The first chapter studies Entrepreneurship and the Stigma of Failure. Entrepreneurial activity varies substantially across countries and sectors and appears to be related to the stigma of failure. To understand this phenomenon, I present a multiple-equilibrium model based on endogenous stigma of...

This thesis examines the incentives to exercise market power that generators would face and the different strategies that they would follow if all electricity supplies in Chile were traded in an hourly-unregulated spot market. The industry is modeled as a Cournot duopoly with a competitive...

This dissertation consists of three separate essays. In the first essay, privatization is found to improve bank performance by both better monitoring of existing firms, and improved selection of new bank clients. Data on firms borrowing from government-owned banks, and firms borrowing from a...

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter explores the effect of Wal-Mart expansion on local retail employment. The phenomenal expansion of Wal-Mart provides a clean case for studying the labor-market effects of increased efficiency. I estimate the effect of Wal-Mart entry...

This thesis consists of three chapters on innovation and economic growth. Chapter 1 is a joint work with Daron Acemoglu. We study the form of intellectual property rights (IPR) policy and licensing in the context of endogenous economic growth with step-by-step cumulative innovation. The main...

In the first chapter, I demonstrate that banks play a special role in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, and that this role potentialy explains the excessive sensitivity and asymmetric response of the real economy to small and temporary changes in interest rates. While banks exploit...