Although higher commodity prices are commonly thought to presage higher rates of inflation, the existing literature suggests that the predictive power of commodity prices for inflation has waned since the 1980s. In the first chapter, I show that this result can be overturned using...

Prices for nearly all basic commodity rose at unprecedented rates throughout early 2008, only to fall nearly as fast as financial markets and global economies began to collapse. Rising food prices in 2008 led to concerns that commodity price spikes would lead to more general food inflation, but...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/24/09.

El objetivo de este trabajo es contrastar empíricamente el impacto entre países de shocks de precios de materias primas en el crecimiento de la PTF agregada en una muestra de economías emergentes. En un contexto de contabilidad de crecimiento, estimamos crecimientos de la PTF específicos por...

Commodity and energy prices have exhibited an unprecedented increase between October 2006 and July 2008, only to fall sharply during the last months of 2008. Many explanations have been offered to this phenomenon, including steadily increasing demand from China and India, large mandated...

There are many situations in which individuals have a choice of whether or not to observe the eventual outcome. In these instances, individuals often prefer to avoid observing the outcome. The standard von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) Expected Utility model cannot accommodate these cases, since it...

This dissertation addresses a basic difficulty in accommodating other-regarding preferences within existing models of decision making. Decision makers with such preferences may violate the property of stochastic dominance that is shared by both expected utility and almost any model of...

This dissertation consists of three essays concerning entrepreneurship, venture capital and monetary economics. It takes time for a venture capitalist to find a project in which to invest, to implement projects and to cash out. Further, capitalists and entrepreneurs are uncertain about whom they...

The dissertation consists of four chapters. The first chapter presents a model that incorporates product market competition into the standard neoclassical framework. The model explains why value-maximizing firms conduct mergers that appear to lower shareholder value. In a Cournot setting, the...

This dissertation considers the determinants of individual careers within firms and it is articulated into two chapters. The first chapter analyzes a learning model in which a firm and a worker can acquire information about the worker's ability by observing his performance at different tasks....