This dissertation is a collection of three studies on topics in economic history and labor economics, in Italy and the United States. The chapters are ordered chronologically, based on the period of interest. In the first chapter, I investigate the causes and consequences of public spending on primary education in...
When demand is volatile and uncertain, prices often cannot adequately respond to demand shifts because these shifts are not known when prices are set. In this dissertation, I use the hotel industry--- an industry with a high degree of demand uncertainty and capacity constraints, which amplify the cost of setting...
Recognizing the significance of social interactions in shaping human behavior and development, policies and programs often rely on peers and social relationships as mechanisms for inducing positive change. Yet, even in randomized control trials, social spillover can make an effective program appear ineffective, and measuring peer effects poses identification...
This dissertation studies three aspects of health insurance market regulation and design. Chapter 1 (which is joint work with Steve Cicala and Ethan Leiber) studies a regulatory mechanism used to constrain insurer market power. The mechanism targets health insurers' Medical Loss Ratio, which is the share of premiums spent on...
This dissertation addresses questions in the fields of household finance and corporate finance. In Chapter 1, I use a quasi-experiment in Norway to examine how households respond to capital taxation. The introduction of a new wealth assessment methodology in 2010 led to geographic discontinuities in household exposure to wealth taxes,...
I analyze a new mechanism through which changes in aggregate income can result in changes in the labor income distribution. This mechanism arises from heterogeneity in the expenditure elasticity of different sectors and in their employment composition. Once total income increases the mechanism suggests that consumption will be re-allocated towards...
Perhaps because of the influence of the central limit theorem, it is common for scientists to assume distributions in the real world are singly peaked and unimodal. However, many quantities in nature are actually better represented by multimodal distributions. One must provide an explanation for this disconnect between the central...
This dissertation addresses three distinct topics in development economics. The first chapter assesses the role of entry and exit in the measurement of misallocation in India. In the last decade, misallocation of productive inputs across firms has been proposed as a primary driver of differences in aggregate productivity over time...
This thesis contains three chapters studying the evolution of the American higher education landscape, the different forces that shaped their organization, and how they, in turn, influenced human capital accumulation. The chapters are organized into three time periods: 1850-1900, 1910-1940, and 1980-2010. In the first chapter, joint with Heyu Xiong,...
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...