Group lending has received a great attention from economists and policymakers for its successful delivery of credit to poor borrowers and its role in alleviating poverty in the developing countries. The success of group lending in providing credit to poor borrowers has been attributed to its...

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...

This dissertation addresses three important price judgments: price fairness, price magnitude, and price expectation. Developed over three chapters, the main objective of this research is to determine underlying differences in these three price judgments. These differences are based on...

Outbreaks of infectious diseases bring behavior and policy responses into sharp focus since societies face acute constraints and uncertainties. This paper compares two infectious disease outbreaks: the Covid-19 pandemic and the 1665 London plague outbreak described by Daniel Defoe in A Journal...

The result that firms competing in a Cournot oligopoly with pairwise collaboration form a complete network under zero or negligible link formation costs provided by Goyal and Joshi (2003) no longer hold in multi-market oligopolies. Link formation in one market affects a firm’s profitability...

This paper argues that the availability of arable land in antiquity created gender norms that continue to affect current gender inequality. We show that countries with greater ancestral arable land have lower levels of gender inequality, better female reproductive health outcomes, and greater...

Individuals bring effort to a group to achieve a common objective. Group membership introduces a free riding incentive, reducing effort, as well as a social responsibility incentive, increasing effort. This paper shows that the free riding effect is stronger. Individuals significantly reduce...

Previous studies have demonstrated that a multitude of options can lead to choice overload, reducing decision quality. Through controlled experiments, we examine sequential choice architectures that enable the choice set to remain large while potentially reducing the effect of choice overload. A...

We propose an allocation rule that takes into account the importance of players and their links and characterizes it for a fixed network. Unlike previous rules, our characterization does not require component additivity. Next, we extend it to flexible networks a la Jackson (2005). Finally, we...

Previous studies have demonstrated that a multitude of options can lead to choice overload, reducing decision quality. Through controlled experiments, we examine sequential choice architectures that enable the choice set to remain large while potentially reducing the effect of choice overload. A...