As demand to substantiate predictions from economic theory with causal empirical evidence increases, economists have more and more turned towards controlled laboratory experiments. As this field has blossomed it has provided evidence confirming some of the key predictions of economic theory and...

In the presence of competing interest groups, this paper examines how the form of votebuying contracts affects policy outcomes. We study contracts contingent upon individual votes, policy outcomes, and/or vote shares. Voters either care about their individual votes, or about the policy outcome....

We study a model where an employer, trying to fill a vacancy, engages in optimal sequential search by drawing from two subpopulations of candidates who differ in their ""discourse systems"": during an interview, a minority candidate with a discourse system not shared with the employer conveys a...

We study vote buying by competing interest groups in a variety of electoral and contractual settings. While increasing the size of a voting body reduces its buyability in the absence of competition, we show that larger voting bodies may be more buyable than smaller voting bodies when interest...

Chapter 1: Nonparametric Identification of Insurance Models with Multidimensional Screening (with Isabelle Perrigne and Quang Vuong)This chapter studies the identification of an insurance model with multidimensional screening, where insurees are characterized by risk and risk aversion. The model...

This thesis consists of two essays. In the first essay, we analyze a two-stage game, with coalition formation in the first stage and Cournot oligopoly in the second, to show how coalition formation takes place and affects the environmental level.In open membership games with symmetric players,...

CHAPTER 1: Informational Control and Organizational DesignThis essay focuses on organizational issues of allocating authority between an uninformed principal and an informed expert. We show that the established result of Dessein (2002) that delegating decisions to a perfectly informed expert is...

Auctions are among the oldest economic institutions in place---they have been used since antiquity to sell a wide variety of goods, and their basic form has remained unchanged. In this dissertation, I explore the efficiency of common auctions when values are interdependent---the value to a...

This dissertation examines a natural signaling mechanism in a two-sided matching market between firms and workers. We consider a basic game of incomplete information. Each agent knows her own preferences over matches, but uncertain about other agent preferences. Each worker can send a limited...

This dissertation develops dynamic stochastic models of heterogeneous firms in small open economies and uses them to analyze how firms' decisions are shaped by their participation in export markets and to understand the implications that these decisions have for firm-level volatility and the...