This dissertation consists of two papers united by a common element: they both study the behavior of heterogeneous agents across the business cycle.
In Chapter 1, I consider: what is the link between the drop in consumer credit during the Great Recession and increased unemployment? I build a heterogeneous household...
This dissertation looks at the consequences of three different government regulatory policies---the nondistribution constraint (which prohibits managers of nonprofit organizations from distributing profits generated by the nonprofit organization to themselves), the 100/0, 85/15, and 90/10 rules (which restrict the fraction of revenue for-profit colleges and universities can receive from Title...
While it is the ongoing growth in healthcare spending that has been making headlines, improving and maintaining healthcare quality is a critical goal of healthcare policy. In this dissertation I answer three questions relating to healthcare quality: does physician-hospital financial integration improves healthcare quality; how physician-hospital financial integration improves healthcare...
The patent system seeks to strike the ideal balance between competition and the rate of innovation – not to maximize innovation unconditionally. Clearly there must be limits on the manner and degree to which patents are used to diminish competition. A critical complication, however, is that this boundary is often...
This dissertation comprises three essays on industrial organization. In Chapter 1 I study the productivity effects of corporate diversification, where productivity is understood as a measure of sales per input at the productive unit level, and diversified firms are defined as firms that operate in different industries. I develop and...
Both chapters of this dissertation relate to the aggregate value of corporations in an economy. In particular, they relate to the ratio of the aggregate total market value of corporations over the replacement cost of their recorded capital. The first chapter introduces a model that can explain why this ratio...
This thesis consists of three chapters: two are empirical studies of policy design in small-business lending markets, while the final is a large-scale retrospective of retail mergers. Chapter 1 examines moral hazard in loan guarantee programs. To address credit constraints in small-business lending markets, policymakers frequently rely on loan guarantees,...
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...
In this thesis, I study the effects of spillovers in all-pay auctions and the effects ofregulating wages and hours on the labor market. In the first chapter, I study a model of
asymmetric all-pay auctions with spillovers. In this model, players compete for a prize, and
the sunk effort players...