This thesis is a collection of essays on the effects of trade and capital flows in developing countries. Chapter 1 starts with the observation that institutions - contract enforcement, property rights, investor protection, and the like - have received a great deal of attention in recent years. I...

This thesis considers inference issues in serially correlated multilevel and panel data and presents a separate essay that examines the impact of 401(k) participation on wealth. The first chapter examines generalized least squares (GLS) estimation in data with a grouped structure where the...

This thesis is composed of three chapters, each includes one paper. The first chapter includes a paper that analyses the impact of terror on consumption and investment. This paper provides evidence on how consumers and investors react to terror attacks based on a new database from the...

"Much as I hate to spoil my story by announcing its plot in advance, this paper is too long and involved to be clear otherwise. It deals with growth of investment and of capital stock subject to depreciation and periodic replacement. " E. Domar The above citation is taken from a piece,...

This dissertation consists of four chapters on empirical and experimental macroeconomics and other experimental topics. Chapter 1 uses a laboratory experiment to test the predictions of a dynamic global game designed to capture the role of information and coordination in speculative attacks. The...

This thesis studies the macroeconomics of incomplete markets. Chapter 1 studies the effects of capital taxation in a dynamic heterogeneous-agent economy with uninsurable entrepreneurial risk. Unlike either the complete-markets paradigm or Bewley-type models where idiosyncratic risk impacts only...

This thesis explores the link between human capital accumulation and the functioning of marriage markets. The first chapter studies the effect of marriage market conditions on pre-marital investment. After showing how a change in the sex ratio can alter incentives for investments, I test this...

This thesis is a collection of three essays on mechanism design. In Chapter 1, we consider a general Informed Principal Problem in the context of procurement. Both the potential suppliers and the buyer hold some private information: each supplier knows his cost of production, the buyer knows how...

This thesis is a collection of essays that uses theoretical and experimental methods to explore institutional persistence, contract structure, and authority. Chapter One studies the informational and efficiency properties of institutions that form to reduce moral hazard. While in the short run...

This dissertation consists of three essays on international trade and investment. In the first essay, I study how cross-country differences in labor market institutions shape the pattern of international trade with a focus on workers' skill acquisition. I develop an open-economy model in which...