This dissertation addresses questions in the fields of household finance and corporate finance. In Chapter 1, I use a quasi-experiment in Norway to examine how households respond to capital taxation. The introduction of a new wealth assessment methodology in 2010 led to geographic discontinuities in household exposure to wealth taxes,...
This dissertation comprises three essays in distinct areas of economic theory. The first chapter is co-authored with Gregorio Curello. We identify a new and pervasive dynamic agency problem: that of incentivising the prompt disclosure of productive information. To study it, we introduce a model in which a technological breakthrough occurs...
``Hazy decisions: The effect of dementia on medical decision-making'' \\ I estimate the causal effect of having dementia on the course of treatment for unrelated diseases by leveraging differences in the relative time of onset of dementia and the other condition in a difference-in-differences event-study framework. To demonstrate this approach...
I analyze a new mechanism through which changes in aggregate income can result in changes in the labor income distribution. This mechanism arises from heterogeneity in the expenditure elasticity of different sectors and in their employment composition. Once total income increases the mechanism suggests that consumption will be re-allocated towards...
I examine economic design issues in the realm of dynamic organ allocation for transplantation and behavioral market design/contract theory. The second and third chapters focus on two issues in the design of the U.S. deceased-donor organ allocation system, which represents the majority of transplants performed in the U.S. In contrast...
In this dissertation, I explore how quasi experiments can be used to estimate the causal impact of financial variables on agents’ behavior. Specifically, I analyze three different events that allow me to shed light on the role that financial markets play in decisions made by households, firms, and the government,...
This dissertation consists of three chapters on theoretical and empirical industrial organization. The first chapter highlights a previously unnoticed property of commonlyused discrete choice models, which is that they feature parallel demand curves. The second chapter studies how a behavioral consumer preference with “price reference effect” can overturn the standard...
This dissertation is a wide-range study of the relationships between the three central elements of the production function: technology, capital and its financing, and labor. Chapter 1 analyzes the relationship between labor and recent wave of automation and digitization technologies, showing that while they typically substitute for workers, in several...
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 contains two studies. In Chapter 1 we investigate the relationshipbetween expansionary credit events and firms’ employment decisions. To overcome the
endogeneity coming from the supply side of credit we exploit the legal and political framework
in Mexico to examine the effects of local governments’ prepayment of loans, a...