VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays in empirical economics [electronic resource]
Keywords: Business.

This thesis studies a range of economic issues that arise due to incomplete information when utilizing discrete choice models for estimation. First, I study the efficiency and profitability of a range of pricing plans, within the context of a market that offers subscription services. Second, I study the impact of unobserved quality in the trade of goods, showing with simulations and data how enriching a model of trade by allowing for unobserved heterogeneity (with parametric or non-parametric assumptions) can generate predictions more in line with the observed data.
Essays in finance and macroeconomics [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics.

This dissertation explores various issues in finance and macroeconomics. The first two chapters deal with the workings of the prime brokerage and repo markets, with a special emphasis on the relationship between broker-dealers and hedge funds through collateral re-use in particular. The last chapter, co-authored with Daniel Garcia-Macia, deals with the impact of energy transitions on economic growth with a focus on the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom and has potential implications for the energy transitions in general. In the first chapter, I analyze the relationship between prime brokers and hedge funds. Prime brokers and hedge funds form relationships in a matching market. In particular, the research questions are: What are the determinants of these matches? How did they change after the financial crisis? I estimate a matching model in which part of the profits of prime brokers and hedge funds depends on variables that are defined at the level of the entire portfolio of clients that a prime broker serves. I show that prime brokers and their client hedge funds choose to have trading relationships with each other in a manner that reflects the benefits of specialization. Moreover, prime brokers preferred risky clients before the crisis, while they were averse to risky clients after the crisis. Identification follows from pairwise matching stability. I analyze the potential underlying economic mechanisms, mainly the cost advantages to a prime broker of collateral re-use between hedge fund clients. This is known as internalization. I estimate that the value of internalization for major prime brokers, such as Goldman Sachs, is around \
Essays in financial economics [electronic resource]
Keywords: Business.

This thesis studies how information affects trading and firm investment. In the first chapter I examine the conditions for the no-trade theorem to hold in multiperiod consumption settings and show it no longer holds in many reasonable scenarios. In situations where agents have different concerns for intertemporal substitution, information-based trade can be mutually acceptable because it enables agents to readjust their consumption profiles based on future consumption shocks. I show that the existing literature that finds no-trade results in various multiperiod consumption settings crucially depends on specific preference assumptions that lead to risk aversion dominating concerns for intertemporal substitution. The no-trade theorem fails to hold when a wider range of utility functions with a more important role for intertemporal substitution are considered. Chapter 2 presents quantitative analysis on the intertemporal substitution as a rational channel to generate trading. Intertemporal substitution bridges information-based trading and consumption-based asset pricing. Consumption-based asset pricing models are natural candidates to analyze information-based trading, and information-based trading affects the volatility of individual consumption processes. Quantitative analysis demonstrates that besides asset pricing implications, information-based trading related to intertemporal consumption smoothing can also explain a significant part of the trading volume observed in financial markets. Finally, Chapter 3 studies how a firm's growth is affected by the evolution of its external debt financing environment. Asymmetric information about the qualities of projects the firm can undertake makes external financing costly. Collateral can mitigate this problem, but its availability is limited by the size of the firm. As a firm grows, more collateral becomes available, broadening the firm's access to external debt financing channels and lowering its cost of capital. The firm's growth decision is affected by how effective additional collateral can be in lowering its cost of capital and the amount of assets it needs to accumulate to broaden its access to potential lending channels. A small firm may optimally choose to stay small when it is financially constrained and far from the size necessary to have access to formal lending. When the size of a small firm approaches the level needed to have access to formal lending there arises a strong incentive to expand, making the firm locally risk loving. The framework I study also raises some questions about the frequent use of a firm's growth rate as an empirical proxy for firm value. I show that a high growth rate is not necessarily associated with high firm value.
Essays in financial economics [electronic resource]
Keywords: Business.

This thesis studies how credit market frictions affect debt pricing and the behavior of borrowers and lenders. In the first chapter, I study the matching of corporate borrowers with banks and the implications of endogenous matching for credit provision. I find that bank-dependent firms borrow from well capitalized banks, while firms with access to the bond market borrow from banks with less capital. This matching improves access to credit during a crisis by pairing bank-dependent firms with stable banks. During the 2008 Financial Crisis, bank-dependent borrowers faced significantly greater loan supply from their relationship banks than they would have without this matching. In the second chapter, I investigate the pricing of bonds issued by states and local governments. I use three distinct, complementary approaches to decompose municipal bond spreads into default and liquidity components, finding that default risk accounts for 74% to 84% of the average municipal bond spread after adjusting for tax-exempt status. The price of default risk is high given the rare incidence of municipal default and implies a high risk premium. In the third chapter, I explore the nature of corporate capital structure adjustments. The third chapter is coauthored with Arthur Korteweg, a professor at the University of Southern California, and Ilya A. Strebulaev, my principal adviser. We show that the frequency of capital structure adjustment varies significantly across firms. Using new hand-collected data from detailed corporate filings, we find that frequently refinancing firms tend to use lines of credit, which have minimal adjustment costs, to fund operating losses and working capital needs. In contrast, infrequently refinancing firms use long-term debt and equity, which have higher issuance costs, to fund investment and rebalance capital structure. Our findings suggest that adjustment costs are an important determinant of firms' financing choices.
Essays in microeconomics [electronic resource]
Keywords: Business.

This dissertation theoretically analyzes how competition among firms affects their strategic choice of information provision, which is particularly important for internet businesses. The first chapter is motivated by crowd-sourced recommender platforms that organize social learning about ``experience goods'' by recommending items based on information collected from previous users. In order to balance making good recommendations and collecting information about new products, platforms ``experiment'' with products. This chapter studies how market structure affects experimentation over the life cycle of a product. Chapter two is inspired by targeting in internet advertising auctions, in which publishers decide how much information about user characteristics to reveal to advertisers. Revealing information increases efficiency, yet a monopolistic seller may prefer to hide information. When sellers are competing for potential bidders, a policy of providing more information can be a means of attracting bidders. This chapter investigates how the intensity of competition among sellers affects their incentives to reveal horizontal information.
Essays in protest and repression [electronic resource]
Keywords: Political Science.

While civil wars and armed conflict have declined in Africa, protest incidence has increased. To explain when these protests emerge, we need to know (1) what individuals stand to gain from demonstrating, (2) how they overcome collective action problems, and (3) whether and how severely the state responds. The three chapters of this dissertation bring new theory and findings to bear on these three steps in the logic of protest and repression. First, what motivates demonstrators? In rural areas, the upward trend in protests captures an increase in mining and land-related conflicts. Common explanations for these protests focus on environmental harm, an influx of job-seeking migrants, or predation by rebel groups. Chapter 1 argues, instead, that the evidence supports a different explanation --- conflictual bargaining over the division of profits between mining companies and poorly informed host communities. Second, how do these protesters organize? Communities must overcome a coordination problem and face the risk of repression. Chapter 2 employs a quasi-experimental design to demonstrate that cell phone access has lowered the costs of protesting by easing communication among would-be demonstrators and by deterring the use of repression, as governments now fear that any brutality will be quickly and widely disseminated over cell phone and social media networks. Third, under what conditions does the state repress protests? Chapter 3 uncovers and explains two widespread patterns in how governments in Africa deploy repression: first, repression is more likely in response to urban demonstrations; but, second, when states intervene in rural areas, they are 75% more likely to kill demonstrators. These patterns suggest that small protests in remote towns pose a minor threat and, thus, prompt infrequent repression. Yet, when the state cracks down in rural areas, it worries less that brutality will spark a backlash, as there are fewer bystanders who might join the fray.
Essays in theoretical and behavioral economics [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics.

This dissertation consists of three essays in theoretical and behavioral economics. They all concern decision-making in complex environments. The first chapter is entitled Obviously Strategy-Proof Mechanisms. It is generally held that some strategy-proof mechanisms are easy for non-experts to understand, and others are difficult to understand. However, this distinction is not captured by standard game theory. In this chapter, I define obviously dominant strategies. Whether a strategy is obviously dominant depends (just) on the extensive game form. I characterize this definition in two ways: Obviously dominant strategies are exactly those strategies that a cognitively limited agent can recognize as dominant. Obviously strategy-proof (OSP) mechanisms are those that can be run by a social planner with only partial commitment power. For an environment with one-dimensional types and transfers, I characterize the OSP mechanisms and the OSP-implementable allocation rules. I test and corroborate the theory with a laboratory experiment. The second chapter is entitled Context Effects as Explained by Foraging Theory, and is coauthored with Neil Yu. This chapter reconciles two seemingly competing explanations of context-dependent choice, one invoking psychological mechanisms, and the other Bayesian learning. We prove that standard context effects are features of the optimal solution to a general dynamic stochastic resource- acquisition problem. The model has two key ingredients: inter-temporal substitution and learning about the environment. Interpreted as a description of animal foraging behavior, it explains why context effects might be adaptive in nature. Interpreted as a description of consumer choice problems, it suggests that context effects might result from rational inference. A simple experiment shows that the latter interpretation sometimes holds. The third chapter is entitled Thickness and Information in Dynamic Matching Markets, and is coauthored with Mohammad Akbarpour and Shayan Oveis Gharan. We introduce a simple model of dynamic matching in networked markets, where agents arrive and depart stochastically, and the composition of the trade network depends endogenously on the matching algorithm. We show that if the planner can identify agents who are about to depart, then waiting to thicken the market is highly valuable, and if the planner cannot identify such agents, then matching agents greedily is close to optimal. We characterize the optimal waiting time (in a restricted class of mechanisms) as a function of waiting costs and network sparsity. The planner's decision problem in our model involves a combinatorially complex state space. However, we show that simple local algorithms that choose the right time to match agents, but do not exploit the global network structure, can perform close to complex optimal algorithms. Finally, we consider a setting where agents have private information about their departure times, and design a continuous-time dynamic mechanism to elicit this information.
Essays on capital markets and corporate disclosure [electronic resource]
Keywords: Business.

This thesis studies how a firm's disclosure decisions are affected by the interaction between prevailing financial reporting regulation and managerial incentives. Chapter 1 summarizes studies related to this thesis. I focus on rules that require a firm to issue regular financial statements. As a result, the release of some information about a firm's performance and financial condition is inevitable. However, since financial statements do not fully reflect all value-relevant information, a firm's manager can still affect the interpretation of this information via voluntary disclosure. In Chapter 2, I study how reputational concerns of a firm's manager affect her voluntary disclosure decisions. I show that interpretation of both the firm's report and voluntarily disclosed information depend on the timing of the disclosure relative to disclosures made by other firms in the same industry. In Chapter 3, I consider the case when private information of the firm's manager cannot be credibly communicated to outside investors and a mandatory financial report is the only available information channel about firm value. As a result, the noisiness of a financial report will lead investors to overvalue some firms and undervalue others. I show that allowing for misreporting can increase social welfare if a firm must rely on external capital in order to finance its investment opportunities. Overall, my results emphasize the importance of taking into account strategic disclosure decisions of managers for regulators, investors, and analysts.
Essays on energy management and public health [electronic resource]
Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.

Energy management is concerned with the planning and operation of energy production and energy consumption units. This dissertation focuses on energy management problems for EV rental fleet charging and wastewater treatment plants, with the goal of minimizing energy costs in response to time-varying energy pricing schemes and/or minimizing CO2 emissions. In the EV rental fleet charging setting, we study the non-preemptive EV fleet charging control problem in order to minimize the total energy cost under hourly energy pricing schemes. This has not been addressed by previous literature. The optimal charging policy is derived in closed-form and can be implemented as a computationally efficient algorithm. Our simulation results show that our proposed charging algorithm reduces the electricity cost by 40% compared to the current charging patterns of an average California EV under hourly energy pricing schemes. Energy management issues for the wastewater treatment industry are a relatively new subject for the operations research community. We develop an analytical framework for optimal timing of the flow-control demand response approach to minimize energy cost and CO2 emissions respectively and characterize the optimal policies in detail. Our case study suggests that the optimization techniques in our paper can reduce 11% of wastewater treatment net energy cost and 9% of the related CO2 emissions via the flow-control demand response approach. This thesis also includes a third project related to public health. In particular, we develop a generalizable mathematical model to help public health departments working with housing departments to determine the cost and cost-effectiveness of affordable housing programs, in terms of secondary health benefits.
Essays on interstate crises and audiences [electronic resource] : a text analysis approach to US foreign relations
Keywords: Political Science.

Policymakers conduct foreign policy in the presence of domestic and international audiences―especially in the midst of interstate crises that may precipitate armed conflict (e.g., Fearon 1994, 1997; Schultz 1998, 2001; Smith 1998; Tomz 2007). This dissertation project aims to study the role of the audience in interstate crises by applying text analysis and machine learning techniques to vast bodies of newly digitized documents from the United States government. Quantitative time-series data generated in this project allowed for a substantially improved understanding of mechanisms explaining interstate behavior in the presence of domestic and international audiences. This dissertation project consists of three independent essays: 1) policymakers' credibility concerns and escalatory behavior in the Berlin Crisis; 2) the effectiveness of public and private diplomatic signals after Khrushchev's ultimatum in 1958; and 3) the determinants of de-escalation policy in the Vietnam War. These quantitative historical studies contribute to micro-foundational understandings of U.S. policymakers' perceptions and interstate behavior in crises and the actual influence domestic and international audiences have on foreign policy.
Essays on state capacity [electronic resource]
Keywords: Political Science.

This dissertation addresses two closely related questions. How does state capacity --- the ability of governments to implement basic policies, such as taxation --- develop? What are the consequences of state capacity development or its breakdown? These questions are explored in three related essays that use formal reasoning, analysis of original data with quasi-experimental designs, and qualitative evidence from archival research. The first essay presents a theory of the development of state capacity grounded in domestic elite conflict and tests it in post-revolutionary Mexico. The second examines the role of institutions of limited government and elite representation in explaining the expansion of the fiscal state in Spanish America in the late 18th century. Finally, the third essay develops and empirically evaluates a model of strategic tax evasion under the shadow of state collapse.
Essays on the economics of social networks [electronic resource]
Keywords: Business.

This dissertation consists of two projects, both concerned with how social networks form and how they affect economic decisions. In the first project, entitled Identifying Influential Agents in a Social Network, I define influence centrality, a new measure of influence which combines information on node and neighbor characteristics as well as information on the network structure, by building a model of friendship formation and peer effects and calculating the change in the equilibrium behavior of the network when one node changes its behavior. I apply the model to the context of smoking among middle and high school students and show that a targeted anti-smoking intervention in which a small number of influential smoking students are treated may be more efficient than a uniform program where every student in the school receives the same anti-smoking treatment. The second project, entitled Quantifying Spillovers in Network Formation Over Time, is a joint work with Sean Chu and Shankar Kalyanaraman at Facebook. The goal of the project is to separately identify and understand the relative importance of network effects and unobserved heterogeneity in a multi-period network formation model. Here, we define network effects to be the effect of the number of mutual friends on the probability of friendship and assume that unobserved heterogeneity is time-consistent. We estimate the model on a de-identified panel data set from a small group of users on Facebook and find that both network effects and unobserved heterogeneity are statistically and economically significant predictors of friendship formation on Facebook. We further re-estimate the model first, without network effects and next, without unobserved heterogeneity. Comparing the results from these specifications, we find that network effects play a more important role than unobserved heterogeneity in network formation models on Facebook.