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,...