It is commonly observed that over time and across societies, women tend to marry older men. The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that wages increase with age and hence older men are more attractive in the marriage market. The model developed in Chapter 2 of this dissertation shows...

This work suggests a connection between the lack of restructuring of the privatized firms in transition and the high level of regulatory barriers faced by the private sector. In this work I suggest that the potential entry of the newly created private firms significantly affects the incentives...

This dissertation involves two set of papers. The first chapter contains a brief introduction of the issues covered in this thesis. In the first set of papers (chapters 2 and 3) I investigate the use of product standards in international trade. Product standards relate to restrictions on the...

Since Hotelling's (1929) seminal work, economists have tried to understand how product differentiation affects price competition. I study the product location decisions, on a vertical characteristic space, of two sets of horizontal competitors when the inputs supplied by the "upstream" set (the...

Exchange-rate-based inflation stabilization programs cause a sizable loss of inflation tax revenue and thus open a fiscal gap. The stabilization literature usually assumes that this gap can be closed by raising lump-sum (nondistortionary) taxes and/or cutting lump-sum transfers. As such policies...

When a country experiences a balance of payments problem, the typical remedy mix proposed by the International Monetary Fund consists of fiscal austerity, tight monetary policies, devaluation, privatization, elimination of subsidies and trade liberalization, combined with low interest rate...

This dissertation consists of three chapters studying different issues related to self-employment and entrepreneurship. The first chapter studies the effects of labor market frictions and credit constraints in an economy with self-employment. Two types of self-employed workers emerge in the...

New residential construction is significantly more procyclical in emerging markets than in developed countries, although the correlation between aggregate investment and output is similar across emerging and developed countries. This paper shows that a multi-sector stochastic growth model with a...

We consider an extension of the classical secretary problem where a decision maker observes only the relative ranks of a sequence of up to N applicants, whose true values are i.i.d. U[0,1] random variables. Applicants arrive according to a homogeneous Poisson Process, and the decision maker...