This dissertation consists of three essays on spatially differentiated markets. Generally, I explore how firms and consumers behave in such markets using structural modeling, causal inference and machine learning techniques, as well as high-resolution spatial data. In the first chapter, I study the efficiency of firm location configurations in the...
This dissertation contains two studies. In Chapter 1 we investigate the relationshipbetween expansionary credit events and firms’ employment decisions. To overcome the
endogeneity coming from the supply side of credit we exploit the legal and political framework
in Mexico to examine the effects of local governments’ prepayment of loans, a...
AbstractThis dissertation consists of three papers examining economic issues in developing countries.
The first paper studies how export activity affects prices in domestic consumer markets. Using extensive, spatially disaggregated data from India’s rice markets and exploiting a natural experiment provided by India’s rice export restrictions during 2007-2011, I show that,...
This thesis contains three chapters studying the evolution of the American higher education landscape, the different forces that shaped their organization, and how they, in turn, influenced human capital accumulation. The chapters are organized into three time periods: 1850-1900, 1910-1940, and 1980-2010. In the first chapter, joint with Heyu Xiong,...
Pharmaceutical companies pay more than $2 billion to physicians every year. Most of these payments are for food and beverage, speaking, honoraria, consulting, and travel and lodging, which are termed “general payments.” These payments have come under increased scrutiny as critics of pharmaceutical promotion argue that they influence prescribing in...
This thesis investigates various aspects of productivity. In the first chapter I investigate the role of consumer demand in generating productivity dispersion. In particular, I study how differences in consumer preferences across the household income distribution generate dispersion in markups across the Indian manufacturing sector. I find that this consumer...
In Chapter 1, I investigate whether physical capital anchors the spatial distribution of economic activity and how capital destruction affects local economic activity in the short and the long term. I investigate these questions by examining the 1975 frost that damaged coffee trees in the Brazilian state of Paraná. I...
This dissertation is a wide-range study of the relationships between the three central elements of the production function: technology, capital and its financing, and labor. Chapter 1 analyzes the relationship between labor and recent wave of automation and digitization technologies, showing that while they typically substitute for workers, in several...
Conventional methods in industrial organization assume that firms are strategically sophisticated and set prices as best responses to their competitive environment. In the first two chapters of this dissertation, I use a detailed dataset of retail and wholesale prices from the newly legalized cannabis industry in Washington state to show...
Economic and political processes are heavily intertwined. Political processes put constraints on economic activity while economic development influences the way the political system operates. This interconnection is especially tight in developing countries and transition economies with less secure property rights, less stable political institutions, and more rapid economic changes. In...