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,...