VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Equal opportunity politics in post-civil rights America [electronic resource] : African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, 1964-1980

"Equal Opportunity Politics In Post-Civil Rights America: African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, 1964-1980" examines the relationship between African American and Mexican American communities in Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s. This study uses the federal War on Poverty program to argue that the mid-1960s were a critical moment for the development of African American and Mexican American relations in the city and brought these groups into contact at a level unprecedented in U.S. history. By combining the fields of African American history and Mexican American history, this story demonstrates that key historical moments, including the Black Freedom Movement, Chicano Movement, and urban uprisings were linked through the War on Poverty and set the foundation for recent debates about black/brown relations.

Keywords: History.
Advisor: Camarillo Albert primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Ebron Paulla A.
Hobbs Allyson Vanessa advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in applied microeconomics [electronic resource]

This dissertation in applied microeconomics examines supply-side behavior, particularly responses to policy changes. The first chapter studies the supply response of urban private schools to public school funding changes in New York City. We find that private schools whose public school competitors received larger funding increases were more likely to close in the subsequent two years. These closures amplified student sorting and undid some of the funding reform's positive achievement effects. The second chapter investigates how stimulus-motivated federal funding directed to universities affected their revenues, expenditures, employment, tuition, student aid, endowment spending, and receipt of state government appropriations. We find that private universities spent additional funding on many categories of expenditures while public universities used federal funds as leverage to gain independence from state governments-gaining the ability to set tuition and other prices closer to market-based rates but losing state appropriations in the bargain. Overall, the stimulus apparently caused universities to increase their investments in research and human capital. The third chapter examines how online platform design interacts with consumer search and seller price-setting to affect market outcomes. We use browsing data from eBay to estimate a model of consumer search and price competition when retailers offer homogeneous goods. We find that retail margins are on the order of 10%, and use the model to analyze the design of search rankings. Our model explains most of the effects of a major re-design of eBay's product search, and allows us to identify conditions where narrowing consumer choice sets can be pro-competitive.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Einav Liran primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Hoxby Caroline Minter primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Levin Jonathan D. (Jonathan David)
Essays in behavioral and experimental economics with applications to risk and social preferences [electronic resource]

This dissertation describes my research in several related areas of behavioral and experimental economics. In the first chapter, I use subjective and hypothetical responses to show that opt-in choice framing leads to greater organ donor designation rates than active choice framing. I use the same methodology to accurately predict behavior in settings where standard models of social preferences fail. In the second chapter, I show that machine learning models and economic models predict equally well in domains of risk, but economic models fall behind when ambiguity is introduced. In the final chapter, I present a field experiment that shows that making a commitment choice public increases demand for the device, indicating that participants believe they can reveal something positive about themselves by using the device.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Bernheim B. Douglas primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Niederle Muriel advisor. Thesis advisor
Sprenger Charles
Essays in economic theory [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of three self-contained essays. The first essay 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: intertemporal 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. We ran a simple experiment to show that the latter interpretation sometimes holds. The second essay investigates the performance of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) in investment acceleration and welfare promotion for small-business entrepreneurs. In a model of privately observed investment returns, random ROSCAs improve upon autarky, while bidding ROSCAs can achieve efficiency. By relaxing the assumption of homogeneous agents calculating equilibria, it is shown that an expected-utility maximizer prefers some bidding ROSCAs to random ROSCAs regardless of her belief about others' strategies. Such analysis respects the Wilson doctrine, putting forth a novel framework for comparing mechanisms. The results highlight why more ROSCAs may embrace auction designs as economic development differentiates economic opportunities. The third essay explores the frontier between possibility and impossibility results in social choice theory by analyzing different combinations of "pro-socialness" and "consistency" conditions. This exercise delivers stronger versions of four classical impossibility theorems, and offers a thorough understanding of connections among them. We also characterize social choice functions that are "independent of irrelevant alternatives, " which makes evident that the fundamental difficulty of social choice lies in "pairwise" consistency requirements. We also introduce a concise pedagogical approach to classical impossibility theorems.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Milgrom Paul R. (Paul Robert)
Bernheim B. Douglas advisor. Thesis advisor
Roth Alvin E.
Segal Ilya advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in finance [electronic resource]

This thesis studies how bank level capital structure frictions impact both banks and borrowers. In the first chapter, I use bank level capital structure frictions to explain banks' seniority in corporate debt structure. In the second chapter, I look at how bank level capital structure frictions can be passed on to borrowers and impact both bank and borrower behavior. In the third chapter, I look at how capital regulation, bailout expectation, and deposit insurance interact with bank level capital structure frictions.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Strebulaev I. A. (Ilʹi͡a Alekseevich) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Grenadier Steven R. advisor. Thesis advisor
Zwiebel Jeffrey advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in financial economics [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of two essays which are entitled "Learning, Dispersion of Beliefs, and Risk Premiums in an Arbitrage-free Term Structure Model" and "Risk Premiums Implicit in the Term Structure of Oil Futures Prices", and two accompanying appendices. The first essay, which is based on joint work with Marco Giacoletti and Ken Singleton, explores the properties of risk premiums implied by a dynamic term structure model (DTSM) in which the stochastic discount factor (SDF) reflects Bayesian learning and where the degree of investor dispersion of beliefs today is informative about the future paths of yields. The estimated learning rule has formal roots in the literature on Bayesian learning, and it reveals which aspects of risk and the state of the economy agents learn about and which aspects they (evidently) know from information embedded in the current yield curve. Through the lens of our arbitrage-free learning model we see that investors had full knowledge of key aspects of the pricing distribution. Furthermore, we find that, when the U.S. economy is emerging from a recession, knowledge of the extent of disagreement among professionals is informative about how today's yield curve will impact its future shape. Our learning-based DTSMs outperform the median professional forecasts as well as a random walk over the past twenty-five years, particularly during the years following recessions in the U.S. economy. The second essay, which is based on joint work with Ken Singleton, explores the nature of risk premiums within an arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model of oil futures prices. Particular attention is given to 2008 which included the boom and bust in oil prices and the subsequent global financial crisis. A novel feature of our model is that it allows for information about trading patterns in futures markets and macroeconomic developments to systematically affect variation in risk premiums within a dynamic, arbitrage-free model. This is accomplished by extending the literature on affine term structure models to accommodate the changing maturities of futures contracts. Our results suggest that both investor flows and market perceptions about future inflation had large effects on risk premiums, over and above the information in the past history of oil futures prices. With the model in hand, and the implied estimates of expected excess returns on oil contracts, we then ask if index trader activity in oil markets is related to expected future oil returns. This is one of the questions in the heated debate on the financialization of commodity markets. We document that index funds flowed into commodity markets as oil risk premiums were high, nominal interest rates were low, and the slope of the oil term structure was in backwardation.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Singleton Kenneth J. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Duffie Darrell advisor. Thesis advisor
Van Binsbergen Jules H.
Essays in international trade [electronic resource]

This dissertation studies the determinants of global trade patterns and strategic tariff negotiation in trade policy. The first essay examines why firms and countries indirectly export through trade intermediaries, with an emphasis on the role of financial frictions. I show theoretically and empirically that financially more constrained exporting firms and financially less developed countries are more likely to use trade intermediaries. The empirical analysis uses firm-level data on indirect exports for 118 countries and country-level data on entrepot trade through Hong Kong for over 50 countries. Calibrating a two-country version of the model in general equilibrium for China and US reveals important gains from trade intermediation. The second essay studies exporting countries' choice of trade partners, and shows that financial development is again an important determinant. The paper provides new, systematic evidence that at the aggregate level, countries follow a hierarchy, or pecking order, of export destinations. This pecking order is governed by the market potential of destinations such as market size and trade costs. Financially more developed countries have more trade partners and go further down the pecking order, especially in sectors that rely heavily on the financial system. The last essay studies tariff negotiation with a dynamic bargaining inefficiency known as forward manipulation. Forward manipulation is formalized in a non-cooperative game where countries negotiate over tariff levels in a sequential, bilateral fashion. The common party across the negotiation rounds has an incentive not to lower its tariff in the earlier stages of the game so that it can manipulate the threat points of negotiation partners in later stages. Forward manipulation is applied to explain gradualism, the observed pattern of tariffs declining slowly and gradually, for the early GATT rounds.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Manova Kalina
Bagwell Kyle advisor. Thesis advisor
Bowen Renee advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in macroeconomic policy [electronic resource]

This dissertation evaluates the impact of government policies using macroeconomic tools. The first policy I study is Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs). I use an assignment model to estimate the potential impact on the housing market if GSEs were eliminated. Because GSEs provide target subsidies to low quality segments of the housing market, their elimination would affect those segments the most. The second policy I study is the U.S. sanctions on Iran. I employ econometric tools to estimate the effect of the sanctions on inflation, GDP, and exchange rate in Iran.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Piazzesi Monika primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Schneider Martin (Professor of economics) primary advisor.
Duffie Darrell advisor. Thesis advisor
Kurlat Pablo
Essays in macroeconomics [electronic resource]

This dissertation in macroeconomics comprises three chapters. In the first chapter, ``The Macro Impact of Short-Termism, '' I study a pervasive tradeoff between the short-term and long-term performance of firms. In the United States, long-term investment, like R& D, must be expensed from short-term earnings figures. Therefore benchmarks for short-term performance, such as analyst earnings forecasts, may cause managers to underinvest in the long term. The second chapter, ``Alternative Methods for Solving Heterogeneous Firm Models, '' compares four algorithms for the solution of a canonical neoclassical heterogeneous firms model with fixed capital adjustment costs and firm-level productivity shocks. Trade between low-cost, low-wage countries like China and the developed world has increased substantially in recent decades. Recent empirical research suggests that firms exposed to this liberalization engage in more innovation. In a third chapter entitled ``Trapped Factors and China's Impact on Global Growth, '' which is joint work with Nick Bloom, Paul M. Romer, and John Van Reenen, we build a product-cycle model of growth and trade which seeks to both rationalize this micro-level response of firm innovation to low-cost competition as well as quantify the dynamic or growth based gains from trade liberalization.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Bloom Nick
Hall Robert
Klenow Peter J. advisor. Thesis advisor
Piazzesi Monika advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in mechanism design with semi-exclusive information and wrong beliefs [electronic resource]

Mechanism design theories have established basic framework in studying economic problems where agents have private information and behave in their own interests. This framework provides a workhorse for exploring how to implement social choice rules in general. One typical issue is to analyze the decision-making by a social planner or a designer who aims to achieve efficient outcomes that maximize the joint welfare of all agents. Not surprisingly, efficiency essentially requires that the designer know the agents' private information and then choose the corresponding socially optimal outcome. However, the difficulty of mechanism design problem is to characterize these incentive constraints where agents find it optimal to reveal their private information truthfully. Specifically, sufficiently rich private information could entail non-implementability of efficient social choice rules. To overcome this difficulty, this dissertation considers a class of semi-exclusive information structures where agents may observe signals about payoff signals, and a class of problems where agents may have wrong beliefs or the mechanism designer is not informed about the agents' valuation functions, and proposes mechanisms that implement efficient allocations.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Segal Ilya primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Bagwell Kyle advisor. Thesis advisor
Jackson Matthew O. advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in public and labor economics [electronic resource]

This thesis is composed of three empirical papers in the field of labor and public economics. The first paper uses historical data from the New-York Stock Exchange to investigate the importance of ethnic discrimination, ethnic networks and ethnic homophily in the field of finance. The second paper studies the role of parental insurance on the job search behavior of new entrants in the labor market. It also uses parental shocks around the time of the child's entry into the labor force as an instrument to test for the existence of persistent effects from a temporary increase in job search effort at the beginning of a worker's career. The third paper takes advantage of an important tax reform that took place in Belgium in 2006 to answer a longstanding question in the field of public economics and corporate finance: what is the role of corporate taxes in determining the observed levels of leverage among incorporated firms.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Hoxby Caroline Minter primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Moser Petra advisor. Thesis advisor
Pérez González Francisco
Essays in the economics of education and innovation [electronic resource]

This dissertation contains three essays on the economics of education and innovation. In the first essay, I study the effects of increased access to higher education by examining a dramatic 1961 Italian reform that increased university enrollment in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields by more than 200 percent in a few years. The peculiar features of the reform allow me to identify students who were unaffected, directly affected, and indirectly affected. They also allow me to identify key channels through which the effects ran. Using data I collected from tax returns and hand-written transcripts on more than 27,000 students, I show that the direct effects of the reform were as intended: many more students enrolled and many more obtained degrees. However, I also find that those induced to enroll earned no more than students in earlier cohorts who were denied access to university. I reconcile these surprising results by showing that the education expansion reduced returns to skill and lowered university learning through congestion and peer effects. I also demonstrate that apparently inframarginal students were significantly affected: the most able of them abandoned STEM majors rather than accept lower returns and lower human capital. The promotion of STEM education, realized by inducing more students to enroll in university STEM majors, might have large positive externalities by fostering the production of innovation. In the second essay (joint work with Michela Giorcelli), we use the 1961 Italian reform of college admissions as a positive shock to the amount of STEM workers in the economy. We isolate the effect of the policy on invention using a variety of techniques. At the individual level, we link the school and income data of students that were in school around the policy implementation with information on each Italian patent that they owned or developed. At the national level, we exploit differential increases of STEM skills in municipalities that were at varying distance from a STEM school. In both cases, we do not find strong evidence that easier access to university STEM majors led to higher level of patenting. In the third essay (joint work with Joerg Baten and Petra Moser), we investigate whether compulsory licensing - which allows governments to license patents with- out the consent of patent-owners - discourages invention. Our analysis exploits new historical data on German patents to examine the effects of compulsory licensing under the US Trading-with-the-Enemy Act on invention in Germany. We find that compulsory licensing was associated with a 28 percent increase in invention. Historical evidence indicates that, as a result of war-related demands, fields with licensing were negatively selected, so that OLS estimates may underestimate the positive effects of compulsory licensing on future inventions.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Hoxby Caroline Minter primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Abramitzky Ran advisor. Thesis advisor
Moser Petra advisor. Thesis advisor
Pistaferri Luigi advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on financial markets and game theory [electronic resource]

Trading in financial markets has changed dramatically over the past decade: it has become largely automated and orders of magnitudes faster, and it has become spread out across many venues. Chapters 1 and 2 of this dissertation investigate how this transformation has affected market outcomes. Chapter 1 studies the effect of speed on market outcomes in a setting where information acquisition is endogenous. An increase in trading speed crowds out information acquisition by reducing the gains from trading against mispriced quotes. Thus, faster speeds have two effects on traditional measures of market performance. First, the bid-ask spread declines, since there are fewer informational asymmetries. Second, price efficiency deteriorates, since less information is available to be incorporated into prices. A tradeoff exists between the dual objectives of minimizing the bid-ask spread and maximizing price efficiency. We characterize the frontier of this tradeoff and evaluate several trading mechanisms within this framework. Despite its popularity, the limit order book mechanism generally does not induce outcomes on this frontier. We consider two alternatives: first, a small delay added to the processing of all orders except cancellations, and second, frequent batch auctions. Both induce equilibrium outcomes on this frontier. Chapter 2 investigates how an increase in the number of exchanges affects the bid-ask spread. The welfare consequences of increased exchange competition are theoretically ambiguous. While competition does place downward pressure on the bid-ask spread, this force may be outweighed by increased adverse selection that stems from additional arbitrage opportunities. We investigate this ambiguity empirically by estimating key parameters of the model using detailed trading data from Australia. The benefits of increased competition are outweighed by the costs of multi-venue arbitrage. Compared to the prevailing duopoly, we predict that the counterfactual spread under a monopoly would be 23 percent lower. Further, market design variations on the continuous limit order book would eliminate profits from cross-venue arbitrage strategies and reduce the spread by 51 percent. Finally, eliminating off-exchange trades, so-called dark trading, would reduce the spread by 11 percent. Chapter 3 introduces two new equilibrium refinements for finite normal form games. Both refinements incorporate the intuitive idea that a costless deviation by one player is more likely than a costly deviation by the same or another player. These refinements lead to new restrictions in games with three or more players. Furthermore, these refinements are applied to two well-known auction games: the generalized second price auction and the first-price menu auction. Both refinements select interesting equilibria in these games, and may be interpreted as providing a strategic foundation for the selections that others have made.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Milgrom Paul R. (Paul Robert)
Bresnahan Timothy F. advisor. Thesis advisor
Carroll Gabriel advisor. Thesis advisor