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...