Chapter one investigates the impact of agents' expectations about future fundamental economic disturbances (news) on macroeconomic dynamics. Several intuitive tests provide insight into the information content of the yield curve and its' ability to identify these 'news' disturbances. Bayesian estimation of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model using conventional...
The ready-mix concrete industry is a fascinating laboratory for the study of industry dynamics. Concrete plants produce a single homogeneous product with technology and equipment that has changed little over the last 50 years. Building a plant entails substantial sunk costs since the machinery used to produce ready-mix cannot easily...
Should the government subsidize entry to promote competition? In theory, free entry does not guarantee the socially optimum number of entrants. In differentiated product markets, free entry can result either in excessive or insufficient entry. Quantifying this inefficiency and identifying the optimal subsidy level require an empirical framework that combines...
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...
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...
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...
Game Theory is the branch of applied mathematics that studies the strategic interaction among intelligent agents. So far, standard Game Theory literature has interpreted "intelligent agents" exclusively as "rational agents". This work points out that this interpretation is an important limitation since intelligence consists of more abilities, some of which...
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,...
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...
Households in emerging markets hold significant amounts of dollar deposits while firms have significant amounts of dollar debt. Motivated by the perceived dangers, policymakers often develop regulations to limit dollarization. In this paper, I draw attention to an important benefit of dollarization, which should be taken into account when crafting...