VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Equipment Investment and Economic Growth in the 21st Century
Keywords: Machinery
Economic Development
Growth Econometrics
Learning by Doing
Embodiment
and Externalities
Thesis

It is widely held that the Industrial Revolution introduced a century of explosive economic growth on the back of machinery and equipment. Testing whether this conventional wisdom held for more advanced economies, DeLong and Summers found large equipment returns to economic growth of up to 20-30%. In this paper, I extend their analysis and attempt to estimate the impact of equipment investment on economic growth in the late 20th and early 21st century. Using a strategy of OLS regression of productivity growth on equipment investment and other drivers of growth, I find that equipment still produces large returns but reach a more modest conclusion than DeLong and Summers.
Erasing the Rohingya: The Historical Roots of Myanmar's Crimes Against Humanity
Keywords: International Relations
human rights
genocide
ethnic cleansing
crimes against humanity
Rohingya
Myanmar
national identity
Thesis

Located in the heart of Southeast Asia, Myanmar is a majority Buddhist country that recently transitioned from an authoritarian regime to a nominal democracy. Despite this, violence against the Muslim Rohingya minority of Rahkine State has only escalated. In August 2017, Myanmar’s military began a scorched-earth campaign against the stateless Rohingya, committing crimes against humanity and driving thousands of Rohingya into Bangladesh. One year later, the UN has recommended for Myanmar to be criminally investigated for the most egregious crime in international law: genocide. Though the Rohingya have been present in the Rahkine region for centuries, the military claims that they are illegal immigrants. From a contemporary human rights perspective, this thesis analyzes the historical, political and religious origins of today’s genocide of the Rohingya people. Employing history as a means to understand the Rohingyas’ current suffering, this thesis situates the Rohingya narrative in the larger context of post-colonial Burmese state-building and in comparison to other Burmese minorities in order to understand the Rohingyas’ vulnerability. Through historical analysis, this thesis strives to raise awareness of the Rohingyas’ erasure and human right to national belonging.
Essays in applied microeconomics
Keywords: Business.

This dissertation is a collection of three primarily empirical studies broadly concerned with how corporate decision making affects household labor market outcomes. In the first chapter, I study how business relocation affects the regional distribution of job creation within the United States, and I find that local economic booms on average lead to establishment and job outflows. The second chapter, coauthored with Bobak Moallemi and Ramana Ramakrishnan, studies the impact of firm human resource allocation decisions on the labor market value of workers. We find that online reports of promotions causally increase recruiter interest in workers. The third chapter, coauthored with Joshua Rauh, examines the impact of the 2012 California Proposition 30 income tax increase on the pre-tax income and migration decisions of high earning California residents. We find that high earners respond strongly to income taxation both along the intensive and extensive margins.
Essays in development and public economics
Keywords: Economics.

This dissertation, Essays in Development and Public Economics, comprises three chapters of theoretical and empirical research investigating various topics in development and public economics. The first chapter explores a new welfare benefit of imposing conditions to send children to school on cash transfers in developing countries. The second chapter develops a method to decompose income inequality into differences in individual productivities vs. differences in individual preferences for consumption relative to leisure. Finally, the third chapter investigates why parents may optimally invest more in their first child relative to their later-born children, focusing on the context of India.
Essays in financial economics
Keywords: Business.

This dissertation consists of three essays which examine how asset prices are impacted by the behavior and constraints of financial market participants. Chapter 2 shows evidence that slow asset price reaction to information can be driven by constraints in investors' information processing, rather than by illiquidity and transaction costs, which are the current dominant explanations in academia. My core hypothesis is that investors cannot immediately read and understand all value-relevant information, so they have to choose where to allocate their attention, and that drives variation in price underreaction to information. The key testable prediction is that price underreaction will be information source-specific, with lower underreaction to sources that are more value-relevant. Corporate bond and stock return data are strongly supportive of this view. For instance, corporate bonds with higher credit risk respond more quickly to default-relevant news, and bonds with longer duration respond more quickly to interest rate news. These facts cannot be explained by traditional illiquidity mechanisms which only explain security-level variation. Chapter 3 shows that mutual fund flow-induced price pressures explain around 30% of Fama-French size and value factor movements. Throughout 1965 to 2015, mutual fund investors frequently made very large size and value style-level capital reallocations that amount to a few percentage points of the total equity market value. These flows induce fund man- agers to conduct corresponding trading in those factors, and such factor-level trading pressure creates price pressures that revert very slowly. Because size and value are major return factors, this means that price pressures can explain a significant fraction over overall price movements. Chapter 4, which is a joint project with Wenhao Li, examines the intermediation arrangements in institutional trading. When executing trades for institutional investors, intermediaries sometimes act as brokers (e.g. in equities) and earn commissions, and other times (e.g. in currencies) as dealers, taking risks and earning markups. What explains this variation in intermediation style? To this end, we propose a theory based on the trade-off between the cost of monitoring brokers and paying dealers for holding inventory. Brokers have incentives to misbehave so they need to be monitored. In contrast, dealers have aligned incentives, but charge customers for inventory costs. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, broker intermediation is more prevalent in liquid and transparent markets where monitoring is easier, and when intermediary inventory costs are higher.
Essays in historical and contemporary Chinese economy
Keywords: Economics.

This dissertation is a collection of three essays on historical political institutions and contemporary economic issues in China. In the first chapter, titled "State Formation and Bureaucratization: Evidence from Pre-Imperial China", I study the mechanisms of state-building in pre-imperial China. I develop an incomplete contract model of land ownership and military conflict, which produces three predictions. First, external military threat dampens state-building as the ruler needs to incentivize his agent to defend against invasion by giving out ownership to land. Second, military attacks are conducive to state-building as centralized states are more efficient at offense. Third, a decrease in the bargaining position of administrators also facilitates state-building. Empirical tests and historical examples are consistent with model predictions. In the second chapter, titled "Media Attention and Choice of Major: Evidence from Anti-Doctor Violence in China", we study the effect of media persuasion in the context of educational choices. We exploit plausibly exogenous variations in Chinese newspaper articles on anti-doctor violence to identify how media reports affect students' decision to study medicine in college. We collect articles from over 1,200 newspapers and match them with an administrative dataset containing the universe of students enrolled in Chinese colleges from 2005 to 2011. We find that one additional article on violence against doctors leads to a 0.5 percent decrease in the number of students choosing medicine majors, especially majors that train physicians and nurses. Students attending elite colleges and with above-median test scores are more responsive to media attention. Consequently, articles on violence reduce the quality of medical students, measured by their rank in the college entrance examination. In the third chapter, titled "Marital Preferences and Housing Prices in China: Evidence from Online Dating", we estimate the effects of China's surging house prices on individuals' marital preferences and equilibrium assortative matching patterns. Using data from China's largest dating website, we estimate mate preferences based on users' decision to reply to a first-time message from a contact. We find that (1) site users, in particular women, have strong preferences for home-ownership, and increases in housing prices are associated with higher reply rate by women; (2) compared to non-homeowners, homeowners have stronger preferences for home-ownership; (3) home-ownership increases users' competitiveness and this effect becomes more pronounced for men when as housing prices increase; (4) there is weak evidence on the impact of housing prices on equilibrium assortative matching patterns.
Essays in industrial organization
Keywords: Economics.

The first chapter of my dissertation studies the costs and benefits of multi-outlet retails firms, or chains. Chains make up a large and growing part of the US retail sector, with significant variation across store category and geographic location. This paper quantifies the demand-side incentives to operate a network of stores as a chain: various forms of economies of scale allow chains to generate higher demand than independent firms, but at the same time chains are less flexible in customizing product selection or prices across locations. To quantitatively assess this tradeoff, I develop a simple model and estimate it using a large transaction-level dataset from a payment card company, focusing on restaurant purchases. I find that on average chains could earn 22\% more transactions if they could customize their product optimally to local tastes, but they would lose 13\% of their transactions if they were to operate as unconstrained independents. Policies that ban chain restaurants would result in a loss of consumer welfare equivalent to 1.5\% of restaurant spending and would disproportionately impact lower income consumers. Considering the endogenous entry of independent restaurants dampens the effects of chain bans by 30\%. The second chapter of my dissertation studies the potential for strategic default among borrowers during the financial crisis. Together with Nicola Pierri, we exploit a discontinuity in the eligibility criteria of the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), a large federal government program that incentivized lenders to renegotiate mortgages for borrowers who were more than 60 days delinquent on their loans. In contrast to prior literature, we find that HAMP increased rates of delinquency by about 0.5\% among eligible borrowers with much larger effects for underwater loans. At the same time, the program succeeded in its stated purpose of lowering foreclosure rates among borrowers that were already delinquent and increasing the likelihood that they return to making payments. Our results suggest that borrower strategic response is an important consideration in designing debt relief policies. Written with Johannes Dolfen, Liran Einav, Pete Klenow, Jon Levin, Larry Levin, and Wayne Best, the third chapter of my dissertation focuses on the role of e-commerce in the economy. E-Commerce represents a rapidly growing share of consumer spending in the U.S. We use transactions-level data on credit and debit cards from Visa, Inc. between 2007 and 2017 to quantify the resulting consumer surplus. We estimate that E-Commerce spending reached 8\% of consumption by 2017, yielding consumers the equivalent of a 1\% permanent boost to their consumption, or over \$1,000 per household. While some of the gains arose from saving travel costs of buying from local merchants, most of the gains stemmed from substituting to online merchants. Higher income cardholders gained more, as did consumers in more densely populated counties.
Essays in labor economics
Keywords: Economics.

This dissertation, "Essays in Labor Economics, " includes three chapters investigating the role of innovation and technological change in shaping labor markets. The first chapter, "Do R\& D Tax Credits Create Jobs?", studies the employment effects of state tax credits for research and development (R& D), a large and widely-used policy tool. Using confidential micro data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I show that state R& D tax credits increase state employment growth. The increased in-state employment growth is not due to R& D-performing firms shifting employment across states in response to differential tax incentives. Rather, total employment growth at these firms increases. Additionally, greater in-state employment growth does not come at the expense of neighboring states. This is surprising in light of previous research which found that the credits increase in-state R& D spending but that all of the increase is offset by decreased R& D spending in neighboring states. I find no similar effect with respect to employment growth. A plausible explanation for my results is that state R& D tax credits cause increased innovation in the states which offer them, as the tax credits are associated with higher R& D investment and patenting, and lead to increased productivity growth. The second chapter, "Do Innovative Firms Offshore Less?", provides causal evidence of a link between innovation and offshoring. Linking confidential U.S. Census micro data on foreign trade transactions, production, and R& D expenditures, and using R& D state tax credits to instrument for firm R& D investment, I find that over the past 20 years more R& D-intensive firms engage in less offshoring. I provide evidence that the operative mechanism is quality-upgrading -- innovative firms produce higher quality products using more expensive and higher quality intermediate inputs which are complementary to domestic production. The third chapter, co-authored with Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is titled "Have R\& D Spillovers Changed?". Slow growth over the last decade has prompted policy attention towards increasing R& D spending, often via the tax system. In this essay, we examine the impact of R& D on firm performance, both by the firm's own investments and through spillovers from other firms. Analysing panel data on US firms over the last three decades, and allowing for interactions in both technology space and product market space. We show that the magnitude of R& D spillovers remains as large in the second decade of the 21st Century as it was in the mid-1980s. The marginal social return and marginal private return to R& D have been largely stable during this time period. Consequently, the ratio between marginal social returns to R& D and marginal private returns has changed little since the 1980's, with the marginal social return exceeding the marginal private return by a factor of 4. This implies that there remains a strong case for public support of R& D. Positive spillovers appeared to increase in the 1995-2004 digital technology boom.
Essays in law and business
Keywords: Business.

Chapter 1: Despite the vast sums transferred through the legal system, the foundations of the procedures used to compensate plaintiffs for unobservable losses remain unclear. Standard remedies can compensate plaintiffs for unknown harms, but it is expensive to do so. Damage awards will generally undercompensate or overcompensate a plaintiff whose true harm is unknown, while equitable remedies that provide more tailored compensation are generally wasteful. In this paper I develop a novel remedy that compensates plaintiffs for unobservable private values at the lowest possible cost to the defendant. This remedy consists of offering the plaintiff the choice between intermediate damages and an inalienable injunction that restores the underlying harm at the conclusion of the trial. I show that this remedy is robust to errors by the court and potential post judgment renegotiation. Furthermore, I demonstrate that this remedy reduces litigants' incentives to lie during trial. Finally, I consider ex ante deterrence and show conditions under which the remedy improves social welfare relative to optimal damages. Chapter 2: Corporate sanctions are meant to deter bad behavior and to compensate victims. Yet the imposition of sanctions may lead to negative consequences including missed debt payments, job losses, and insolvency. In this article I show that how a corporation pays sanctions has important implications for deterrence, compensation, and collateral consequences. With debt in place, shareholders pay sanctions through selling assets rather than through issuing securities, shifting some of the incidence of the sanctions onto creditors and imposing collateral consequences on workers. I show that shareholders can benefit from social-welfare decreasing corporate malfeasance even when detection is certain and the sanctions are equal to the harm caused. Furthermore, the presence of restrictive debt covenants does not solve the problem. I propose that officials mandate that firms issue equity to pay sanctions, and show that this eliminates the tradeoff between the benefits and costs of sanctions and better aligns the interests of corporations and society. Chapter 3: Large asset managers manage trillions of dollars of assets on behalf of tens of millions of clients. In this article, I take a close look at the underlying interests of those clients. Because asset managers' clients are affected by corporate actions as customers, employees, creditors, taxpayers, and the general public, they are interested in more than the financial performance of the corporations in their portfolios. Instead of maximizing the profits of individual firms, an asset manager acting in their clients' best interests should instead focus on improving the alignment between corporations and society more broadly. I show that asset managers can induce significant changes at portfolio companies. I then put forward a set of actions that asset managers could implement that would significantly increase clients' collective welfare. Finally, I show that there is little legal risk from a reorientation towards client welfare by asset managers.
Essays in market and mechanism design
Keywords: Economics.

This dissertation demonstrates three works to understand how specific markets work and how we can devise the rules to improve market outcome. Chapter 1 studies a two-period matching model where one side of the market (e.g. workers) have an option to invest and delay matching in the first period. Chapter 2 explores the optimal ordering of heterogeneous items in sequential auctions with unit-demand buyers. Chapter 3 analyzes the optimal ``screening'' mechanism of products with network externalities.
Essays in over-the-counter markets
Keywords: Business.

This thesis consists of three essays, which examine several issues in over-the-counter financial markets. The first essay shows that dealers build socially excessive inventories in order to compete for market share. The distortion in pricing is empirically identified using transaction level data in the U.S. corporate bond market. The second essay shows that the two roles of a dealer, immediacy provision and matchmaking, create a conflict of interest. A direct implication is that bid-ask spread is a misleading measure of immediacy provision. The third essay introduces reducible intermediation chains in order to quantitatively measure search frictions in over-the-counter markets. This allows us to categorize intermediation chains by their primary intermediation incentives. Specifically, the first essay shows that dealers in over-the-counter markets build socially excessive inventories in order to compete for market share and get the associated intermediation rents. Using the TRACE dataset for the U.S. corporate bond market, I find that, excluding the crisis, the incentive to build inventory raises dealers' bid prices for corporate bonds by an average of 5 basis points. During the crisis, this effect was reversed by 23 basis points of implied additional dealer balance-sheet costs. The second essay, co-authored with Zeyu Zheng, shows that the two roles of a dealer, immediacy provision and matchmaking, create a conflict of interest that leads dealers to hold inefficiently high levels of inventory in order to extract additional rents from customers. Because of this, bid-ask spread is a misleading measure of immediacy provision. Our model suggests the use of execution delays as an additional measure of immediacy provision. The third essay, co-authored with Yang Song and Xingtan Zhang, introduces reducible intermediation chains in order to quantitatively measure search frictions in over-the-counter markets. This allows us to categorize intermediation chains by their primary intermediation incentives. Using interdealer trades in the U.S. corporate bond market, we discover new types of intermediation chains that are not formed to mitigate search frictions or to facilitate liquidity provision. Instead, these chains arise when dealers intermediate trades for other dealers in order to unwind positions at a profit.
Essays in political economy
Keywords: Business.

This dissertation addresses important questions in the social science of democratic political institutions. The three constituent essays use formal models to construct theories of often observed, but under-examined, features of collective decision-making in government. The first essay distinguishes textual ambiguity in laws from other types of uncertainty about policy and proposes an intra-legislature cause of ambiguous laws. Namely, conflict over policy can reduce (even rational, policy-concerned) legislators' incentives to exert effort in searching for and fixing ambiguous text. As a consequence, ambiguous laws are likely to arise under general conditions. Institutional changes adopted in order to reduce ambiguity, e.g., reducing legislators' costs of searching bills, may not have the intended effect in certain strategic settings. The second essay relates three prior literatures on population heterogeneity, state capacity, and the distribution of power between central and local governments. In a multi-state model, diverse citizens vote for the level of government capacity and the spatial policy in both their own state and the entire nation. As in the first essay, policy conflict is shown to undermine provision of what is commonly perceived to be a common good: here, the capacity of a government to implement laws effectively. For plausible population preferences, government capacity can be inefficiently over-provided. The interaction effect between state and national capacity has significant consequences for the distribution of power to implement policy between those two levels of government. When capacities are complements, state-level preference homogeneity can assist in the development of national government capacity. The third essay investigates the well-worn question of strong legislative party formation in the novel setting of distributive politics. In the three-player bargaining model, two legislators with partisan ties decide whether one should delegate his proposal rights to the other, in turn, gaining additional proposal rights through an institutional privilege of the majority party leader. Even with this institutional advantage, partisan ties must still be strong for delegation to be chosen.