Chinese business leaders suffered from the crisis of COVID-19 and the Double Reduction Policy, and used various strategies and learning practices to survive the crisis. The purpose of this modified exploratory multicase study was to explore how leaders in the Chinese tutoring industry made sense of the crisis of the Pandemic and the Double Reduction Policy and learned to think strategically in a time of crisis. The study not only uncovered how Chinese business leaders used different strategies to deal with a crisis and learned to think strategically while adapting to the new environment but also brought implications and insights to business leaders about effective strategies and learning practices to cultivate strategic thinking in a complex and fast-changing world. The study addressed the following four research questions: 1.How did the business leaders in tutoring companies make sense of the complexities of the crisis of COVID-19 and the Double Reduction Policy? 2.What strategies, if any, did the business leaders develop to deal with the crisis? 3.In what ways, if at all, did the business leaders learn to think strategically while dealing with challenges? 4.What other factors helped or hindered the business leaders’ learning to think strategically in a time of crisis? Qualitative semi-structured interviews (critical incident interviews included), surveys, and a focus group discussion were used to collect data from 15 Chinese business leaders from the tutoring industry. The study generated four findings: Finding 1: The crisis negatively impacted the participants and their companies at different levels, but it also served as a valuable learning opportunity for their long-term development. Finding 2: The participants developed strategies to deal with the crisis at personal, organizational, and social levels. Finding 3: The participants learned to think strategically from direct experiences, indirect experiences, and two thinking processes—systems thinking and metaphorical thinking. Finding 4: Policies and relationships were two outstanding factors that hindered or helped their learning to think strategically. These findings indicated that (1) unprecedented crises like COVID-19 and the Double Reduction Policy can bring people benefits and valuable insights, (2) business leaders can develop critical strategies by combining their own and others' experiences and strategic insights into dealing with crises, (3) business leaders can use informal learning practices and deliberately use them to cultivate their strategic thinking, and (4) business leaders need to combine learning and action for cultivating strategic thinking capabilities. Lastly, business leaders should consider the influence of policies and relationships in their strategy formulation and learning process.

This dissertation combines micro-level data and partial equilibrium models to understand how financial policies affect non-financial firms, with a particular focus on the role played by banks in such transmission. In the first chapter we study a large-scale intervention in the Brazilian banking sector characterized by a sudden increase in the supply of credit provided by commercial government banks. Theoretically, the effect of this type of policy is ambiguous: while it can increase the total amount of credit in the economy, it can also increase misallocation if government banks finance riskier firms with unproductive projects. We leverage credit registry data to document a series of empirical facts and test if the intervention alleviated inefficient underprovision of credit. We find that while the intervention led to a reduction in interest rates and to an increase in total credit from both government and private banks, government banks faced a significant increase in defaults. Loans to ex-ante indebted firms explain this increase in default for government banks. Moreover, neither the increase in total credit nor the reduction in interest rates had any observable effects on output or employment. Our results suggest that the intervention increased credit misallocation, and that adverse selection did not play a significant role in the allocation of credit in Brazil. In the second chapter, we assess the role of banks in the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a large and unprecedented small-business support program instituted as a response to the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. In 2020, the PPP administered more than $525 billion in loans and grants to small businesses through the banking system. First, we provide empirical evidence of heterogeneity in the allocation of PPP loans. Firms that were larger and less affected by the COVID-19 crisis received loans earlier, even in a within-bank analysis. Second, we develop a model of PPP allocation through banks that is consistent with the data. We show that research designs based on bank or regional shocks in PPP disbursement, common in the empirical literature, cannot directly identify the overall effect of the program. Bank targeting implies that these designs can, at best, recover the effect of the PPP on a set of firms that is endogenous, changes over time, and is systematically different from the overall set of firms that ultimately receive PPP loans. We propose and implement a model-based method to estimate the overall effect of the program and find that the PPP saved 7.5 million jobs. In the third chapter we further explore the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) by asking what is the optimal allocation of funds across firms and the distortions caused by allocating these funds through banks. We show that it can be optimal to allocate funds to the least or most affected firms depending on the underlying distribution of the shock that firms face, the firms' financial position, and the total budget available for the program. In the model, as in the data, banks distort the allocation toward firms with more pre-pandemic debt and those less affected by the COVID-19 crisis. We characterize how this misallocation depends on the degree of asymmetric information between banks and the government. In an empirical application of our model, we estimate the PPP's effectiveness and compare it with alternative policies. A policy targeted at the smallest firms could have increased the program's effectiveness significantly.

In chapter 1, I ask whether an exchange rate depreciation depresses trading partners' output. I address this question through the lens of a classic episode: the currency devaluations of the 1930s. From 1931 to 1936, many of the biggest economies in the world successively left the gold standard or devalued, leading to a depreciation of their currency by more than 30% against gold. In theory, the effect is ambiguous for countries that did not devalue: expenditure switching can lower their output, but the monetary stimulus to demand might raise it. I use cross-sectional evidence to discipline the strength of these two mechanisms in a multi-country model. This evidence comes in two forms: (i) causal inference of the effect of devaluation on country-level variables, (ii) new product-level data to estimate parameters that are essential to discipline the response of trade --- the international elasticity of substitution among foreign varieties, and the pass-through of the exchange rate to international prices. Contrary to the popular narrative in modern policy debates, devaluation did not dramatically lower the output of trading partners in this context. The expenditure switching effect was mostly offset by the monetary stimulus to foreign demand. In chapter 2, Emi Nakamura, Jon Steinsson, and I provide new estimates of the evolution of productivity in England from 1250 to 1870. Real wages over this period were heavily influenced by plague-induced swings in the population. We develop and implement a new methodology for estimating productivity that accounts for these Malthusian dynamics. In the early part of our sample, we find that productivity growth was zero. Productivity growth began in 1600---almost a century before the Glorious Revolution. Post-1600 productivity growth had two phases: an initial phase of modest growth of 4% per decade between 1600 and 1810, followed by a rapid acceleration at the time of the Industrial Revolution to 18\% per decade. Our evidence helps distinguish between theories of why growth began. In particular, our findings support the idea that broad-based economic change preceded the bourgeois institutional reforms of 17th century England and may have contributed to causing them. We also estimate the strength of Malthusian population forces on real wages. We find that these forces were sufficiently weak to be easily overwhelmed by post-1800 productivity growth. In chapter 3, Carlo Altavilla, Miguel Boucinha, and I propose a new methodology to identify aggregate demand and supply shocks in the bank loan market. We present a model of sticky bank-firm relationships, estimate its structural parameters in euro area credit register data, and infer aggregate shocks based on those estimates. To achieve credible identification, we leverage banks' exposure to various sectors' heterogeneous liquidity needs during the COVID-19 Pandemic. We find that developments in lending volumes following the pandemic were largely explained by demand shocks. Fluctuations in lending rates were instead mostly determined by bank-driven supply shocks and borrower risk. A by-product of our analysis is a structural interpretation of two-way fixed effects regressions in loan-level data: according to our framework, firm- and bank-time fixed effects only separate demand from supply under certain parametric assumptions. In the data, the conditions are satisfied for supply but not for demand: bank-time fixed effects identify true supply shocks up to a time constant, while firm-time fixed effects are contaminated by supply forces. Our methodology overcomes this limitation: we identify supply and demand shocks at the aggregate and individual levels. In chapter 4, I study how the fiscal side of the US government reacts to monetary policy. I estimate the response of several fiscal variables to monetary shocks. Following an interest rate hike, tax receipts fall, outlays excluding interest payments are constant, and interest payments and debt increase. The fall in output that follows a monetary tightening --- not legislated changes in marginal tax rates --- drives the response of receipts. The fiscal authority therefore responds passively to monetary shocks, keeping expenditures constant and letting debt adjust to satisfy its budget constraint. In heterogeneous agent models, this scenario dampens output's response to monetary policy.

This dissertation contains three essays in financial economics. The focus of the dissertation is to study how retail investors and the financial market react to the arrival or the possibility of disastrous events. In the first chapter, I explore the portfolio reaction to evidence of climate change by looking at how retail investors trade when they locally experience abnormal temperature. I test the hypothesis that retail investors will trade out of high emission stocks and trade into low emission stocks when experiencing abnormally high temperature through a channel of climate belief updating. Using detailed administrative records of retail investors’ positions and trading activities from a large financial institution, I construct measures of trading imbalances at the zip code level for various types of stocks and study the impact from abnormal temperature. I do not find evidence that investors trade out of high emission stocks or trade into low emission stocks when experiencing abnormally high temperature. The estimated effects are neither economically nor statistically significant. Moreover, investors are not dynamically adjusting their portfolios in response to abnormal temperature. The nonresults are robust if I implement the estimations in quarterly or annual frequency. Focusing on only trading activities in the energy sector does not change the results. Analyzing subsamples of investors with different levels of beliefs in climate change also produces nonresults. Although past literature has shown that local extreme temperature can induce changes in beliefs about climate change and related behavior, this paper shows that such belief updating does not translate into response in portfolio choice.In the second chapter, we model the contribution of a vaccine to the rebound in corporate earnings the year following the onset of COVID-19 while accounting for the role of fiscal and monetary measures. A vaccine that reopens the economy leads to a jump in earnings, while temporary fis- cal and monetary support for households and businesses leads to higher short-run earnings growth before a vaccine arrives. We show that our model can be consistently estimated using revisions of value-weighted industry-level consensus earnings forecasts. We first present reduced-form evidence that security analysts account for both effects. Our model estimates then suggest that the reopening effect is as important as the short-run growth effect in explaining the rebound in corpo- rate earnings. The third chapter studies the partisan difference in trading behavior at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Partisanship drives disagreement on the severity and persistence of the COVID-19 shock when it hit the US. Republicans were more optimistic than the Democrats when evaluat- ing the potential damage of COVID-19 to the economy. Using detailed administrative records of retail investors’ positions and trading activities from a large financial institution, I find that the partisan disagreement on COVID-19 is reflected in stock trading behavior: Republicans had more net flow into equity than the Democrats from March to May of 2020. Moreover, the difference is concentrated on industries with high face-to-face interactions and highly levered firms, which are expected to be more severely damaged by COVID-19. The results suggest that disagreement rooted in partisanship can have a real impact on household financial decisions and potentially on the overall financial market.

This dissertation consists of three essays. Each one seeks to add in the understanding, in a small way, of the factors that contribute to the development of societies. The first chapter explores the decisive facts of technological advancements and the ability of trade to shape incentives to create new techniques destined for the open markets. The second chapter examines the electoral consequence of having a conservative biased source of information and its effects on the desired ideology of representatives. The third explores how using violence, illegal groups can reach their population control goals in their territories. These three chapters seek to answer history, and power relations between different groups determine societies' paths. In the first chapter, I study how access to international markets affects the direction of technical change. I use a historical trade shock that transformed the Spanish textile industry at the end of the 19th century. After Spain effectively forced its colonies to buy manufactured cotton goods in 1891, I document an increase in cotton textile innovation relative to other fabrics. After the colonies' independence in 1898, the difference in textile innovation between cotton and different fabric remained significant. This shows that innovation exhibits a path dependence even without the initial conditions that motivated the increase. I provide price evidence of the strength of the technical change indicating that the rise in relative prices of cotton fabrics boosted the rise in cotton innovation. Together, these results provide some of the first causal evidence on how international trade and foreign markets shape the direction of the technical change. Even more, I show that innovation is possible in peripherical countries. Conditions outside the technological leaders determined the incentives of local innovators to develop technologies needed for those local conditions. In chapter 2, written with Haaris Mateen, we study how the introduction of a biased local TV operator affects electoral results. We use Sinclair Broadcasting Group's (SBG) staggered expansion over 2012 and 2017. This is the largest TV operator in the United States and is known for its conservative slant. We find that in areas exposed to SBG biased news coverage in local TV stations the electoral results experienced changes compared to places where the company did not penetrate. First, we find that penetration of SBG decreased the likelihood of a third-party candidate in the House of Representatives elections yet increased the probability of having a republican candidate as the winner of the seat. On the other hand, in the presidential elections after SBG penetration, the republican party was harmed, and its candidate received fewer votes, thanks to an increase in the voting of third parties. Second, when analyzing the ideology of the winner of the local election, we document a movement to the right, partially motivated by an increase in the probability of electing a conservative republican as representative. Finally, when looking at the mechanism that explains these effects, we find no movements on the democrat candidates but changes towards the right on republican candidates. In those areas affected by SBG, the republican candidate had a more significant likelihood to be conservative and not moderate. Evermore, those republican candidates had an increase in the donations coming from PACs. Together, these results prove that media have differential impacts on the election. It can affect beyond the voters' preferences, and it also affects the decision of which type of candidates run on local electoral races. In chapter 3, together with Diego Martin, we study how non-state actors enforce stay-at-home orders to reduce COVID-19 cases. We argue that Colombian-illegal groups used massacres to enforce social distance rules. Massacres are attacks killing at least three defenseless civilians in one operation. We estimate the effect of those violent events using a synthetic control method. To rule out the channel of massacres for other reasons such as coca production, we compare sub-regions with low conflict before the pandemic and where coca is not suitable for growth. We find that places with massacres reduced the pandemic outbreak by 70 cases per 100.000 inhabitants per week after the second month. We show that the principal channel that explains our results is a reduction on mobility indexes. The first massacre decreased infection levels by reducing individuals' mobility at workplaces. Finally, we show that young population groups experienced the earliest reduction in infection rates, while the old group has the highest decline in infection rates after massacres.

This thesis titled ``Essays in Private Capital" comprises of three essays focused on various parts of private capital. Private capital, also known as alternative assets are non-traded, broadly defined as private equity, real estate, venture capital, hedge funds, infrastructure and natural resource investments. The first chapter studies private equity, the second focuses on residential real estate, and the third is on commercial real estate. These are important asset classes given the low interest rate environment, and the recent COVID-19 and Silicon Valley Bank crisis which had large exposures to private assets. The first essay titled ``Desperate Capital Breeds Productivity Loss: Evidence from Public Pension Investments in Private Equity" studies investor heterogeneity in private equity and its ultimate effect on target firms. Using novel micro-data on individual investments in private equity funds funds and buyout deals combined with confidential Census data, I show that capital contributed by the most underfunded U.S. public pensions decreases efficiency at target firms, as pensions fuel the growth of low quality, new entrant private equity funds. These results get stronger post the financial crisis, when underfunded positions and their subsequent investments in private equity increased. The paper shows that traditionally positive post buyout efficiency results turn negative in recent years, as marginal investors matching with marginal private equity funds pull down the average. The most underfunded pensions also realize lower total private equity returns relative to the least underfunded ones. These results suggest possibility of a ``funding doom loop" as currently public pensions use assumed return on assets to calculate liabilities. The second essay titled ``Flattening the Curve: Pandemic-Induced Revaluation of Urban Real Estate" focuses on work from home with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on residential real estate prices across the U.S. We show that the COVID-19 pandemic brought house price and rent declines in city centers, and price and rent increases away from the center, thereby flattening the bid-rent curve in most U.S. metropolitan areas. Across MSAs, the flattening of the curve is larger where working from home is more prevalent, housing markets are more regulated, and supply is less elastic. Using a model predicting future residential price and rent evolution, we show urban revival in housing markets for the foreseeable future with urban rent growth exceeding suburban rent growth, as working from home recedes. In the third essay titled ``Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse", we show remote work led to large drops in lease revenues, occupancy, lease renewal rates, and market rents in the commercial office sector. We revalue New York City office buildings taking into account both the cash flow and discount rate implications of these shocks, and find a 39% decline in long run value. For the U.S., we find a $413 billion value destruction. We show evidence of flight to quality, as higher quality buildings are buffered against these trends, while lower quality office is at risk of becoming a stranded asset. These valuation changes have repercussions for local public finances and financial stability.

The primary focus of this thesis is on the causes and macroeconomic implications of inequality. The first two chapters of this thesis concern firm size (measured by sales) inequality. The rise in inequality in the upper tail of firm size distribution has important macroeconomic implications on the product market, the labor market and aggregate productivity growth. In Chapter 1, I seek to understand how acquisition and innovation drive the rise in the upper tail firm size inequality. This question is motivated by the fact that as top firms pull increasingly farther from the rest of the firms, they did not grow into superstar firms on their own. I construct a new dataset to track the dynamic ownership of firms and their patents to identify the mechanisms through which acquisitions drive the growth of the acquiring firms via innovation. I then examine the implications of these innovation mechanisms on upper tail firm size inequality — in terms of both stationary distribution and transition dynamics — using a range of firm random growth models. In chapter 2, I study what do changes in top sales shares signal about changes in large firm dynamics. I use an accounting decomposition to identify two sources of top sales shares growth: (i) incumbent top firms grow bigger; (ii) new top firms replace old top firms. I then build a continuous-time random growth model to infer the growth dynamics of firms at the upper tail of firm size distribution. In Chapter 3, in collaboration with Tam Mai, Istudy the implications of occupational and regional inequality on the labor market after the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City (NYC) emerged as a global epicentre, revealing stark disparities in its impact across diverse neighbourhoods and populations. This dissertation delves into the uneven geographies of the pandemic city, critically examining the paradoxes, linkages, and questions embedded in the infrastructures that shape and are shaped by the politics of the city. As modern life becomes increasingly intertwined with complex digital control systems, these infrastructures, far from being rational, orderly or even intelligible, obscure systems of power that govern their stable flow and circulation. Drawing on Stephen Graham’s concept of infrastructural “disruption”, this research sheds light on how everyday infrastructures—often invisible until they fail—reveal intricate tensions between distance and access, between participation and criminalisation, and between mobility and class. Through a multi-scaled empirical analysis, this research delves deeper into the topological and topographical characteristics of urban infrastructure during a time of crisis to illuminate their role in mediating relationships between citizens, space and justice in our everyday lives. This dissertation is anchored around three categories of spatial unevenness: geographies of access, geographies of digital participation, and geographies of work. Three infrastructural modalities are interrogated during the COVID-19 moment in NYC: the built environment, a digital governance platform, and the personal mobile phone. The study seeks to answer pivotal questions regarding access to critical pandemic response infrastructure, patterns of civic participation in NYC’s 311 non-emergency hotline, and the spatial politics of remote work behaviour. Ultimately, by unmasking the intricate web of infrastructural politics, this research offers an in-depth understanding of the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 spread and emphasises the significance of spatial considerations in our theorisations of justice.

This dissertation consists of three chapters, each containing a distinct research paper in the field of macroeconomics. In the first chapter, I estimate the impact of mutual fund flows on corporate bond prices, issuance and firm investment. I leverage variation caused by the COVID-19 induced financial panic of March 2020 and find that safer firms suffered a larger impact in the component of bond spreads that does not compensate for expected default risk. However, I do not detect impacts of fund flows on issuance or investment. A simple model predicts liquidation decisions and price responses as being driven by demand and liquidation elasticities, which depend on the characteristics of the bond return processes. In the second chapter, we ask: what is the importance of firm and bank credit factors in determining investment responses to monetary policy? We decompose variation in corporate loan growth rates into purely firm-level and bank-level variation. The estimated factors are correlated with a set of variables that proxy for the firm’s and bank’s financial health. Firms with a higher borrowing factor experience relatively larger investment responses to an unexpected interest rate shock; the effect is muted when the shock is the reveal of central bank information. The bank factor does not induce similar heterogeneity in investment responses. In the third chapter, we ask: what is the nature of optimal monetary policy and central bank disclosure when the monetary authority is uncertain about the economic state? We consider a model in which firms make nominal pricing decisions and the central bank sets the nominal interest rate under incomplete information. We find that implementing flexible-price allocations is both feasible and optimal despite the existence of numerous measurability constraints; we explore a series of different implementations. When monetary policy is sub-optimal, public information disclosure by the central bank is welfare-improving as long as either firm or central bank information is sufficiently precise.

This dissertation consists of three essays in the field of health economics. The first essay provides the first causal evidence that bargaining power in a relationship shapes pregnancy outcomes and health disparities in the US. A key driver of bargaining power is the availability of potential non incarcerated male partners in the local dating market, which I define at the race by cohort by county level. Because these sex ratios are endogenous, I use a novel instrument that leverages the randomness in sex at birth and the persistence of local demographics to isolate exogenous variation in the relative availability of men. Greater female bargaining power causes better outcomes: fewer out-of-wedlock births, less chlamydia and hypertension among mothers, and fewer infants with APGAR score below the normal level. The marriage market makes a significant contribution to racial disparities in pregnancy health. Specifically, Black women face relatively poor prospects when looking for a partner compared to White women: while there are 102 White men per 100 White women, only 89 Black men are available per 100 Black women. According to my estimates, Black women’s disadvantage accounts for 5-10% of the large racial gap in maternal and neonatal health. The racial difference in male availability is mostly policy-driven, as incarceration accounts for 45% of the gap. A counterfactual policy equalizing county-level incarceration rates for non-violent offenses between Black and White people would prevent 200-700 adverse pregnancy outcomes per year among Black mothers through the bargaining power channel alone. The second essay investigates how reopening hotels and ski facilities in Poland impacted tourism spending, mobility, and COVID-19 outcomes. We used administrative data from a government program that subsidizes travel to show that the policy increased the consumption of tourism services in ski resorts. By leveraging geolocation data from Facebook, we showed that ski resorts experienced a significant influx of tourists, increasing the number of local users by up to 50%. Furthermore, we confirmed an increase in the probability of meetings between pairs of users from distanced locations and users from tourist and non-tourist areas. As the policy impacted travel and gatherings, we then analyzed its effect on the diffusion of COVID-19. We found that counties with ski facilities experienced more infections after the reopening. Moreover, counties strongly connected to the ski resorts during the reopening had more subsequent cases than weakly connected counties. The third essay studies the diffusion of influenza-like illnesses (ILI) through social and economic networks. Using almost two decades of weekly, county-level infection and mortality data from Poland, it studies within and across-counties ILI transmission. Firstly, it evaluates the causal effect of school closures on viral transmission. The results show that closing schools for two weeks decreases the number of within county cases by 30-40%. The decline in infections extends to elderly and pre-school children. In addition, flu-related hospitalizations drop by 7.5%, and mortality related to respiratory diseases among the elderly drops by 3%. Secondly, the paper demonstrates the significant contribution of economic links to diffusion across counties. The disease follows the paths of workers commuting between home and workplace. Together with the structure of the labor mobility networks, these results highlight the central role of regional capitals in sustaining and spreading the virus.