This thesis includes four essays on the macroeconomic effects of financial market imperfections. The first essay studies the incentives for banks that participate in an interbank market to keep a sufficient level of reserves. It presents a model where, in presence of imperfect insurance against...

The first two chapters of this thesis explore how coordination happens in simple games. The first chapter models the adaptive play of a 2 x 2 game by pairs of agents matched together from a large population. In contrast with the existing literature, I assume that agents have some control over...

This thesis examines the workings of insurance markets. The first two papers examine the effect of government tax and regulatory policy in markets for supplementary health insurance. The third paper presents new evidence of the importance of adverse selection in insurance markets. The first...

Since Friedman (1953) an advantage often attributed to flexible exchange rate regimes relative to fixed regimes is their ability to better insulate the economy against real shocks. I use a post-Bretton Woods sample (1973-1996) of 74 developing countries to assess whether the response of real...

This dissertation consists of three chapters exploring the role of incomplete information and learning in elections. The first chapter examines the dynamics of voter learning about candidate ability in repeated elections. The dynamic process of belief revision gives rise to incentives that vary...

In the first chapter, I demonstrate that banks play a special role in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, and that this role potentialy explains the excessive sensitivity and asymmetric response of the real economy to small and temporary changes in interest rates. While banks exploit...