(cont.) left on the table" due to underpricing in the IPO allocation is not capital the firm could have raised; instead, it is the empirical regularity associated with obtaining a high quality aftermarket, high equity valuation, and higher proceeds to the issuer. We examine the principal-agent...

(cont.) Risk Management have begun implementing strategies to provide commodity price and weather insurance in the developing world. In Chapter 3 (joint with Professor Rob Townsend from the University of Chicago), we examine how shocks to the price of rubber, an important but volatile Thai...

(cont.) observed in several Western countries. Finally, the third chapter evaluates the labor market effects of public subsidies to families with children. Using variation in the level of benefits provided by a policy reform in the UK that affected differentially what would otherwise be...

This dissertation studies the role of signaling concerns in discouraging access to liquidity facilities like the IMF contingent credit lines (CCL) and the Discount Window (DW). In Chapter 1, I analyze the introduction of IMF CCL in an economy with asymmetric information and financial frictions....

This thesis is concerned with the economic consequences for individuals of two important U.S. labor market institutions: unionization and the military draft. The first chapter develops an econometric procedure for estimating quantile treatment effects in a regression discontinuity design. It...

This thesis consists of three essays that examine household responses to state unemployment insurance (UI) generosity across spells of unemployment, with a particular emphasis on the role of liquidity constraints. Enacted in 1986, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA)...

In this thesis, I study two different economies that consist of heterogeneous labor. By allowing for differences among individuals where previous analyses restricted attention to homogeneous labor, I am able to understand the impact of such a consideration on issues of optimal policy and...

It is often argued that borrowing constraints are crucial to the understanding of entrepreneurial activity in the United States. However, portfolio data and calibration exercises raise doubts about the importance of borrowing constraints. This thesis provides three chapters on the subject of...

This thesis investigates the effects of online advertising on human behavior: clicks, new-account sign-ups, and retail sales. Five chapters cover natural and field experiments used to measure these effects for both display and search advertising. The first chapter uses a natural experiment on...

This thesis consists of three separate papers. In the first paper, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which has measures of both risk preferences and religiosity along with measures of many risky behaviors, I investigate the implications of the correlations among risk preferences,...