This thesis is a collection of three essays on entry regulation, institutions, and development.Chapter 1 examines the effect of a business registration reform in Mexico on economic activity. This reform made registration procedures less complex and was implemented in different municipalities at...

This thesis is a collection of three essays on development economics and finance. The first chapter studies the 1992 presidential impeachment in Brazil to evaluate the impact of an anti-corruption drive on politically connected companies. I identify two types of firms: companies owned by friends...

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 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 is a collection of three independent papers in empirical development economics. The first chapter studies the effect of a family planning program in Bangladesh, which successfully reduced fertility, on households' asset accumulation. In developing countries parents expect their...

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 thesis consists of three essays that examine investment choices in less developed countries. Chapter 1 examines how the structure of existing microfinance contracts may discourage risky but high-expected return investments. I develop a theory that unifies models of investment choice,...

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...

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...

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...