This dissertations consists of three chapters. The first chapter is on the topic of environmental economics and studies the question of the effects of air pollution on students’ school absences, finding significant and positive effects for air pollution, and PM10 in particular, on school absences. The second chapter is on...
This dissertation investigates how public disclosure of quality information affects the behavior of firms. The first chapter uses a quality disclosure policy, the Nursing Home Quality Initiative (NHQI), to examine how quality "report cards" affect firms' choices of multidimensional product quality. I show that after the introduction of NHQI: (1)...
In the first part of the dissertation, I investigate the nature of retail coupons, a popular tool for non-price competition. The widely expressed view that coupons are primarily a tool to allow price discrimination has received mixed empirical supports. I depart from the static framework of the price discrimination theory...
Chapter 1: (Bounds on the Counterfactual Revenue Distributions in Auctions with Reserve Prices) In first-price auctions with interdependent bidder values, the distributions of private signals and values cannot be uniquely recovered from bids in Bayesian Nash equilibria. Non-identification invalidates structural analyses that rely on exact identification of the model primitives....
The expansion of public education at the beginning of the twentieth century had a profound effect on the American economy. This dissertation explores the impact of changing educational institutions on both individuals and communities with a study of Iowa during its introduction of modern grammar schools and high schools during...
This dissertation studies whether stock mergers creates value for acquirers. The first chapter of this dissertation conducts a comprehensive review of the existing merger literature relevant to this topic. It includes existing merger theories, empirical studies on whether mergers are value destroying or value creating, and methodological issues on empirical...
This dissertation contains three essays that investigate various factors affecting firms' choice of quality in the context of nursing homes.
The first essay examines how strategic interactions with competitors affect quality levels selected by nursing homes. I explore nursing homes' responses to minimum nurse staffing standards imposed in two large...
Ethicity, race and gender play an important role in labor markets; labor market outcomes such as hiring and compensation are very different across different social groups. These differentials are partly the result of differences in productivity and preferences and partly the result of discrimination. Chapter two uses an audit study...
The first chapter of this dissertation studies a continuous-time agency model where the agent controls the drift of the geometric Brownian motion firm size. The changing firm size generates partial incentives, analogous to awarding the agent equity shares according to her continuation payoff. When the agent is as patient as...
The first chapter investigates the offshoring decision from a network capacity investment perspective. We analyze a firm that manufactures two products to serve two geographically separated markets using a common component and two localized final assemblies. Two strategic network design questions arise naturally: (1) Should the common part be produced...