This dissertation examines how investments in information technology (IT) influence the value that firms derive from merging or collaborating with other firms. The dissertation is organized as follows. The first chapter, entitled Towards a Theoretical Framework of Information Technology in...

We study the location-specific component in research productivity of economics and finance faculty who have ever been affiliated with the top 25 universities in the last three decades. We find that there was a positive effect of being affiliated with an elite university in the 1970s; this effect...

My dissertation is composed of three essays addressing the following three questions: First, how do mergers and acquisitions create value? Second, what role does labor union play in affecting merger outcomes? Third, how do CEOs' career concerns impact firms' restructuring decisions? In the first...

Companies in a broad range of industries and economies rely heavily on external sources to finance their operations. But, external financing could be expensive and/or difficult to obtain due to imperfections in real capital markets. I focus on cash-constrained manufacturers that rely on external...

In Chapter 1, I examine the frequent use of recommended retail prices by manufacturers.I present a model in which price recommendations convey information to consumers aboutaggregate market conditions. The manufacturer uses recommendations to directly affect consumers?search and indirectly...

This work consists of three essays that investigate the effect of investor behavior on asset prices. In the first essay, titled “Transaction Costs and Investment Decisions of Individual Investors,” I study the liquidity decisions of 66,000 households from a large discount brokerage. My paper...

One influential criticism of the stock market oriented U.S. financial system is that its excessive focus on short term quarterly earnings forces public firms to behave in a myopic manner. We hypothesize that if capital markets pressure listed firms to be myopic in a way that impacts efficiency,...

This dissertation exploits variation in tax policies in order to better understand the incentive effects of taxation on individual and firm behavior. The results presented herein are intended to inform policy debates in the two areas examined--property and multinational taxation--as well as the...

The dissertation consists of three distinct chapters that contribute to important, yet unresolved topics in Macroeconomics and International Economics.Macroeconomists have been keenly interested in understanding how financial crisis turn into real recessions in emerging markets. By using a...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms optimally adjusttheir capital investment in response to discount rate changes. Consistent with the discount-ratehypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future returns increaseswith the...