Many believe that increasing the quantity of children will lead to a decrease in their quality. This paper exploits plausibly exogenous changes in family size caused by relaxations in China's One Child Policy to estimate the causal effect of family size on school enrollment of the first child....

I first document that the introduction of the One Child Policy dramatically increased sex selection in certain regions, and that the Chinese government responded to this by allowing parents who had a daughter as their first child to try for a second child. Next, I show that the increase in...

Foreign aid is one of the most important policy tools that rich countries use for helping poor countries to improve population well-being and facilitate economic and institutional development. The empirical evidence on its benefits is mixed and has generated much controversy. This paper presents...

The first essay explains why credit contracts in developing countries are often denominated in foreign currencies, even after many of these economies succeeded in controlling inflation. I propose a new interpretation based on the demand for insurance against real aggregate shocks. The fact that...

These four essays concern the theory of games and its application to economic theory. The first two, closely linked, chapters are an investigation into the foundational question of the sensitivity of the predictions of game theory to higher-order beliefs. Impact of Higher-Order Uncertainty with...

In this study we examine the impact of internet use on the duration of non-sequential search in the housing market. We develop a model of partial equilibrium in the housing market which suggests an ambiguous effect on the search duration when internet resources are employed in the search. In...