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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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,...
The first two chapters focus on the topic: how efficiently do markets reallocate capital in booms and busts, and what are the effects of policies designed to smooth out fluctuations? I exploit a novel dataset of contracts and projects in the offshore oil and gas industry to examine the role...
This dissertation is a broad study on individual and firm-level financial conditions and their effects on politics. In the first chapter, I study the effect of economic conditions on political polarization using micro-data on house prices, mortgages, and individual political contributions. I argue that shocks to housing wealth --- the...
The world is an increasingly interdependent place. Regions of economic activity are deeply connected with each other through the movement of goods, labor and ideas. This has deep consequence for both the economist and policymaker: in the evaluation of economic activity, an exogenous shock in any given region does not...
Chapter 1 presents analysis comparing the effectiveness of two mechanisms of regulation enforcement: (1) the frequency of inspections and (2) penalties for violations. Recent policy changes regarding enforcement of mining safety regulations are exploited to quantify the effectiveness of each mechanism. It is concluded that increasing the frequency of inspections...
In this dissertation I study the effects of mortgage leverage policies. These policies have become widely used in recent years, both as a macroprudential tool and to protect consumers, yet their effects are still not well understood. In Chapter 1, I show that mortgage leverage rules implemented under the Dodd-Frank...
This dissertation studies three distinct problems in econometrics. Chapter 1 proposes an adaptive randomization procedure for two-stage randomized controlled trials. The method uses data from a first-wave experiment in order to determine how to stratify in a second wave of the experiment, where the objective is to minimize the variance...
In this dissertation, I cover three different topics in macroeconomics. In Chapter 1, I explore the macroeconomic implications of an increase in business competition and its micro transmission channels. In Chapter 2, I document a rise in savings and cash holdings by non-financial corporations across advanced economies and show that...
This dissertation proposes an oracle efficient estimator in the context of a sparse linear model. Chapter 1 introduces the penalty and the estimator that optimizes a penalized least squares objective. Unlike existing methods, the penalty is differentiable – once, and hence the estimator does not engage in model selection. This...
This dissertation examines three distinct empirical questions in macroeconomics and finance. Chapter 1 studies the reasons why households file for bankruptcy. The debt relief households obtain in bankruptcy provides insurance against wealth losses, but also distorts borrower incentives to repay debt, discouraging lending. Understanding how bankruptcy filings respond to changes...
In the first chapter I introduce the ideas that link selling information to surplus extraction. In my environment the seller may be uncertain about how much the buyer both has already learned before contracting with the seller (belief types) and is able to learn after contracting with the seller (information...
This dissertation explores our understanding of corporate credit ratings. In the first chapter I examine the issue of split ratings. S&P and Moody’s often differ in their initial ratings at bond issuance, producing what is referred to as a split rating. The consensus view in the literature and in practice...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
This thesis explores questions in labor economics and applied microeconomics, with particular focus on issues that have implications for public policy. The first essay estimates the Frisch elasticity, sometimes known as the wage elasticity of labor supply in response to anticipated wage changes. Despite its importance in macroeconomic and public...
This dissertation presents research on the game theory of political power, both between and within nations. It first revisits a classical distinction between three different types of power or influence: information, rewards and threats. By presenting a binary-action Principal-Agent problem which incorporates the essential ingredients of all three types of...
Digitization has led to dramatic cost reductions and reshaped both what and how products are sold. This dissertation examines the impact of digitization on the behavior of market intermediaries that bring together producers and consumers. Our empirical context is the transition from 35mm film to digital cinema technologies in the...
This dissertation contains three essays. In the first essay, "The Role of Connections in Congressional Lawmaking", I investigate the role of connections in congressional lawmaking by studying how legislators' deaths impact their peers' capacity to sponsor and advance bills in the U.S. House of Representatives. I focus on legislators who...
This thesis contains three chapters studying macroeconomics and trade. The chapters are organized into two topics: inflation expectations and perceptions, and the effect of trade intermediation on economic activity. In the first chapter, I investigate whether households are significantly harmed by inaccurate beliefs about inflation. The chapter analyzes two established...
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...
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...
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 dissertation studies three aspects of health insurance market regulation and design. Chapter 1 (which is joint work with Steve Cicala and Ethan Leiber) studies a regulatory mechanism used to constrain insurer market power. The mechanism targets health insurers' Medical Loss Ratio, which is the share of premiums spent on...
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,...
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...
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 addresses three distinct topics in development economics. The first chapter assesses the role of entry and exit in the measurement of misallocation in India. In the last decade, misallocation of productive inputs across firms has been proposed as a primary driver of differences in aggregate productivity over time...
This thesis contains three chapters studying the evolution of the American higher education landscape, the different forces that shaped their organization, and how they, in turn, influenced human capital accumulation. The chapters are organized into three time periods: 1850-1900, 1910-1940, and 1980-2010. In the first chapter, joint with Heyu Xiong,...
In this dissertation I examine how the government should respond to sovereign risk and show that it has implications on the optimal behavior of the government. In Chapter 1, I look into international reserve management. In Chapter 2, I analyze the effects of sovereign risk on the size of fiscal...
In Chapter 1, we construct a test for hypotheses about the effect of a recent policy change, when a single unit is treated and there are several control units, with time series observations of each available before and after the policy change. The goal is to incorporate information provided by...
Pharmaceutical companies pay more than $2 billion to physicians every year. Most of these payments are for food and beverage, speaking, honoraria, consulting, and travel and lodging, which are termed “general payments.” These payments have come under increased scrutiny as critics of pharmaceutical promotion argue that they influence prescribing in...
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...
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...