This dissertation explores various topics at the intersection of behavioral economics and political economy. It develops a theory of preference formation, investigates the effects of social media use, and studies the relationship between social image concerns and effective communication in the...

People compete to be esteemed and respected in nearly all group settings. Does intragroup status competition erode the ability for groups to achieve collective aims, or is competition for status part of the very fabric upon which collective action is produced? This dissertation aims to bridge an...

The Business of Property: Levantine Joint-stock Companies, Land, Law, and Capitalist Development Around the Mediterranean 1850-1925 is framed by two questions: First, how did land in the Levant become commodified? Second, how was this process of commodification -- with its related impetuses and...

This thesis consists of three essays on the economics of information. We study economic situations that involve information asymmetry. For example in an informal insurance market the borrower has private information about her income that the lender cannot observe. In a social learning context...

The first chapter investigates search and matching in online marketplaces, emphasizing how user behavior responds to the presence of others on the platform, which I call ``market thickness". Unlike standard settings in which firms typically benefit from increasing their customer base, in...

As the traditional employment relationship has deteriorated in the U.S. and in much of the world, the nature of careers has been changing. Formal organizations no longer serve as holding environments for people’s careers. Workers today have to continually navigate an external labor market,...

Over the past fifty years, financial and legal theory have predicted that owners of firms may have incentives to take risks that have positive expected value from the perspective of firms' equity holders but negative expected value from the perspective of total firm value and of society as a...

My project develops a social art history of a once-popular genre of decorative art called "cut glass, " domestic glassworks like bowls and vases incised with geometric patterns against stone and metal wheels. Specifically, I consider how the medium, its widely-discussed manufacture, and...

I re-examine the information content of earnings press releases (EPRs) by distinguishing tone, which captures optimism and pessimism and is the focus of prior research, and linguistic fundamentals (LF), which captures information content in non-tone language. I find after controlling for...

Campaign donors in the United States, though a small and unrepresentative segment of the broader electorate, have the financial means to potentially exert an outsized influence in American politics. Understanding the micro-foundation of donor behavior–why do they give? And how do they choose...