Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 167-169). / by Matthew Jason Eichner. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1984. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / Bibliography: leaves 333-340. / by Niccie Lee McKay. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Holger Christian Wolf. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 141-149). / This thesis examines several aspects of open economies. The first two chapters are about sovereign debt and its interactions with domestic financial markets. The third chapter, coauthored with my classmate Daniel Rees, studies volatility in terms of trade. The first chapter studies how the introduction of new assets in sovereign debt markets can increase a country's level of investment and welfare. In the model presented in this chapter public debt has a liquidity purpose for the domestic private sector and is demanded as a saving vehicle by more patient international investors. The government commits to repay but is constrained by its fiscal capacity which is low when the private sector needs outside liquidity. I find that the government can increase domestic investment by tranching its fiscal capacity, increasing the number of assets supplied and introducing state-contingency or safe assets. In this chapter I also test the predictions of the model and find that domestic collateral constraints and international discount factor both play a significant role in determining the share of public debt held by non-residents and that there is a significant differential effect for countries that have introduced more financial innovation in sovereign debt markets. The second chapter studies the implications of bailout policy tools for sovereign default and public default risk in a model where, similarly to chapter 1, public debt has a liquidity purpose in financial markets. In this chapter, I show that the government might default for strategic reasons if it can bailout its financial system. It does so when investment and output are low in the economy and when available credit in financial markets is below optimal. The model in this chapter delivers the empirical evidence that financial crises precede sovereign debt crises and it generates the qualitative evidence that, first, private credit drops before sovereign defaults, second, government defaults in periods of low output and, finally, bailout policies affect public debt sustainability. The third chapter, co-authored with my classmate Daniel Rees, examines the consequences of changes in the volatility of commodity price shocks on commodity exporters. We first demonstrate the existence of time-varying volatility in the terms of trade of a selection of commodity-exporting small open economies. We then show empirically that increases in terms of trade volatility trigger a contraction in domestic consumption and investment and an improvement in the trade balance in these economies. Finally, we construct a theoretical model and demonstrate that it can replicate our empirical results. / by Patricia Gómez-González. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-153). / Since 1999, regional retail and wholesale gasoline markets in the United States have experienced significant price volatility, both intertemporally and across geographic markets. In particular, gasoline prices in California, Illinois and Wisconsin have spiked occasionally well above gasoline prices in nearby states. The three chapters of my thesis study the relationship between gasoline price spikes, environmental regulation of gasoline content, unanticipated refinery outages and other recent structural changes in the domestic oil market. In the first chapter, I detail current regulations related to gasoline content. Implemented regionally to address local mobile-source emissions, gasoline content regulations increase costs to refiners, transporters and distributors of gasoline, as well as reduce the fungibility of gasoline across different regions. Chapter one provides a summary of the regulations and a qualitative description the costs the regulations impose on refiners, transporters and distributors of gasoline. In chapter two, I estimate two distinct effects of gasoline content regulations in California, Illinois and Wisconsin: (i) the effect of increased production costs due to supplementary regulation, and (ii) the effect of incompatibility between these blends and gasoline meeting federal reformulated gasoline standards. Using a structural model based on the production optimization problem of refiners, I simulate wholesale prices for jet fuel, diesel and four blends of gasoline in each geographic market. I then specify a counterfactual in which gasoline in the three states met federal requirements. / (cont.) Using a similar methodology, I also estimate the effect of two structural changes in the domestic oil market, (i) changes in refinery ownership and (ii) limited expansion of domestic refining capacity. I estimate the effect of increased refining costs is 4.5, 3.0 and 2.9 cents per gallon in California, Illinois and Wisconsin. The effect of incompatibility with federal RFG criteria, conditional on an in-state refinery outage, is 4.8, 6.6 and 7.1 cents per gallon in California, Illinois and Wisconsin. Controlling for the magnitude of local outages in these areas, I estimate that 72, 92 and 91 percent of price spikes created by local refinery outages could be mitigated by compatibility with federal RFG standards. In chapter three I study the challenge faced by regulators of differentiating strategic withholding of capacity from unreliable production. If a regulator cannot verify "unplanned" outages, the regulator cannot credibly distinguish between strategic behavior by producers and unlucky realizations of facility reliability. I specify a model in which a firm's choices of production and maintenance affect facility reliability and study how incentives arising from ownership of more than one facility affect facility reliability. I then statistically test whether the pattern of incidents is consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model. I find statistically significant evidence that ownership of other local refining capacity is correlated with the probability of an outage at a given refinery. In addition, the relationship between ownership and incident likelihood is greatest for markets with special gasoline formulations, where a refinery outage has the largest effect of gasoline prices. In these markets, expected incident likelihood is 30 percent greater for a refinery affiliated with another refinery that it is for an unaffiliated refinery. / by Erich Johann Muehlegger. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / The central focus of this dissertation is the role of financial instruments, in particular insurance and credit, in economic development. Motivated by the observation that exposure to the risk of extreme weather conditions may constrain investment by subsistence farmers and lead to inefficient production choices, the first chapter evaluates whether insuring farmers against such risks alters resource allocation decisions. In particular I consider the effects of a Mexican government disaster relief program with insurance-like features. The results, based on a regression discontinuity design, indicate that insurance against losses arising from natural disasters changes how rural households invest in their farms. Insured farmers utilize more expensive capital inputs and adopt different technologies. Additionally, the insurance changes labor supply patterns. Notably, members of insured households are approximately 10% more likely to migrate internationally. Additional results, that the program matters most when the returns to migration are more unpredictable, are consistent with a model where insurance obviates the need for precautionary savings, allowing households to finance international migration. Turning from insurance to the role of access to credit in furthering development, the second chapter considers how interest rate ceilings affected investment in agricultural capital and the tenure status of farms in the nineteenth century United States. Using within state variation in usury laws, I find that more restrictive laws lead to an economically meaningful reduction in agricultural investment. / (cont.) Additionally, the results pertaining to the tenure status of farms indicate that exacting usury laws reduce the share of owner-operated farms. This effect is especially pronounced for small farms, which is consistent with the notion that interest rate limits ration small-scale, risky farmers out of the credit market. To overcome the issue of omitted factors which may affect both legislation and agricultural outcomes, I employ an instrumental variables strategy. By isolating variation in usury laws associated with the historical presence of religious bodies, this study provides evidence of a causal channel from more permissive interest rate ceilings to greater agricultural investment and a more egalitarian ownership structure of agricultural land. The third chapter departs from the more narrow focus on the provision of financial services and addresses a question of relevance to development economics in general. In particular, this chapter, which is joint work with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, evaluates how well various systems for identifying and targeting assistance to the poorest of the poor actually identify the poorest. Firstly, we consider the methods used to identify households eligible for participation in assistance programs administered by the Indian government. Secondly, we evaluate Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs) as a mechanism to identify exceptionally poor households. Finally, we investigate whether additional verification of information gathered in PRAs improves targeting. / (cont.) For each method of targeting, we examine whether the households identified by that process are more disadvantaged according to several measures of economic well-being than households which were not identified. We conclude that PRAs and PRAs coupled with additional verification successfully identify a population which is measurably poorer in various respects, especially those which are more readily observed. The standard government procedures, however, do not appear to target the very poorest for assistance. Based on this sample, households targeted for government assistance are observationally equivalent to those that are not. / by Jeremy Place Shapiro. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Kim S. Rueben. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis consists of three chapters on household finance and regulatory policy in consumer credit markets. The first chapter studies the efficiency and distributional effects of credit card pricing restrictions in the 2009 Credit CARD Act. I document how two forces drive these restrictions' effects: first, the Act constrains lenders from adjusting interest rates in response to new information about default risk, which exacerbates adverse retention of risky borrowers and induces partial market unraveling on new accounts; second, the Act constrains lenders from pricing private information about demand, which reduces markups on inelastic borrowers. I develop a structural model of the US credit card market to study how heightened information problems and lower markups interact in equilibrium to determine the Act's effects. I find that equilibrium market unraveling is most severe for subprime consumers, but the reduction in markups is substantial throughout the market, so that on net, the Act's restrictions allow consumers of all credit scores to capture higher surplus on average. Total surplus inclusive of firm profits rises among prime consumers, whereas gains in subprime consumer surplus are greatest among borrowers who were recently prime. The second chapter (co-authored with Alexander Bartik) also studies the regulation of credit market information, focusing on the use of such information in labor markets. In particular we study recent bans on employers' use of credit reports to screen job applicants. This practice has been popular among employers but controversial for its perceived disparate impact on racial minorities. Exploiting geographic, temporal, and job-level variation in which workers are covered by these bans, we analyze these bans' effects in two datasets: the panel dimension of the Current Population Survey (CPS); and data aggregated from state unemployment insurance records. We find that the bans reduced job-finding rates for blacks by 7 to 16 percent, and increased subsequent separation rates for black new hires by 3 percentage points. Results for Hispanics and whites are less conclusive. We interpret these findings in a statistical discrimination model in which credit report data, more for blacks than for other groups, send a high-precision signal relative to the precision of employers' priors. The third chapter (co-authored with Sydnee Caldwell and Daniel Waldinger) returns to consumer credit markets and studies determinants of household borrowing behavior. Many economic models predict that consumption and borrowing decisions today depend on beliefs about risky future income. We quantify one contributor to income uncertainty and study its effects: uncertainty about annual tax refunds. In a low-income sample for whom tax refunds can be a substantial portion of income, we collect novel survey evidence on tax filers' expectations of and uncertainty about their tax refunds; we then link these data with administrative tax data, a panel of credit reports, and survey-based consumption measures. We find that while many households have correct mean expectations about their refunds, there is substantial, and accurately reported, subjective uncertainty. Households borrow moderate amounts out of expected tax refunds: for each dollar of expected refund, roughly 15 cents in revolving debt is repaid after refund receipt. This borrowing and repayment is less pronounced for more uncertain households, consistent with precautionary behavior. The unexpected component of tax refunds is not used to pay down debt, but rather induces higher debt levels. Credit report and survey evidence both suggest that these higher debt levels are driven by newly financed durable purchases such as vehicles. / by Scott Thomas Nelson. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-121). / This dissertation consists of three chapters on persistence and interactions of policies of different governments in various settings. Chapter 1 studies government policy persistence when firms face capital installation costs. In an environment, where the government is either left- or right-wing, the left-wing government almost always sets more right-wing policies when it follows a conservative administration than otherwise. Similarly, when the types of policy makers are close enough to each other, a right-wing government that succeeds a leftist one chooses more left-wing policies. However, when the preferences of the politicians are sufficiently different, a conservative government selects more right-wing fiscal policies when following a leftist administration in order to address the state of the economy it inherits. Chapter 2 considers the political implications of tax competition between countries of different sizes. Smaller countries competing for internationally mobile capital set lower tax rates than their larger counterparts. This is because they perceive higher elasticity of capital with respect to their policy and their governments are to the right of those elected in larger countries. Then a more significant number of small countries involved in the competition with large countries not only decreases the large-country tax rates on capital, but also shifts their governments to the right. Large countries do not have a similar "right-wing" power and the presence of more of them in a competition can actually cause a left-ward shift in the governments of the competitors. / (cont.) Chapter 3 compares educational achievement of 15-year olds in post-communist versus other countries. It finds that even almost 20 years after the fall of communism, the effect of the regime and its policies seems to persist in the educational system of the Eastern Bloc countries. Students in the East achieve better in mathematics and hard sciences and worse in reading than their Western counterparts. This is likely because the communist regimes supported education in the former but stifled free and interpretive thinking necessary to achieve on the latter test. While the advantage of the East may be shrinking, its disadvantage remains the same. / by Frantisek Ricka. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis examines three models of dynamic contracting. The first model is a model of dynamic moral hazard with partially persistent states, and the second model considers relational contracts when the states are partially persistent. The last model studies preference for delegation with learning. In the first chapter, the costly unobservable action of the agent produces a good outcome with some probability, and the probability of the good outcome corresponds to the state. The states are unobservable and follow an irreducible Markov chain with positive persistence. The chapter finds that an informational rent arises in this environment. The second best contract resembles a tenure system: the agent is paid nothing during the probationary period, and once he is paid, the principal never takes his outside option again. The second best contract becomes stationary after the agent is tenured. For discount factors close to one, the principal can approximate his first best payoff with review contracts. The second chapter studies relational contracts with partially persistent states, where the distribution of the state depends on the previous state. When the states are observable, the optimal contracts can be stationary, and the self-enforcement leads to the dynamic enforcement constraint as with i.i.d. states. The chapter then applies the results to study the implications for the markets where the principal and the agent can be matched with new partners. The third chapter studies preference for delegation when there is a possibility of learning before taking an action. The optimal action depends on the unobservable state. After the principal chooses the manager, one of the agents may receive a private signal about the world. The agent decides whether to disclose the signal to the manager, and the manager chooses an action. In an equilibrium, the agents' communication strategies depend on the manager's prior. The principal prefers a manager with some difference in prior belief to a manager with the same prior. / by Suehyun Kwon. / Ph.D.