In Chapter 1, we estimate equilibrium dollar wages for 15 transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union. Equilibrium dollar wages are interpreted as full employment wages consistent with a country's physical and human capital endowment, and estimated by...

This thesis includes three essays on the interaction between financial market institutions and market liquidity, and its implications for financial stability. The first essay studies an overlapping generations model of a risky asset market in which some agents face a participation cost. Market...

This thesis is a collection of three essays analyzing the economic effects of taxation, market structure, and the regulatory environment on financial markets, focusing in particular on financial intermediaries such as banks and mutual funds. The first chapter uses the unprecedented changes in...

Chapter 1 For most US households, labor income is the most important source of wealth and housing is the most important risky asset. A natural intuition is thus that households whose incomes covary relatively strongly with housing prices should own relatively little housing. Under plausible...

This thesis is a collection of essays on market structure, competition and consumer behavior. In Chapter 1 I develop and estimate a structural model of demand for commercial bank deposit services, which allows me to analyze consumer response to various bank characteristics, as well as to measure...

Chapter one is titled "Social Capital and Group Banking." Lending to the poor is costly due to high screening, monitoring, and enforcement costs. Group lending advocates believe individuals are able to select creditworthy peers, monitor the use of loan proceeds, and enforce repayment better than...

This thesis investigates individual decision-making in response to government policies, in particular, state lotteries and the welfare "family cap." Despite considerable controversy surrounding the use of state lotteries as a means of public finance, little is known about their consumer...

The central theme of this dissertation is that the interaction between firm characteristics and market characteristics is crucial to understanding the evolution of market structure, competition, and firm behavior. I integrate ideas from industrial organization and strategic management in an...

The first chapter studies Entrepreneurship and the Stigma of Failure. Entrepreneurial activity varies substantially across countries and sectors and appears to be related to the stigma of failure. To understand this phenomenon, I present a multiple-equilibrium model based on endogenous stigma of...

In this dissertation, I present three essays that are motivated by the interesting and dynamic price-setting behavior of firms in Canadian retail gasoline markets. In the first essay, I examine behavior at the market level for 19 Canadian cities over 574 weeks. I find three distinct pricing...