VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays in energy resource economics [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of three chapters whose common theme is innovation and tax policies as they concern emerging energy technologies and resources in the United States and Canada. The first chapter investigates whether there is econometric evidence of learning-related externalities in the U.S. wind development business that might substantiate learning-by-doing as a basis for costly policies to support wind energy. I develop a modeling framework that: (i) disentangles firms' experience installing wind capacity from other determinants of wind power projects' costs -- in particular, input prices, scale economies, and exogenous technical change; and (ii) allows for alternative measures of experience and multiple channels through which experience can accumulate. For a variety of specifications, I find evidence of firm-specific learning-by-doing but no evidence of knowledge spillovers across firms, which calls into question the need for policies to support U.S. wind on the grounds that there are learning-related externalities. The second chapter develops a model of production and investment in the upstream natural gas business in an effort to characterize and evaluate an efficient and government revenue-maximizing royalty regime for shale gas in Canada. The model suggests that efficient production, investment, and royalty revenue outcomes can be achieved via a royalty on shale gas producers' operating profits, with royalty rates sensitive to gas wells' locations and market prices for gas. Simulation results based on this model suggest that the royalty regime currently in place in British Columbia -- the province with the best shale gas resources in Canada -- over-taxes shale gas producers at low prices, and under-taxes shale gas producers at high prices, compared to the proposed alternative royalty regime. The third chapter revisits the issue of identifying and estimating learning-by-doing in U.S. wind (and renewable energy technologies more generally). I explain why statistical inference based on learning curves -- a class of regression models employed in much existing empirical research on learning-by-doing in renewables -- is suspect and should not inform policy. Specifically, I show that popular learning curve models make strong assumptions that: (i) preclude the ability to distinguish between inter-firm knowledge spillovers and firm-specific learning-by-doing (i.e. learning that does and does not entail externalities); and (ii) disregard factors besides learning in explaining the evolution of firms' costs over time.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Wolak Frank A. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Einav Liran advisor. Thesis advisor
Reiss Peter C. (Peter Clemens) advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in financial economics [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of three essays in which I study dynamic incentive problems in corporate finance. In particular, I use methods from dynamic contracts, dynamic games, and stochastic control to study agency and asymmetric information problems in finance and economics. In Chapter 1, ``Contracting Timely Delivery with Hard to Verify Quality, '' I analyze the optimal long-term contract in a setting with an extreme problem of multi-tasking in which one task is value destroying. I study this problem in a stylized continuous-time optimal contract model with hidden effort and imperfect monitoring about project quality. I consider a situation with imperfect performance measures in which the agent can manipulate output as to improve observed performance at the expense of project quality. The optimal contract balances the provision of incentives to exert effort and the cost of monitoring quality. The optimal contract has the following features: 1) termination is unpredictable as otherwise the agent would manipulate performance when he is close to being fired; 2) monitoring is contingent on the agent's past performance -- agents with a weak performance are monitored more thoroughly; 3) cash compensation is deferred longer and the optimal contract has longer duration and lower turnover than in a setup without manipulation. In Chapter 2, ``Trading Dynamics in the Market for Lemons, '' I analyze dynamic trading in a market with a divisible asset and asymmetric information, as in the market for lemons. I characterize an equilibrium in which the seller signals high value by both delay of trade and by retaining a larger fraction of the asset. Due to the lack of commitment not to trade again in the future, separation is only partial and improves over time. In equilibrium, these two signaling mechanisms are related, and delay is an increasing function of cumulative sales. The equilibrium expected surplus is the same as in a static market for lemons in which only low-quality assets are traded. In the dynamic setting, even though there is an efficiency gain because high-quality assets are eventually traded; this gain is offset by the delay in trade of low-quality assets. Finally, Chapter 3, ``Optimal Capital Structure with Contingent Capital Requirements'' study the impact of contingent capital requirements on the optimal capital structure and dividend decisions of a regulated bank.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: DeMarzo Peter M. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Skrzypacz Andrzej
Duffie Darrell advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in international trade [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of three chapters, studying causes and effects of trade policy. The first two chapters study a policy that was imposed on an economy from the outside - a blockade, while the third deals with policies which are self imposed. In the first chapter, I use detailed household expenditure and price data to study the welfare consequences of the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip between 2007 and 2010. Using the West Bank as a counterfactual, I find that being removed from world markets reduced welfare by 17%-28% on average. Moreover, households with larger pre-blockade expenditure levels experienced disproportionally larger welfare losses. The second chapter uses firm level data to study the effects of the blockade on domestic production in Gaza. I find that the blockade triggered reallocation of workers across firms and sectors, especially from manufacturing to services, and from industries that use imported inputs intensively, or export. In addition, labor productivity fell sharply by 24%. This decline was however significantly higher in manufacturing (39%) than in services (5%). These findings suggest that access to world markets did not only determine the location of the Gaza economy on a given Production Possibility Frontier, but also determined the shape of this PPF. The third and last chapter deals with the the effects of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) on the level of protectionism that member countries use against non members of their PTA. Using data on the use of Anti-dumping Duties by the U.S. before and after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), I find that American industries that were exposed to imports from Mexico became much more likely to receive protection in the form of AD duties relative to industries that were not exposed to imports from Mexico. I interpret these findings as evidence supporting the "protection diversion" hypothesis, according to which countries that enter PTAs will become more aggressive in using protection measures against non-members.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Bagwell Kyle primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Fitzgerald Doireann advisor. Thesis advisor
Manova Kalina
Essays in macroeconomics and financial economics [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay, entitled "Dynamic Market Participation and Endogenous Information Aggregation", studies information aggregation in financial markets with recurrent investor exit and entry. The paper considers a dynamic general equilibrium model of asset trading with private information and collateral constraints. Investors differ in their aversion to Knightian uncertainty: when uncertainty is high, some investors exit the market. Since exiting investors' information is not fully revealed by prices, conditional return volatility and risk premia both increase. I use data on institutional investors' holdings of individual stocks to show that investor exit rates indeed comove with return volatility and help forecast it. The model also implies that exit is more likely when wealth is more concentrated in the hands of less uncertainty averse investors. The model thus predicts more exit toward the end of a long boom, as seen in the data. Moreover, economies with looser collateral constraints should see more volatility due to exit and partial revelation. The second essay, entitled "The (Un)importance of Mobility in the Great Recession", is based on a paper co-authored with Siddharth Kothari and Itay Saporta-Eksten. Unemployment during and after the Great Recession has been persistently high. One concern is that the housing bust reduced mobility and prevented workers from moving for jobs. The paper characterizes flows out of unemployment that are related to mobility to construct an upper bound on the effect of mobility on unemployment between 2007 and 2012. The effect of mobility is always small: Using pre-recession mobility rates, decreased mobility can account for only an 11 basis points increase in the unemployment rate over the period. Using dynamics of renter mobility in this period to calculate homeowner counterfactual mobility, can account for an 8 basis points increase. Using the highest mobility rate observed in the data, reduced mobility accounts for only a 34 basis points increase in the unemployment rate. The third essay, entitled "Long-term Bonds in a Housing Model", looks into a housing model where mortgages are modeled as a long-term bond. Most house purchases in the US are financed through a mortgage with maturity between 15 and 30 years. This essay studies house price dynamics when modeling mortgages as long-term bonds instead of the more standard one-period bond. With this new feature in the model, results show that the equilibrium price-rent ratio and mortgages borrowing are much less sensitive to changes in the interest rates. In addition, the model can generate negative equity, which matches the presence of negative equity in the housing market downturn in data.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Schneider Klaus primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Amador Manuel (Manuel A.) advisor. Thesis advisor
Piazzesi Monika advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in political economics [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of three self-contained but related chapters addressing topics in empirical political economy. Though the applications differ, the chapters share a common methodological approach: each chapter first develops a microeconomic model of behavior and then estimates the parameters of the model using observational data. The first chapter, "The Informational Content of Campaign Advertising, " examines alternative mechanisms for the influence of political advertising on voter behavior. Using a dataset of advertising exposures and election outcomes in statewide elections, I measure how much of advertising's effectiveness can be attributed to the provision of information to voters, and how much to non-informative or "persuasive" effects. I find small but nontrivial advertising effects, of which almost all can be attributed to the persuasive channel. The second chapter, "Dividing the Dollar with Formulas, " proposes a model of legislative bargaining in which legislators allocate a budget subject to the constraint that allocations must be conditioned on a set of district covariates of limited dimension. I discuss some implications for the structure of coalitions and the outcomes of distributive politics, and then estimate the degree to which this constraint binds in the allocation decisions of the US Congress. I find that formulaic allocation substantially reduces Congress' ability to target funds to politically marginal districts. The final chapter, "Testing Theories of Congressional-Presidential Interaction with Veto Override Rates, " uses data on veto-override votes in Congress to test several game-theoretic models of interactions between the President and Congress. A version of this chapter appears in Political Analysis, vol. 20 (2012), pp. 501-519.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Callander Steven primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Benkard C. Lanier advisor. Thesis advisor
Hartmann Wesley R. (Wesley Robert)
Yurukoglu Ali advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in the economics of education, children and family [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of three distinct essays in the economics of education, children and family. The first essay evaluates the effectiveness of carbonated beverage bans in schools by investigating their impact on household carbonated beverage consumption. I match households in Nielsen Homescan Data to their school district's carbonated beverage policies over the last 10 years. I find that when high schools ban the sale of carbonated beverages to students, households with a high school student experiencing the ban increase their consumption of non-diet carbonated beverages by roughly the equivalent of 3.5 cans per month. I present evidence that the average high school student consumes roughly 4.5 cans of non-diet soda per month in school, when carbonated beverages are available. Thus, the results suggest that the drop in student school consumption is substantially offset by increased household consumption. The second essay explores the effectiveness of motivating students to improve their academic performance through conditioning various privileges. I show that conditioning the privilege of going off campus during the school day on certain academic (GPA, test scores, etc.) or behavioral (absences, probation, etc.) criteria improves high school students' test scores and decreases their dropout rates. These results shed light on student incentive programs intended to increase academic performance. The third essay asks how conditioning a monetary benefit on individuals' family status can create distortions, even in individuals' seemingly personal decisions, such as the birth of a child. I exploit a 21-month lag between announcing California's introduction of the first paid parental leave program in the United States and its scheduled implementation to evaluate whether women timed their pregnancies in order to be eligible for the expected benefit. Using natality data, documenting all births in the United States, I show that the distribution of California births in 2004 significantly shifted from the first half of the year to the second half of the year, immediately after the program's implementation. While the effect is present for all population segments of new mothers, it is largest for disadvantaged mothers - with lower education levels, of Hispanic origin, younger, and not married.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Harding Matthew C. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Abramitzky Ran advisor. Thesis advisor
Hoxby Caroline Minter advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in the economics of education [electronic resource]

This dissertation examines questions in the economics of education. I estimate the college enrollment effects of attending a high school that hosts an SAT testing center on campus, the heterogeneous capitalization of school quality across high and low income communities, and the effect of an Advanced Placement curriculum on college outcomes. To answer these questions, I construct several new student and household level data sets and exploit novel sources of variation. The results suggest that some students' college decisions are sensitive to seemingly minor obstacles, that districts in high income communities reap greater financial rewards for performance than low income districts, and that Advanced Placement courses and exams promote modest gains in college graduation rates.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Hoxby Caroline Minter primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Abramitzky Ran advisor. Thesis advisor
Bloom Nick
Essays on business and politics [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of three essays on the subjects of business and politics, with each analyzing key tensions and interactions between various business and political agents. Chapter 1 theorizes about how firms use their business, operations, or market strategy decisions as a lobbying instrument, to influence political decision-makers. I also contrast this with conventional monetary lobbying and determine the reasons why firm may prefer to lobby one way over another. Chapter 2 examines how firms with intrinsically long time-horizons overcome the short-run performance pressures on management through corporate governance. I develop a theory for why long-horizon firms should exhibit greater governance insulation than short-horizon firms, and empirically validate the theory for an important set of anti-takeover provisions. Chapter 3 explores how the durability of policy interacts with the shorter electoral cycle and provides incentives for politicians to engage in wasteful and inefficient policy-making.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Callander Steven primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Baron David
Shotts Kenneth W. advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on core-selecting auctions [electronic resource]

This dissertation provides a theoretical performance comparison of some of the leading sealed-bid combinatorial auctions and consists of three main chapters. The first chapter characterizes the complete set of pure-strategy, full-information, Nash equilibria of a set of combinatorial auctions that includes the Vickrey package auction and all core-selecting auctions. All bidder-optimal core-selecting (BOCS) auctions and the Vickrey auction have the same set of equilibrium outcomes: any assignment and individually rational payments. The equilibrium outcomes of the PAB auction must satisfy a stronger condition, but still include many inefficient assignments and payoffs outside of the true core. The second chapter looks at incentives for overbidding -- bidding more than true values -- in minimum-revenue core-selecting auctions. Previous studies ruled out overbidding by including arbitrary simplifying restrictions on the allowable bids. This chapter overturns those previous results, showing that overbidding can be a feature of all Bayesian equilibria in undominated strategies in certain incomplete-information settings. This overbidding can lead to higher expected efficiency and higher expected revenues than those with a restricted strategy space. The third chapter challenges some of the supposed advantages of BOCS auctions over the Vickrey auction with a new model of unrelated goods -- those which are neither substitutes nor complements for any bidder. The unrelated goods highlight the similarities between these auction formats, both of which can suffer from issues of low revenue and revenue non-monotonicity.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Milgrom Paul R. (Paul Robert)
Kojima Fuhito advisor. Thesis advisor
Segal Ilya advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on efficiency, fairness, and incentives in resource allocation [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of three essays on efficiency, fairness, and incentives in resource allocation. Chapter 2 studies allocation problems with and without monetary transfers, such as multi-unit auctions, school choice, and course assignment. For this class of problems, we introduce a generalized random priority mechanism with budgets (GRP). This mechanism is always ex post incentive compatible and feasible. Moreover, as the market grows large, this mechanism can approximate any incentive compatible mechanism in the corresponding continuum economy. In particular, GRP can be used to approximate efficient and envy-free allocations, while preserving incentive compatibility and feasibility. Chapter 3, a joint work with Daisuke Hirata, Onur Kesten, Morimitsu Kurino, and M. Utku Ünver, studies the problem of assigning a set of indivisible objects to a set of agents when monetary transfers are not allowed and agents reveal only ordinal preferences, but random assignments are possible. We offer two characterizations of the probabilistic serial mechanism, which assigns lotteries over objects. We show that it is the only mechanism satisfying non-wastefulness and ordinal fairness and the only mechanism satisfying sd-efficiency, sd-envy-freeness, and weak invariance or weak truncation robustness (where "sd" stands for first-order stochastic dominance). Chapter 4 studies equilibrium selection and stability in the generalized second price auction used by major search engines to sell advertisement slots. We assume that a bidder who bids randomly (noise bidder) participates in the auction with a small probability. The main finding is that the VCG-equivalent equilibria, considered plausible in this literature, do not survive in this model, even as the probability that the noise bidder appears converges to 0. An efficient equilibrium is essentially unique if it exists. This equilibrium is further justified in a model without the noise bidder as a unique limit of efficient trembling-hand perfect equilibria in which all bidders make mistakes in similar ways. However, the noise-bidder model may not have any efficient equilibrium, or even any pure strategy equilibrium. Simulations indicate that the set of parameters for which no pure strategy equilibrium exists occupies almost 99% of the parameter space if six or more positions are auctioned.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Ostrovsky Michael primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Skrzypacz Andrzej
Wilson Robert
Essays on empirical market microstructure [electronic resource]

This thesis studies how automation and structural changes in equity markets have affected various aspects of liquidity. In the first part of the thesis, I study high frequency trading (HFT). I first develop a methodology for measuring HFT activities that uses a statistical model to estimate reaction speed from limit order data. This allows us to separate out and measure HFT activities from that of slower traders. Using these measures, I study HFTs' liquidity provision. In today's markets where high frequency traders (HFTs) act as both liquidity providers and takers, I argue that information asymmetry associated with HFTs' use of public, machine-readable information is important. This particular type of information asymmetry arises because some machines may sometimes access certain information before other machines due to randomness in relative speed. I show that liquidity-providing HFTs supply less liquidity to stocks that suffer more acutely from this information asymmetry problem. My results also show that stocks with low spreads, high beta, and low volatility have a greater information asymmetry of this type. Moreover, when markets become volatile, this information asymmetry problem becomes more severe, and liquidity provision by HFTs decreases. I discuss implications for market-making activity in times of market stress and for HFT regulations. Second part of this thesis studies algorithmic trading, which is a larger set that includes HFTs. Using the introduction of hybrid market in the New York Stock Exchange as a natural experiment, I show that algorithmic trading causes liquidity across stocks to co-move more; hybridization increases the 5-minute liquidity comovement by 30 to 50%. Moreover, the effect is stronger at daily frequencies: hybridization induces a 90% higher daily liquidity comovement. These results are due to both an increase in market liquidity risk and a decrease in idiosyncratic liquidity volatility.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Nagel Stefan
Korteweg Arthur advisor. Thesis advisor
Pfleiderer Paul advisor. Thesis advisor