This thesis investigates forms of non-price competition in the U.S. airline industry. The first two chapters focus on airlines' use of frequent flyer programs (FFPs) while the final chapter considers the entry strategies of "low-cost carriers". FFPs may alter the intensity of competition between...

Chapter 1: This chapter looks at a dynamic panel data model with fixed effects. Estimating the model with GMM is consistent but suffers from small sample bias. We apply Helmert's transformation to the model, assume that error terms and nuisance parameters are homoskedastic and independent across...

This thesis is a collection of three essays on development economics and finance. The first chapter studies the 1992 presidential impeachment in Brazil to evaluate the impact of an anti-corruption drive on politically connected companies. I identify two types of firms: companies owned by friends...

This thesis analyzes several aspects of the Industrial Organization of the airline industry in three separate chapters. Chapter 1 investigates the effect of air traffic delays on airline prices. The degree to which prices respond to changes in service quality should depend on consumers'...

This dissertation is a collection of three essays which address several questions in corporate finance and taxation. The first essay uses a panel dataset of balance sheet and income information, taken from the tax returns of U.S. corporations, to study the relationship between bank competition...

This thesis is a collection of essays on the effect of trade costs on international trade. Chapter 1 derives and empirically examines how factor proportions determine the structure of commodity trade when international trade is costly. It combines a many-country version of the Heckscher-Ohlin...

This thesis is a collection of essays on organizational economics and finance-related topics. Firms and individuals who sell opinions may bias their reports for either behavioral or strategic reasons. Chapter 1 proposes a new methodology for measuring these biases, particularly whether opinion...

The thesis is composed of three chapters. The first chapter proposes that financial innovation induces endogenous changes in the composition of market participants, which can both increase the interest rate and reduce the risk premia earned on pre-existing assets. We consider an exchange economy...

In 1999 the Federal Communications Commission decided to relax its prohibition against one firm owning two television stations in the same market. Although joint ownership was prohibited prior to 1999, evidence on the effects of joint operation is provided by local marketing agreements,...

The first essay empirically models of aggregate fluctuations with two basic ingredients: agents form anticipations about the future based on noisy sources of information; these anticipations affect spending and output in the short run. Our objective is to separate fluctuations due to actual...