This thesis is a collection of three empirical essays in international finance. The first chapter studies the transmission of monetary policy through the lending channel in a partially dollarized banking system. Taking advantage of the cross-sectional and time-series variation in the individual...

The first chapter of this thesis analyzes how the gossip process can be manipulated by malicious people and the impact of such manipulation on information transmission. In this model, a single piece of information is transmitted via a chain of agents with privately known types. Each agent may be...

This thesis consists of three unrelated essays in the fields of labor and urban economics. The first essay exploits the creation of a formal college system in Quebec in the late 1960's as a quasi-experiment to estimate the value of community college. Focusing on the effect of the policy on...

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...