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 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 thesis is a collection of two essays on open economy macroeconomics. The first essay is on imperfect asset substitutability and current account dynamics. It is divided into four chapters. The first chapter in this essay is a preface for the chapters to follow. The second chapter lays out a...

The first essay explores the relationship between openness and growth. As, Rodriguez and Rodrik (2000) argue, the relation between openness and growth is still an open question. One of the main problems in the assessment of the effect is the endogeneity of the relation. In order to address this...

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 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...