<p> In every year since 1982, the popular magazine <i>Forbes Magazine </i> has published a list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. That list has attracted attention from the press and public, but it has been largely ignored by economists, at least in their professional capacities. Although a list published by a popular magazine may seem like a dubious source of data, the magazine's list is arguably the best source of data on the very top of the wealth distribution in the United States. This dissertation is a series of essays that use the magazine's list to study the wealthiest Americans. The essays study inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, inequality among the wealthiest Americans themselves, and mobility among the wealthiest Americans over time. Taken together, the essays offer insight into some basic empirical facts about a much noticed but little studied group. </p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Economics, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Feb. 8, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-05, Section: A, page: 1733. Adviser: Hugh E.M. Kelley.

<p> This dissertation uses cooperative and non-cooperative game theory to examine the role of investment (broadly defined) in social organization. It's composed of three chapters. The first chapter examines bidirectional investment in partnerships and characterizes the stable relationships among the benefits players produce and receive, their costs, and their payoffs. The second chapter extends the model of the first chapter to allow for multilateral matching and investment; it shows that many of the results of the bilateral case remain true in the more general case. The third chapter examines investment in social links to secure future help and characterizes the equilibrium network/linking architecture and welfare.</p>

<p> Questions of design in real economic situations are often dynamic. Managerial compensation, repeated auctions, and taxation are good examples. These demand the economic theory of mechanism design to be adept to changing underlying environments and evolving information. Adjusting existing static results to the dynamic models and introducing new ones is thus what the doctor orders. This collection of essays is a contribution to the theory and applications of dynamic mechanism design. </p><p> Chapter 1 asks the question: <i>when can efficient institutions be made self enforcing?</i> To answer it, the setting of bargaining with two sided asymmetric information is chosen&ndash; a buyer has a hidden valuation for a good and a seller can produce the good at a hidden cost, both of which can change over time. The essay provides necessary and sufficient conditions for efficiency in this bilateral trading problem. In the process of establishing this result, a new notion of budget balance is introduced that allows the budget to be balanced dynamically, borrowing from the future but in a bounded fashion. Through a set of simple examples the comparative statics of the underlying economics forces of discounting and level of asymmetric information are explored. </p><p> In chapter 2, a <i>dynamic and history dependent version of the payoff equivalence</i> result is established. It provides an equivalence class of all mechanisms that are incentive compatible. Given two mechanisms that implement the same allocation, expected utility of an agent after any history in one must differ from the other through a history dependent constant. This result is then exploited to unify a host of existing results in efficient dynamic mechanism design. In particular a mechanism, and necessary and sufficient conditions are provided for the implementation of the efficient allocation in a general <i>N</i>-player dynamic mechanism design problem under participation constraints and budget balance. </p><p> Finally, in chapter 3 (coauthored with Marco Battaglini), we explore the <i>applicability and limitations of the first-order approach in solving dynamic contracting models, and the nature of contracts when local constraints are not sufficient to characterize the optimum.</i> A dynamic principal-agent model in which the agent's types are serially correlated forms the backbone of the analysis. It is shown that the first-order approach is violated in general environments; when the time horizon is long enough and serial correlation is sufficiently high, global incentive compatibility constraints generically bind. By fully characterizing a simple two period example, we uncover a number of interesting features of the optimal contract that cannot be observed in special environments in which the standard approach works. Finally, we show that even in complex environments, approximately optimal allocations can be easily characterized by focusing on a class of contracts in which the allocation is forced to be monotonic.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2005. / (UnM)AAI3186988. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-08, Section: A, page: 3013. Chair: Charles I. Jones.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on May 14, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-09, Section: A, page: 3639. Adviser: Edward F. Buffie.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4798. Adviser: Mattia Polborn. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-64) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4800. Adviser: Anil K. Bera. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-178) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / Title from HTML (viewed on Jul 23, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4445. Adviser: Gerhard Glomm.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / Title from home page (viewed on Jul 23, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4432. Advisers: Michael V. Alexeev; Roy J. Gardner.