Recently, many developed and developing countries have adopted inflation targeting as the monetary policy framework. There is large debate regarding the importance of external variables, such as the exchange rate, for monetary policy decisions under this framework, particularly in small open...

This dissertation includes three essays on hedging the interest rate and credit risks of Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS).Essay one addresses the problem of how to efficiently estimate interest rate sensitivity parameters of MBS. To do this in Monte Carlo simulation, we derive perturbation...

The dissertation investigates the role of networks and connectedness on CEO and director labor market outcomes. I develop new measures of degree, closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality using a new database of executive connections based on executive and director biographical...

This study provides the first comprehensive empirical evidence on the economic impacts and distributional effects of the District of Columbia First-Time Homebuyer Credit program. This program is the only federal program that provides an income tax credit for targeted lower-income households to...

This paper investigates a dataset that provides information about assets heldby U.S. equity mutual funds, but are not U.S. equities (`unmapped holdings'). Ishow the widespread presence of these assets and investigate how they are usedwithin mutual fund portfolios. I find that their effects are...

The allowance price in Phase I of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) followed a peculiar path, increasing from €7 in 2005 to over €30 in 2006, before crashing, recovering and ultimately finishing at zero by the end of 2007. I examine if the price can be explained by...

Essay 1, Constrained Capacity and Equilibrium Forward Premia in Electricity Markets, develops a refinement of the equilibrium electricity pricing model in Bessembinder and Lemmon (2002). The refined model explicitly accounts for constrained capacity, an important feature in electricity markets....

This dissertation examines the factors associated with sustainable privatization of infrastructure projects. Privatization offers a way for governments to make infrastructure delivery more effective and efficient than exclusively public provision, but often the promise is fraught with peril. The...

The VIX index measures the one-month risk-neutral forward volatility of the S&P500 (SPX) index. While Lévy processes such as the CGMY process can price options on the underlying stock or index, they implicitly assume a constant forward volatility. This makes them unsuitable for pricing options...