This thesis consists of three studies of labor markets where differences in talent are associated with very large differences in income. The unifying theoretical feature is the view that the analysis of such labor markets should take into account the scarcity of jobs, which is a natural...

This dissertation is a collection of three essays exploring the impact of incentives on participation in public education and health programs. The first two essays analyze the demand for Special Education (a program for disabled children) in the U.S., while the third essay explores the demand...

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...

Chapter 1 is the product of joint work with Ferhat Akbas and it provides a behavioral explanation for monthly negative serial correlation in stock returns. For the first time in the literature, this work reports that only low momentum stocks experience monthly negative serial correlation. Using...

This dissertation consists of three chapters on topics in labor economics. In the first chapter, I present a model in which firms under-invest in hiring novice workers because they don't receive the full benefit of discovering novice talent. A firm must pay a cost to hire a novice worker. When...

This dissertation is a collection of three independent essays in theoretical and applied econometrics. The first chapter analyzes dynamic games with continuous states and controls. There are two main contributions. First, we give conditions under which the payoff function is nonparametrically...