on two topics: macroeconomic implications of consumer inertia, and sovereign debt. In Chapter 1, I explore the role of consumer inertia---persistence in households' consumption choices---as a driver of the rise in corporate profits and decline in the share of young firms in the US economy during the...
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...
In this dissertation I analyze how population aging and political considerations can affect the conduct of fiscal policy and the management of sovereign debt. In Chapter 1 I focus on the impact of an aging population. In Chapter 2 I consider the effects of political uncertainty. How an aging population...
In Chapter 1 I characterize sharp bounds on treatment effects under data combination with instrumental variables. Data combination in this paper refers to having multiple samples drawn from the same population in which observations cannot be linked across samples. I allow for subsets of the outcome, treatment, instrument and covariates...
This dissertation contains three empirical studies in economic history and labor economics. The first chapter discusses two sources of historical data on work stoppages in the United States: the Third Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1888) and the Tenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1896). It...
This dissertation explores the economics of health and housing policies. In the first chapter, I discuss information disclosure policies in healthcare. Information disclosure programs can help consumers make better choices, but the consumers who respond the most to the information may not benefit the most or generate the most savings...
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...
In Chapter 1, I investigate whether physical capital anchors the spatial distribution of economic activity and how capital destruction affects local economic activity in the short and the long term. I investigate these questions by examining the 1975 frost that damaged coffee trees in the Brazilian state of Paraná. I...
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 comprises three essays in distinct areas of economic theory, yet all are related to experimentation and learning. In the first chapter, I study how organizations assign tasks to identify the best candidate to promote among a pool of workers. Task allocation and workers’ motivation interact through the organization’s...