In Chapter 1, I study the efficiency properties of competitive search equilibria in economies with informational asymmetries. Employers and workers are both risk-neutral and ex-ante homogeneous. I characterize an equilibrium where employers post contracts and workers direct their search towards...

Chapter one is titled "Social Capital and Group Banking." Lending to the poor is costly due to high screening, monitoring, and enforcement costs. Group lending advocates believe individuals are able to select creditworthy peers, monitor the use of loan proceeds, and enforce repayment better than...

Chapter 1 analyzes Pareto optimal non-linear taxation of profits and labor income in a private information economy with endogenous firm formation. Individuals differ in both their skill and their cost of setting up a firm, and choose between becoming workers and entrepreneurs. I show that a tax...

This thesis is a collection of three empirical essays on firms, banks, and access to finance. Chapter 1 provides evidence that credit subsidies for exports are substantially misallocated towards financially unconstrained firms. Using loan level data for firms and exploiting an exogenous change...

Economies around the world are marked by major interventions in credit markets. Institutions ranging from central banks to the Grameen Bank operate under the assumptions that credit markets are imperfect, that these imperfections can be ameliorated, and that doing so increases output. There is...

This thesis consists of three separate papers. In the first paper, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which has measures of both risk preferences and religiosity along with measures of many risky behaviors, I investigate the implications of the correlations among risk preferences,...