This dissertation studies the use of the US antidumping (AD) legislation. In the first chapter, I use panel data on AD petitions filed by US industries from 1980 to1995 to study the determinants of antidumping filings. I argue that a negative binomial model is better suited to study the...

We study the implications of loss aversion for trade policy determination and show how it allows us to explain a number of important and puzzling features of trade policy. An important question concerning trade policy is why a disproportionate share of protection goes to declining industries. We...

Economic reforms along with its promise of increasing income and growth rates have also raised concerns about its distributional implications. These concerns are at the heart of the arguments of those who oppose certain economic reforms. Focusing on the economic reforms implemented in India, we...

In this dissertation I assess the impact of developing country trade liberalization on their wage inequality by focusing on two possible channels, namely job formality and inter-industry wage premium. Informal workers are a large share of the workforce, more than 30% in Brazil and Colombia, and...

Policy commitment and credibility are important for inducing agents to make costly, irreversible investments. Policy uncertainty can delay investment and reduce the response to policy change. I provide theoretical and novel quantitative evidence for these effects by focusing on trade policy, a...

Internalizing market transactions has been seen by New Institutional Economics (NIE) as a means of over-coming transaction costs. Several specific theories have been put forward as to how the presence of such costs (variously defined), or other institutional factors, motivates firms to...

Essay 1 investigates an empirical link between institutional variables and the performance of firms based on cross-country firm-level survey data. Current empirical evidence based on this type of data is unsatisfactory because employing survey responses as direct measures of institutional...

This thesis consists of three chapters on the choice of institutional governance. The first chapter provides empirical evidence on the effect of local norms on the contractual choice, using a comprehensive dataset on US agricultural leasing contracts. We focus on the choice between cash-rent and...

The first half of the dissertation studies how conditional lending by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) affects the implementation of economic reforms. In the presence of asymmetric information about the outcome of a structural reform between an opportunistic agenda-setter government...

This dissertation contains three essays. In Chapter 2, I investigate the causal factors of the soft budget constraint (SBC) problem. Based on a panel dataset from a survey of Chinese enterprises, the test results support the policy burden hypothesis but not the ownership hypothesis. The findings...