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...

This dissertation inquires into the relationship between income, aspirations, and life satisfaction in post-transition Russia. It first explores the channels through which adaptation and social comparison contribute to higher income aspirations. The results show that social comparison is a...

The first chapter of this dissertation considers the complexity of contracts to be determined bytransacting partners based on their exposure to the opportunistic behavior of theother. A transaction cost economics model generates the hypothesis that buyer andseller relationship-specific...

This thesis examines the effect of integration on wages when the economy is partially unionized. The first part sets up a general equilibrium model where wages in one sector are set by a monopoly union. The unionized sector of the economy also utilizes a factor (capital) which is internationally...

We use machine-learning methods to study the features and origins of the Baconian program, a cultural and methodological paradigm viewed as providing the intellectual roots for modern economic growth. After building a machine-readable corpus of Bacon's works, we estimate a structural topic...

The history of England’s institutions has long informed research on comparative economic development. Yet to date there exists no quantitative evidence on a core aspect of England’s institutional evolution, that embodied in the accumulated decisions of English courts. Focusing on the two...

This is the second of two papers that generate and analyze quantitative estimates of the development of English caselaw and associated legal ideas before the Industrial Revolution. In the first paper, we estimated a 100-topic structural topic model, named the topics, and showed how to interpret...