This dissertation explores questions in labor economics with a particular focus on economic inequality. As one might expect, race, gender, and location are recurring themes. The dissertation makes headway on long-standing questions in economics, in large part, through the collection of...

In 1990 Chile transitioned from a military regime led by General Augusto Pinochet to a democratically elected government led by the Coalition of Parties for Democracy, the Concertacion, that had successfully opposed his continuation in power. Yet, the dictatorship left many legacies that...

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are the dominant firm type in the global electricity sector. Given their prevalence, the acquisition of new electricity generation technologies by these firms, could have vast implications for electricity supply, economic growth, greenhouse-gas emissions and the...

In chapter 1, I study the experimentation dynamics of a decision maker (DM) in a two-armed bandit setup ([5]), where the agent holds ambiguous beliefs regarding the distribution of the return process of one arm and is certain about the other one. The DM entertains Multiplier preferences a la...

This dissertation consists of two main essays in which it extends our knowledge on how stock market investors process the information from macro announcements. In the first essay, we extend the existing econometric theory to study the relation between jumps in multiple processes at a...

This dissertation consists of four essays exploring how people form beliefs and make decisions in the financial markets and their implications for asset prices. Two common threads run through this dissertation: the persistence of key state variables and the less-than-fully-rational approach to...

The dissertation studies three seemly independent topics on environmental economics, but they share the same theme: the reactions of local governments and firms on promotional incentives and environmental regulations in China.The first chapter examines whether China’s Two Control Zone policy...

Over the past fifty years, financial and legal theory have predicted that owners of firms may have incentives to take risks that have positive expected value from the perspective of firms' equity holders but negative expected value from the perspective of total firm value and of society as a...

This dissertation consists of two projects, both concerned with how social networks form and how they affect economic decisions. In the first project, entitled Identifying Influential Agents in a Social Network, I define influence centrality, a new measure of influence which combines information...

Information design—or the practice of effectively communicating information to its audience—is a delicate dance that requires accuracy, clarity, comprehensiveness, and engagement. Yet, even when all these boxes are checked off, it is no secret that people process information differently. The...