Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Essays In Microeconomics, Lintao Ye

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation has four chapters. The first chapter studies the testable implications of stable weighted (hedonic) coalitions. The second chapter explores an extension of Bayesian persuasion where the receiver can acquire additional information after receiving information from the sender. The third chapter studies observable implications when a decision-maker endogenously forms consideration sets. The last chapter examines weighted network formation where agents have social status concerns. Omitted proofs in each chapter are presented in the last section of each chapter.

In the first chapter, we study the testable implications of a stable profile of weighted coalitions. We then apply our result …

Essays On Market Structure, Business Cycles And Monetary Economics, Ke Chao

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What contributes to the persistence of economic recessions? How should policy respond to economic crises? The dissertation sheds some new light upon these questions in three chapters. The first chapter explores how market concentration affects business cycles. I build a model featuring the dynamic strategic competition between a forward-looking large firm and a continuum of heterogeneous entrepreneurs who are financially constrained. In the model, the elasticity of demand and the optimal markup of the large firm are determined by the degree of concentration and dynamic strategic considerations. I show that the effect of concentration depends on how the shock alters …

Gender-Targeted Policies, Women's Empowerment, And Intrahousehold Inequality, Andrea Maria Flores

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A growing number of development policies increasingly target women as beneficiaries or grant protections to women under the premise that monetary resources in the hands of mothers are more likely to be spent on children's human capital than monetary resources in the hands of fathers. This dissertation explores how observed household responses to these policies can be effectively attributed to their impact on households' decision-making structure. The first two chapters empirically and theoretically explore whether the 2002 urban expansion of Mexico's Progresa/Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program was effective at simultaneously empowering mothers and increasing household investments in children's human capital. …

Essays On Decision Theory, Edward Honda

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation provides three chapters on decision theory. The main purpose is to consider how economists can rationalize or explain the choices that are being made by decision makers in the economy. For example, when we observe certain substitution patterns among products in a market, we may be interested in questions like why such a pattern arises or what such behavior may tell us about substitution patterns among other similar products. Therefore, all of the chapters focus on writing mathematical models that can help explain the choice behaviors we may observe.The first two chapters focus mainly on what is sometimes …

Household Behavior And Taxation: A Focus On The Labor Market, Mariana Odio Zuniga

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The decision-making process within the household is a significant component to be taken into consideration for policy design in both developed and developing economies. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on understanding how joint-household behavior and taxation impact the labor market and intergenerational mobility. To this end, Chapters 1 and 2, focus on how joint-household behavior and taxation impact the formal-informal sector composition in Brazil. Meanwhile, Chapter 3 analyses the role of taxation, child expenditures, and family structure on intergenerational mobility of educational outcomes.

Among the most significant challenges of the labor market in developing countries is reducing high informality rates, which …

Law And Decisions In Corporations, Xinyu Hou

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies the impact of corporate laws and bankruptcy laws on decisions in corporationsfrom a theoretical perspective. Chapter 1 studies the impact of liability rules on firms’ choices of care (affecting the frequency of tort damages) and scale (level of output) at the extensive and intensive margins. Chapter 2 focuses on gambling using derivatives, made more available by recent changes in the bankruptcy law granting repos and other derivatives “superpriority,” which is exemption from the automatic stay and clawback in bankruptcy.

Limited liability is a birth right given by law to corporations, LLCs, and to differing extents specialforms of …

Essays On The Higher Education Market And Financial Aid Policies, Yuan Huang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the dissertation is to study the role of market structure and education policy on the efficiency and distribution outcomes in the U.S. college market. Through economic modeling and empirical analysis, I aim to assess the effectiveness of existing and potential education policies in enhancing human capital while ensuring equity in access to high-quality education.

The dissertation consists of two chapters. In the first chapter, I study the effects of college market power and Federal financial subsidy on the market equilibrium outcomes and the distribution of economic surplus, using a structural model that incorporates heterogeneous students' demand for …

Modernist Amateur Economists: Heterodox Economic Theory And British Literary Modernism, Samuel Smith

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Modernist Amateur Economists: Heterodox Economic Theory and British Literary Modernism, I argue that a range of British writers of literary modernism responded to a moment of institutional and economic instability by engaging with heterodox economic theories in their literary works. Paying close attention to the institutional history of the academic disciplines of Literary Studies and Economics and to the state of heterodox economic theorization in the first half of the twentieth century, I assemble a group of writers I term “Modernist Amateur Economists,” who rejected the tendency of professional economists to abstract economic questions from broader cultural contexts. In …

Essays On Information And Liquidity, Swaminathan Balasubramaniam

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The 2008 financial crisis has highlighted the challenges faced by financial systems in aggregating information, ensuring coordination among various market participants and providing adequate liquidity. In this backdrop, the three chapters of the dissertation explore (i) the role of disagreement in enabling communication and trade among strategic investors (ii) how uncertainty about what others know could be exploited in preventing coordination failures (ii) pricing liquid and illiquid assets in response to unforeseen liquidity demand.

When do competing traders, endowed with different pieces of information pertaining to a security payoff, exchange information before trading? The first essay shows that competing traders …

Peer Interactions In Decision Making, Yijun Chen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The broad research topic of my dissertation is individual’s decision making in the presence of peer interactions. I focus on empirical settings where individuals are connected with others in the peer network, and through peer interactions, their decisions are interdependent. Peer network structures in terms of who is connected with whom and the mechanisms of peer interactions convey valuable information on the decision making process. I employ quantitative empirical methods to uncover the information embedded in peer networks, provide insights on the mechanisms of peer interactions, and generate peer-network based managerial implications.

Chapter 1 studies how participants collaborate to compete …

Essays On Diversity And Public Policy, Saumya Deojain

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is divided into three chapters, each of which explores a particular aspect of the effect of socio-political institutions on cooperation and conflict between diverse individuals. The first chapter shows how the relationship between diversity and cooperation changes with social norms. The second chapter investigates the relationship between cultural conflict and government regulation. The third chapter describes conditions on the distribution of preferences of legislators that allow legislative coalitions to induce a legislative gridlock and block reform.

In the first chapter, the notion of a `norm of compromise' is introduced and its importance for cooperation among agents with diverse …

Essays On Crime And Public Policy, Yuki Otsu

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters.

The first chapter analyzes the impact of sanctuary policies on criminal behavior. Sanctuary policies may attract criminals and lower the opportunity cost of crime, while these policies produce a spiral of trust that supports police and raises informal social control over crime. I estimate the dynamic effects of sanctuary policies on crime rates at city level. This chapter finds (1) no evidence that sanctuary policies cause an increase in any crime, (2) some evidence that they may lead to a decrease in property crime, and the effect is strengthened over time after the adoption, …

Essays On Empirical Microeconomics: Effects Of Law Intervention, Tsung-Yu Ho

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Do Car Seat Laws Cause People to Buy Larger Cars? In this chapter, I estimate the effects of car seat laws on larger vehicle ownerships. Over the past few decades in the United States, the market share of vans and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) has increased rapidly. This increase coincides with the widespread adoption of laws that mandate car safety seats for children. Utilizing variation across states in the timing of these laws and their age requirements, we show that car seat laws cause parents to move away from sedans and to choose larger vehicles. We estimate that car seat …

Essays On Human Capital Investment, Dohun Kim

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first two chapters of my dissertation paper detail the role of work-inducing welfare policies on single mother’s human capital formation. These chapters focus on the two most important work-inducing policies that have transformed the welfare program in the United States from an out-work to an in-work assistance program: (1) welfare reform in 1996, imposed strict work requirements and time limits on the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was the biggest monthly cash assistance program for single parents; (2) in 1993, the government expanded the Earned Income Tax Credits in a historical rate to subsidize earnings for …

Safekeeping: Slavery, Capitalism, And The Carceral State In Washington, D.C., 1830-1863, Brandon Wilson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By the 1830s, incarceration emerged as a two-pronged solution for racial control and economic expansion. Local and federal government built jails around the District of Columbia to detain "rowdy negro boys," men, and women, as a means to stymie their rapid movement and fuel a burgeoning domestic slave trade. People were jailed, fined, and often sold to the Deep South, providing a wellspring of capital for enslavers, justified through the lens of criminality. For the crime of petty theft, missing free papers, or in at least one case "using foul language," black people of the Washington region could find themselves …

Essays On Institutions Governing Marriage And Outcomes Over The Life Cycle, Sounak Thakur

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I study how institutions that govern marriage can affect marital choices and economic decisionmaking within marriage. The institutions that I study encompass both formal institutions, like laws that govern family formation, or more informal ones, like customs mandating the amount and direction of transfers at marriage or the level of commitment within marriage. This thesis consists of three chapters, and each chapter tackles a specific research problem under the broad research agenda. In the first chapter of my thesis, I study how changes in divorce and property division laws affect the rates of marriage formation, marital sorting …

Essays On Macro And Financial Economics, Linyi Cao

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nurturing Young Public Firms over Real Business Cycles. In this paper, I develop a theory of financial intermediation in a general equilibrium environment, to study the interactions between households, financial intermediation, and entrepreneurs over real business cycles. In the model, the financial intermediary, who resembles real-life private equity (PE) groups and investment bankers, works as a nurturer of young public firms. It performs screening and sorting on entrepreneurs, then allocates resources to them, borrowed from the households. However, the effort intensity in screening decreases when the financial intermediary is flooded by resources, so do the average quality of financial services …

Essays On Money And Banking, Macroeconomics, And Political Economy, David Lindequist

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis consists of three self-contained articles. In the first article "The Common Currency Channel of Risk Sharing", I propose a new channel of international risk sharing: the common currency channel. I show theoretically that the central bank of a currency union can use the common currency to insure member countries against consumption risk from idiosyncratic productivity shocks. A trade-off between risk-sharing and moral hazard emerges: a central bank which enables risk sharing induces countries to free ride on each other’s production efforts. I study this trade-off and derive rules for a central bank striking the optimal balance between insurance …

Information And The Risk-Neutral Probability, Essays In Financial Econometrics, Michael G. Zdinak

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This article introduces a new high-frequency analysis of six years of data for options written on the S&P 500 and traded on the Chicago Board of Exchange. I quantify in real time the information contained in the probability measure implied by option prices, using concepts developed in information theory. Here information is analogous to a reduction in uncertainty surrounding the future price of the underlying security. A simple nonparametric estimator allows us to measure the amount of information gained as an option approaches maturity. I then test for jumps in the expectation of said future price. I find the intraday …

Essays On Consumer Online Search And Digital Content Consumption, Shuo Zhang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I apply empirical quantitative methods to marketing research and investigate consumer online search and purchase patterns, as well as digital consumption behaviors and the potential implication for marketing managers. This dissertation consists of two chapters. Chapter 1 studies the consumer shopping channel choice when they search and shop for products online. Mobile phones have emerged as a major channel for online shopping as an alternative to PCs. Despite more consumers using mobile phones, the conversion rate on the mobile channel is lower than that on the PC channel. In this study, we propose a structural consumer search-and-purchase …

Essays On Asset Pricing: A Model Comparison Perspective, Lingxiao Zhao

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I focus on theoretical and empirical asset pricing from a Bayesian model comparison perspective. In the first Chapter, revisiting the framework of Barillas and Shanken (2018), BS henceforth, we show that the Bayesian marginal likelihood-based model comparison method in that paper is unsound: the priors on the nuisance parameters across models must satisfy a change of variable property for densities that is violated by the Jeffreys priors used in the BS method. Extensive simulation exercises confirm that the BS method performs unsatisfactorily. We derive a new class of improper priors on the nuisance parameters, starting from a …

Essays On Growth, Development, And Human Capital, Juan Ignacio Vizcaino

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Skills, Technologies and Development. I study how the productivity of skilled and unskilled labor varies with development. Using harmonized, occupational labor market outcomes for a broad set of countries across the development spectrum, I document that employment in high-skill occupations, or jobs that are relatively more intensive in non-routine cognitive tasks, grows with development. In addition, the income of workers in high-skill occupations falls relative to earnings in low-skill occupations as countries grow richer. To understand the forces driving these findings, I develop a stylized model of the labor market across development. In the model, labor productivity is determined endogenously …

Essays On Marketing Strategy, Chang Liu

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I apply game-theoretical methods in the context of marketing research and investigate the effects of stylized facts in behavioral economics. Chapter 1 studies the effects of managerial optimism on firms’ performance. Research has shown that many managers and entrepreneurs tend to be optimistic and are inclined to believe that negative shocks happen to them less frequently than to others. However, there is also evidence suggesting that such optimism is often inaccurate in reality and managerial optimism can lead to the failure of a company. We develop a game-theoretic model to investigate the impact of managerial optimism on …

Essays In Applied Microeconomics, Chuan Chen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first chapter of this dissertation quantifies to what extent business accelerators can reduce the venture market frictions for early-stage startups. With a novel non-transferable utility two-sided matching framework, this study shows that business accelerators can close the gaps due to entrepreneurs' gender and experience, but not so much for the differences due to locations. The second chapter studies the relative importance of screening compared to training in the total value creation by business accelerators from the perspectives of market participants. The estimates suggest that the value created by screening, which reflects through the improvement of financing in short-term after …

Essays On Macro-Finance Affine Term Structure Models, Biancen Xie

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I focus on theoretical affine term structure models and the development of Bayesian econometric methods to estimate them.

In the first Chapter, we address the question of which unspanned macroeconomic factors are the best in the class of macro-finance Gaussian affine term structure models. To answer this question, we extend Joslin, Priebsch, and Singleton (2014) in two dimensions. First, following Ang and Piazzesi (2003) and Chib and Ergashev (2009), three latent factors, instead of the first three principal components of the yield curve, are used to represent the level, slope and curvature of the yield curve. Second …

Essays On Macroeconomics, Helu Jiang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cohabitation, Marriage, and Fertility: Divergent Patterns for Different Education Groups. The United States has been experiencing a long-term decline in the rates of marriage and fertility and a steady rise in cohabitation. Contradicting the prediction of standard theory that emphasizes the opportunity cost of childrearing from labor market and gender specialization, skilled females have experienced a less pronounced drop in marriage and fertility, while unskilled females have experienced a more evident increase in cohabitation. I propose the following mechanisms to understand this puzzle: for high-skilled females, the higher implicit return of investment in children’s human capital compensates for part of …

Essays On Microeconomic Theory, Geyu Yang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters on topics in microeconomic theory. In Chapter 1, I study reputation effects under uncertain monitoring. I examine a repeated game

between a long-run player and a series of short-run opponents. The long-run player

can either be a strategic type or a commitment type that plays the same action in

every period. The modeling innovation is that the short-run player is unsure about

the monitoring structure. The uncertainty about the monitoring structure introduces

new challenges to reputation building because there may not be a direct relationship

between the distribution of signals and the long-run player’s …

Essays On Econometrics And Rational Choice, Junnan He

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Decision and choice theory is a topic of interest in both econometrics and microeconomic theory. We contribute to the theory of decision under both contexts, that is, the theory of model selection in econometrics, and the theory of rational decision in microeconomics.

There is a long-lasting theoretical interest in model selection. More recently, research on sparse estimators, a class of estimation methods that select and estimate important parameters simultaneously, has been the central focus on model selection. The methods become especially relevant when the problem is of high-dimensional nature. Theoretically, sparse methods can perform well when the true data generating …

Three Essays On Separation Of Powers And Competitive Elections, Myunghoon Kang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how separation of powers and competitive elections affect the policymaking process at its various stages. First, I explore how the super-majoritarian rule in the legislature, which is the consequence of separation of powers, affects votersˆa elec

toral decisions, which in turn indirectly affects the policy outcome. I demonstrate that the super-majoritarian rule of the legislative policymaking process creates not only a legislative gridlock but also incentives that lead some districts to strategically elect more ideologically extreme delegates in certain circumstances, which expands the legislative gridlock region. Second, I examine when competitive elections can restrain the president’s unilateral …

Essays On Macroeconomics, Sangmin Aum

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation investigates how technological progress shapes economy. Technological changes have heterogeneous effects on economic agents as they are often biased toward certain tasks or sectoral activities. The dissertation aims at understanding the sources of heterogeneity and their impacts on aggregate outcomes, focusing on economic growth and labor allocation.

The first chapter investigates a bi-directional relation between technology and occupational structure (job allocation). Jobs have polarized in the U.S. since at least the 1980s, but the growth of high-skill jobs has been stagnated since 2000s (skill demand reversal). I document that software innovation has increased compared to equipment innovation and …