Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005. / "June 2005." / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis is a collection of three theoretical essays on institutions and economic growth. Chapter 1 considers a particular institution: ethnicity. Ethnic, religious and tribal divisions are empirically associated with economic underdevelopment. I construct a model in which groups form endogenously to enable cooperation between their members in a prisoner's dilemma. Groups sustain trust through monitoring, whereas only the Nash equilibrium, trade, is possible in an anonymous market. Optimal group size trades off the benefits of increased scale and the costs of reduced ability to detect cheating. Inter-group hostility can enable each group to enforce more trusting behavior between its own members. Even if groups may form optimally, in equilibrium they may persist inefficiently. Chapters 2 and 3 consider some distributional implications of technical change in a model with human capital. Both chapters distinguish between general skills, that are equally useful with any vintage of technology, and specific skills, that are associated with a particular vintage. In Chapter 2, I construct a model of slow technology diffusion. In developing countries, diffusion takes the form of a "dual economy", in which a gradually increasing fraction of workers use modern technology, while the remainder use traditional technology. Intermediate technologies are never used. During the transition, wages of specific-skill workers fall, as workers with general skills disproportionately join the modern sector. The model can also be applied to technology diffusion in developed countries. Chapter 3 asks why, early in the modern era, technical change was primarily deskilling, while in the modern era it is skill-biased. / (cont.) Whereas previous explanations have focused on changes in technology, this paper suggests that changes in skills themselves were important. High-skill workers invest in specific skills if technical change is slow, and in general skills if it is rapid. This generates a U-shaped relationship between the rate of technical change and the skill-premium. Moreover, with low rates of technical change the modern sector is unskill-intensive, whereas the reverse is true when technical change is faster. The predictions of the model are compared with the historical experience. / by Ashley Lester. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation consists of three essays studying the impact of tax policy on housing markets and elderly homeowners. Chapter One examines the potential lock-in effect of capital gains taxation on home sales, using the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 (TRA97) as a policy instrument. Before 1997, homeowners were subject to capital gains taxation when they sold their houses unless they purchased replacement homes of equal or greater value. Since 1997, homeowners can exclude $500,000 of capital gains when they sell their houses. Using zip-code level housing price indices and sales data from 1982 to 2006 on single-family houses in 16 affluent towns within the Boston metropolitan area, I find that TRA97 reversed the lock-in effect for houses with low and moderate capital gains. However, the semiannual home sale rate of houses with capital gains above $500,000 declined after TRA97, suggesting that TRA97 generated an unintended lock-in effect for houses with capital gains over the maximum exclusion amount. Chapter Two studies the relationship between property taxes and elderly mobility. This is the first study using an instrumental variable approach to address the endogeneity problem associated with property taxes in analyzing elderly mobility. Using household-level panel data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and a newly-collected dataset on state-provided property tax relief programs, I find evidence suggesting that higher property taxes raise mobility rates among elderly homeowners. Eligibility for relief programs lowers mobility rates, and the impact of these programs appears to vary with program types, program generosity, and implementation strategy. / (cont.) Chapter Three investigates the effect of property taxes on elderly homeowners labor supply decisions, using similar data and empirical strategy employed in Chapter Two. I examine both the extensive margin - whether elderly homeowners' delay retirement or reenter the labor force in the face of rising property taxes, and the intensive margin - whether elderly homeowners work longer hours when property taxes increase. I find little evidence that property taxes have a significant impact on elderly labor supply. / Hui Shan. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-119). / by Karl T.A. Whelan. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. Thesis. 1969. Ph.D. / Leaf number 36 used twice; Lacking l. 35, 92, 133, 223, 327, 362, 388 and 398. Vita. / Includes bibliographies. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1985. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / Bibliography: leaves 160-165. / by Aaron Schwartzman. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2014. / "February 2014." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / In the first chapter, I explore the role of coordination problems and self-fulfilling beliefs as drivers of sovereign default risk. I employ global-game techniques to induce a unique equilibrium. Along the unique equilibrium, I show how the equilibrium default risk can be decomposed in a solvency-risk component and a coordination-risk component. I then study how fiscal policy can be effective in managing the risk of coordination and I characterise how the shape of the optimal policy is affected by the presence of this risk. I finally show that making the deficit contingent on interest rate movements is more effective in managing default risk than using non-contingent fiscal targets. The second chapter (co-authored with Emine Boz) studies a model in which a government issues bonds to fund a project whose return is unknown to private investors. The government has access to a technology that allows it to manipulate the mean of a public signal. Even though investors fully internalize the manipulation technology - which makes it hard for the government to "fool" them - and manipulation is costly, we show that it occurs in equilibrium. Our extensions reveal that higher transparency leads to weaker manipulation incentives, news about a high probability of manipulation significantly lowers the bond price, and that manipulating private signals leads to similar outcomes as manipulating public signals. The third chapter investigates the relationship between trust and firm activity. Using Italian micro-data, I find that trust affects labour productivity, although larger firms do not appear to benefit more from higher levels of trust. This is in contrast with evidence from cross-country studies, and suggests the cross-country correlation may be spurious. I do not find that trust matters to the main capital owner's decision to delegate control of the firm to either relatives or professional managers, nor that it makes a difference to the firm's choice of hiring accountants and auditors. / by Anna Zabai. / Ph. D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-210). / This thesis consists of essays about how to improve education markets through analyzing data generated by such markets. In chapter 1, I start with looking at how families decide which school to attend in a school choice system. Though such systems are designed assuming that families make well-informed choices upfront, I use data from NYC's high school choice system to show that families' choices change after the initial match as they learn about schools. I develop an empirical model of evolving demand for schools under learning, switching costs, and demand responses to prior assignments. The estimates suggest that there are even more changes in underlying demand, undermining the welfare performance of the initial match. To alleviate the cost of demand changes, I investigate dynamic mechanisms that best accommodate choice changes. These mechanisms improve on the existing discretionary reapplication process. In addition, the gains from the mechanisms dramatically change depending on the extent of demand-side inertia caused by switching costs. Thus, the gains from a centralized market depend not only on its design but also on demand-side frictions (such as demand changes and inertia). In chapter 2, I turn to education production after students start attending schools. In centralized school admissions systems, rationing at oversubscribed schools often involves lotteries on top of preferences of students and schools. This random assignment is extensively used by empirical researchers to identify the effect of getting in a school on outcomes such as test scores. I theoretically study whether a popular empirical research design extracts a random assignment as intended, providing a condition under which the research design successfully extracts a random assignment. Chapter 3 (with Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Josh Angrist and Parag Pathak) considers the complementary question of how best to use the lottery-generated variation for impact evaluation. We develop easily-implemented strategies that fully exploit the random assignment embedded. We apply these methods to find large achievement gains from charter school attendance in Denver. By analyzing test-score consequences, chapters 2 and 3 complement chapter l's analysis of welfare/happiness consequences of school attendance. / by Yusuke Narita. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references. / Financial support provided by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. / by Ricard Jorge Caballero. / Ph.D.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (page 16). / In this paper we aim to test the extent of labor risk sharing exists in thai village economies. Specifically we test the null hypothesis of full risk sharing at the village level. We outline a simple planner's problem that motivates our empirical specification. Our empirical specification consists of two equations, a labor supply equation that determines how many hours you work conditional on participating in the labor market, and a selection equation which determines the probability of working positive hours. Our empirical specification allows for fixed effects that correspond to different Pareto weights for the agents. Our dataset, an unusually long panel survey spanning over 160 months conducted in 16 villages in Thailand, allows us to deal with these fixed effects. Our results lead us to reject the null of full risk sharing since non-labor income has a significant negative effect on participation. In most specifications it also has a significant but small negative effect on hours worked conditional on participation. In light of these results we reject the null of full risk sharing. / by Lucas Manuelli. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-81). / by Paula Ramada. / Ph.D.