In this dissertation, I present three empirical essays that encompass topics in industrial organization. The first essay examines the degree of competition and spatial differentiation in the retail industry by exploiting a unique dataset that describes a consumer's choice of store, product of...

This thesis is a collection of three essays in international trade. Chapter 1 explains how firm heterogeneity and market structure can distort the geography of international trade. By considering only the intensive margin of trade, Krugman (1980) predicts that a higher elasticity of substitution...

This dissertation analyzes the impact of various financial incentives on firm behavior. The first two chapters examine product-market and input-market effects of a firm's capital structure and the incentives they create. The third chapter analyzes how incentives from the tort system affect...

This thesis consists of three essays on aggregate and individual consumption fluctuations. Chapter 1 develops a quantitative model to explore aggregate and individual consumption dynamics when the income process exhibits regime-switching features, and compares its performance with the...

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first one studies the effect of labor policy, in particular of firing costs, on financially restricted firms. It proposes and models an effect of firing costs that has not been described in the literature so far. When a time gap exists between...

This dissertation consists of three chapters on adverse-selection type insurance markets. Chapter 1 develops a model for analyzing non-exclusive insurance markets. It establishes that the "screening" considerations of models following Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976)-long applied for analysis of...

This thesis characterizes the important role of US ethnic scientists and entrepreneurs for international technology diffusion. Chapter 1 studies the transfer of tacit knowledge regarding new innovations through ethnic scientific communities in the US and their ties to their home countries. US...

This dissertation consists of three essays that examine banking and corporate finance in developing countries. Specifically, it explores the theoretical and empirical implications of open capital markets, foreign bank entry, and the role of bond markets during banking crises. Chapter 1 analyzes...

This thesis is a collection of three empirical essays on firms, banks, and access to finance. Chapter 1 provides evidence that credit subsidies for exports are substantially misallocated towards financially unconstrained firms. Using loan level data for firms and exploiting an exogenous change...

This dissertation addresses the potential agency conflicts arising between an insurance broker and its commercial clients. Though the broker is hired to find its client the best insurance quote on the market, the broker's contractual arrangements and private information may lead it to stray from...