In this thesis, I study the effects of spillovers in all-pay auctions and the effects ofregulating wages and hours on the labor market. In the first chapter, I study a model of
asymmetric all-pay auctions with spillovers. In this model, players compete for a prize, and
the sunk effort players...
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 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...
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 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 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...
``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...
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...
Increasingly, governments contract with private firms to provide publicly funded or subsidized goods and services, ranging from defense contracts, social insurance programs to small business loans. In such publicly funded, privately provided markets, governments set specific rules and policies to allow efficient provision or allocation of goods and services. Given...
Social networks play a crucial role in developing economies. One of their most important functions is facilitating the flow of information, particularly about the efficacy of new technologies. This dissertation explores three aspects of this research agenda. First, I study how economists can estimate the structure of a social network...
This dissertation has three chapters. Chapter one evaluates the effects of Short-Time Workin Germany during the great financial crisis. Chapter two describes how British inventors
during the industrial revolution worked on more central technologies. This in turn resulted
in faster growth. Chapter three builds on a novel patent data set...
How do exporting firms react to changes in the cost of credit? To answer this question, we exploit an exogenous variation in banking regulation which increases the cost of financ- ing for exports in the European Union. Using a unique dataset which combines customs, firm-level, and credit registry data on...
This dissertation studies three markets with regulated prices. I focus on how these regulations shape the behavior of firms along non-price dimensions. Chapter 1 studies the effects of community rating regulations in the US individual health insurance exchange market. In this market, the Affordable Care Act established community rating areas...
Chapter 1. Caste, Bureaucracy, and the Limits to Political Affirmative Action. The aim of political affirmative action policies is to ensure that disadvantaged groups are represented in their governments and, in turn, that laws preferred by this group are more likely to be instituted. Often, however, they have not been...
Technology that processes text, audio and video, as well as location data, has revolutionized many industries by enabling innovative operations for customer retention. To retain transactions for a platform and viewers for advertisers, this dissertation leverages novel digital tools to analyze consumer behavior, proposes original economic frameworks to guide platform...
In Chapter 1, I analyze optimal capital structure using a model in which firms issue securities in order to (1) finance investments in operations and (2) recapitalize the firm. In this trade-off model, firms balance the tax benefits of debt against the costs of financial distress. Key to the analysis,...
Monetary Policy plays a crucial role in modern economies by supporting price, financial and economic stability. Its efficacy, however, exhibits variation both over time and across space leading to partially unpredictable and inconsistent outcomes. This thesis shows that the variation in the efficacy of monetary policy crucially relates to the...
The first chapter of this dissertation, coauthored with Martin Eichenbaum and Riccardo Bianchi-Vimercati, addresses the question: how sensitive is the power of fiscal policy at the ZLB to the assumption of rational expectations? We do so through the lens of a standard NK model in which people are level-k thinkers....
This dissertation consists of three essays in microeconomic theory. In the first two chapters, I study a class of partnerships where partners can exit and continue to free-ride on the remaining partners' efforts. The crucial force to deter players from strategic exiting is the ripple effect that it may trigger...
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....
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 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...
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 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...
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...
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...
This thesis consists of three chapters on macroeconomics with heterogeneous households. In the first chapter, I document that spousal labor supply substantially mitigates the impact of cyclical labor income risk on married households. Motivated by this evidence, I present a macroeconomic model with incomplete markets in which households are heterogeneous...
This dissertation consists of three chapters on topics in economic theory. In Chapter 1, "Subjective Complexity Under Uncertainty", I propose and axiomatize a model of choice under uncertainty in which the size of the partition with respect to which an act is measurable arises endogenously as a measure of subjective...
AbstractThis dissertation consists of three papers examining economic issues in developing countries.
The first paper studies how export activity affects prices in domestic consumer markets. Using extensive, spatially disaggregated data from India’s rice markets and exploiting a natural experiment provided by India’s rice export restrictions during 2007-2011, I show that,...
Economic development is a complex and multi-faceted process. Among its many causes, two are particularly consequential: government and technology. By shaping the landscape of economic incentives, they impact how agents interact, invest, and innovate, which in turn affects the creation of wealth. In this dissertation I explore how this interaction...
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...
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...
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...
I study three topics in applied microeconomics. My first chapter concerns the effect of daily school start times on academic achievement in Florida. Exploiting the sharp discontinuity in school start time relative to sunrise, I track children who move between schools on either side of the time zone boundary in...