Historically, scholars of economic growth have focused almost exclusively on aggregate output or income as a way to assess the standard of living in a society. The purpose of this dissertation is to supplement and challenge this methodology by using evidence of the biological standard of living...

This dissertation makes a contribution to regional studies by constructing Multi-Factor Productivity (MFP) growth measures at the state level for the US. The first essay of the dissertation exploits a dual growth accounting technique to calculate sector-specific MFP growth for all US states from...

A central issue in the growth literature is whether initial conditions matter for income disparity among nations. If they don't, then countries will converge to a single regime once the structural features of the economies are controlled for. If they do, then countries will converge to multiple...

This dissertation empirically identifies exogenous changes in monetary policy and estimates their effects on the economy. The framework is the Romer and Romer (2004) quasi-narrative approach to identifying exogenous changes in monetary policy. The first essay replicates the Romer-Romer (RR)...

One of the well documented facts about India's rapid growth since 1991 has been the accompanying unequal sub-national experiences. In this paper, using unsaturated night-light data for 1996-2010, we investigate patterns of growth at the district level. We find evidence of absolute convergence....

On November 8, 2016, the Indian government abruptly demonetized 86% of its currency in circulation in an attempt to reduce black money, corruption, and counterfeiting. Yet, 99% of the currency was eventually returned to banks. We exploit large regional variations in deposit growth as a result of...

I investigate the effects of two important channels of technology diffusion (i) Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and (ii) import of capital goods, on the total factor productivity (TFP) growth. My first essay contributes to the literature by empirically investigating the role of initial distance...

My dissertation is titled 'Creating the Hot Hand Effect with a Grand Prize.' It develops a theory of how the addition of a grand prize for performance in a sequence of tournaments affects agents' effort and participation decisions. The theory's predictions are empirically tested with data from...

This study investigates the implications of firm's demand for real balances from the production and monetary economics perspective. Money is a component of production as a factor increasing efficiency in exchange in input markets. Firms may improve efficiency in production by holding real money...

This dissertation investigates the properties of macroeconomic fluctuations in a small open economy under the presence of sovereign default risk. International borrowing and lending arise from the interaction between a risk averse sovereign representative agent in a small open economy trying to...