Recent cross-country investigations of the role of institutional fundamentals such as the protection of property rights in promoting financial development have extended a literature that has for decades maintained that financial factors can affect real outcomes. In this paper we pursue this new...

This dissertation studies the distributions of treatment effects in switching regimes models (SRMs). First, we propose a general class of SRMs and provide simple estimators of average treatment effects. Second, we establish sharp bounds on the joint distribution of potential outcomes and the...

The unprecedented integration of women into U.S. labor markets was one of the most significant economic and social changes of the Twentieth Century. Indeed, the transformation of legal and economic opportunities for women led The Economist to label the past one hundred years as the "female...

This study provides a detailed quantitative analysis of a transition to inflation targeting with a focus on the role of expectations. I investigate the impact of the Turkish central bank's inflation reduction programs on inflation in Turkey from 1996 to 2005. Over this period there was a...

My dissertation empirically addresses some unanswered questions that have motivated much debate among banking practitioners, government lawmakers and economists by investigating two natural experiments provided by regulatory reforms.The first study examines the impact of the Federal Deposit...

Over the past two decades, China has been the worlds fastest-growing economy. My dissertation focuses on several important issues in Chinas recent development and reform:(1) Financial development and economic growth. It is widely recognized that financial sector reform is crucial to Chinas...

My dissertation studies the dynamics of primary commodity prices empirically and theoretically. In Chapter II, I provide empirical evidence on the time series behavior of commodity price movements. Employing monthly prices for 36 individual commodities, I find that the commodity price to CPI...

My dissertation evaluates technology adoption and transfer both theoretically and empirically, with the goal of providing new insights into the consequences of technology adoption -- an area that remains understudied in the macroeconomic literature. The first chapter introduces and summarizes...