This dissertation consists of three essays on political economy. The first essay studies the effect of competition on media bias in the context of U.S. newspapers in the period 1870-1910. We measure bias as the intensity with which different newspapers cover scandals. We collected data on 121 scandals and 157 newspapers. We also collected data on the partisanship, frequency of publication, and circulation of the newspapers in our sample, as well as of the newspapers circulating in the same cities as those in our sample. Results indicate that partisan newspapers cover scandals involving the opposition party's politicians more intensely and cover scandals involving their own party's politicians more lightly. We find evidence that competition decreases the degree of media bias. The point estimates suggest that compared to a newspaper in a monopoly position, a newspaper facing two competitors will on average exhibits less than 50% as much overall bias in coverage intensity. The second essay shows how voters make choices even in single-party authoritarian elections where the number of candidates equals the number of parliamentary seats. Cuban citizens signal approval of, candidates within the framework of the regime. Voters support candidates who have grassroots links and experience of local multi-candidate electoral contestation. Voters choose based not on clientelist incentives but on the limited political information available to them, namely, posted biographies and direct knowledge of local candidates, friends and neighbors, who run in their communities. Voters have chosen, however, without rejecting the Cuban Communist Party. The third essay studies the unintended effects of the 2003 electoral reform in Colombia. In a context with fragmented and clientelistic parties and an electoral system that incentivizes intra-party competition instead of party discipline, scholars such as Shugart and Carey (1995) recommend the adoption of electoral reforms. A reform such as this was implemented in Colombia. What was unexpected was that the reform would promote a significant increase in the number of candidates running in each district. The effect of this was a lowering of the minimum threshold of the vote share required to obtain a seat, thereby maintaining clientelism as a viable campaigning strategy. / Political Economy and Government

As the developing world continues its pace of rapid growth and the threat of climate change intensifies, the economics of natural resource usage become increasingly important. From the perspective of both economic efficiency and distributional equity, effective policy design is correspondingly urgent. Market failures such as imperfect competition, externalities, and incomplete information plague resource markets everywhere; and both initial endowments and policy interventions often have regressive incidence. I shed light on some of these issues by studying the economics of natural resource usage in two separate empirical contexts. The first is the market for automotive fuel in Spain; I measure pass-through -- the degree to which retail fuel stations "pass through" diesel taxes to final consumer prices -- and use it assess the distributional impacts of energy policy. The second is the Ganga River Basin of India; I estimate the impacts of environmental regulation on river water quality and infant mortality. In both contexts, I utilize estimates of policy impacts to examine the underlying mechanisms by which affected consumers and suppliers of natural resources make decisions. / Public Policy

Many education systems around the world use a centralized admission process to assign students to schools. By definition, some applicants to oversubscribed schools are not offered admission to their most-preferred school. Thus, one naturally asks whether it makes a difference to applicants’ educational opportunities and outcomes which schools they apply to, are offered admission to, and eventually enroll in. Each year in Mexico City, about 300,000 teenagers apply for a seat at one of the nearly 650 public upper-secondary schools. In this centralized, merit-based admission process, applicants are assigned to a school based on entrance examination score and their ranked list of school choices, subject to school capacity constraints. In this dissertation, I include two papers assessing data from the upper-secondary application cohorts in Mexico City from 2005 to 2009. In the first paper, I find evidence of socio-economic stratification across schools. I also find dissimilarities in the application behavior of individuals according to their socio-economic background, even for those with high achievement levels. Based on qualitative and quantitative data from a small sample of applicants, I suggest that in addition to differences in economic resources, asymmetries in access to information might help to explain disparities in the application behavior of individuals from different socio-economic backgrounds. In the second paper, I capitalize on the natural experiment created at each oversubscribed public upper-secondary school in Mexico City by the imposition of exogenous admission cut-off scores. Using a regression-discontinuity design, I estimate that, on average, upper-secondary applicants who score just above the admission threshold for a more competitive school (i.e. a school with higher cut-off score and higher average examination scores) have lower probability of graduating on time and within 5 years than do applicants who scored just below the admission threshold. Given the high take-up rates of the offers of admission, I find that the effects for enrollment in a more competitive school are only slightly larger than they are in their analogous reduced-form estimates. In addition, I show that effects differ across the distribution of admission cut-off scores and for applicants with selected socio-demographic characteristics who scored just above the admission threshold. / Quantitative Policy Analysis in Education

This dissertation is composed of three essays on innovation, strategy and competition. The first essay studies how entry of patent intermediaries known as "patent assertion entities" (PAEs) impacts behavior of other firms in the patent space. It uses deaths of individual patent owners to exogenously identify PAE patent acquisitions, and estimates its impact on follow-on citations. Finally, it shows that after being acquired by PAEs, patents lose a large portion of their follow-on citations. These effects are driven almost entirely by citing behavior of large entities and are robust to controlling for patent examiner-added citations. This effect disappears once the acquired patents expire, indicating that large entities may be acting strategically to reduce the likelihood of patent assertion. The second essay investigates patent disclosure processes at seven large Standard-Setting Organizations (SSOs) where participating entities have a choice between specific patent disclosures and broad generic disclosures. It finds that large, downstream firms who face large technology search costs prefer to use generic patent disclosures. In addition, it shows that higher quality patents are more likely to be disclosed in specific disclosures, because they are more likely to be monetized through licensing. The third essay estimates the causal impact of research expenditures on scientific output. Unexpected college football outcomes provide exogenous variation to university funds, and in turn, research expenditures in the subsequent year. Using this variation, this essay estimates the dollar elasticity of scholarly articles, new patent applications, and the citations that accrue to each.

Given increased competition with for-profit firms, the issue of the comparative advantage of non-profit organizations is renewed. While non-profits may want to differentiate themselves when faced with additional non-profit competition, it is unclear whether they would want to differentiate themselves or converge towards for-profit competitors. This paper addresses this issue by considering the different financing models, human resource systems, and objectives of non-profit organizations, as compared to for-profits, in the mixed industry of microfinance. In my first essay, I utilize an analytical model, where firms can choose profit status, sources of financing, and the borrowers they target with a given interest rate and loan size. I find that non-profit and for-profit organizations will segment the market, partly due to differences in profit status and partly due to differences in the sources of financing. I find support for the hypotheses using a large-scale panel dataset of microfinance organizations in Latin America. The second essay focuses on a particular element of the business model considered in the first essay: deposit-taking. I show that non-profits that begin taking deposits only benefit financially if they also begin making larger loans. This suggests that changes in non-profits' activities may require a change in positioning to improve financial performance. More broadly, it supports the literature on the importance of fit between product market strategy and business model, which suggests extra managerial attention be paid to whether and how to adopt activities that change the business model. The third essay considers another key distinguishing element between the non-profit and for-profit business model: the incentive and reward systems for employees. I merge the panel dataset with a cross-sectional survey on the dimensions along which the firms incentivize employees, and develop a proxy for the level of bonus pay. The results suggest that more mission-oriented firms reward employees on more dimensions, but with lower average salary and a smaller amount of bonus pay. This suggests that incentive pay may be used as a signal in more mission-oriented firms to clarify the expectations of employee behavior, whereas it is used to directly motivate and incentivize employees in less mission-oriented firms. The three essays of my dissertation combine to examine the characteristics that distinguish non-profit organizations, even in industries in which they co-exist with for-profits. The results shed light on these increasingly common mixed industries, as well as provide insight into business model competition and the fit between elements that make up a business model.

One of the major challenges of health care contracting is that physicians' financial and personal interests are often not aligned with patients' best interests. When this physician agency problem is widespread, patients may lose trust in their physicians, leading to undesirable clinical outcomes. In this dissertation, we explore several means to solve the physician agency problem through institutional arrangements. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on peer-to-peer institutions within physician groups that can sustain a good group reputation, and this group reputation mechanism can play a role in encouraging physicians to provide appropriate treatments. Chapter 1 investigates the group reputation mechanism from a theoretical perspective. The theory suggests that a physician group's reputation outperforms each physician's individual reputation when some kinds of intragroup institutions can minimize an individual physician's motivation to free-ride on the group reputation. These intragroup institutions have to address the information sharing among physicians and the enforcement of peer sanctions after a misbehaving doctor is detected. We investigate the suspension as an example of such an enforcement. Chapter 2 further provides empirical evidence on the effects of peer-monitoring institutions on reducing harmful overtreatments in a laboratory setting. The experimental results suggest that information sharing alone does not significantly reduce overtreatment. By contrast, peer-selection enforcement, in which doctors have the freedom to choose their group affiliations and colleagues, significantly reduces overtreatment, nearly eliminating overtreatment in the best physician groups. Furthermore, patients are more likely to see a doctor from the physician group that maintains a low overtreatment rate. While physicians can adopt vigorous peer-monitoring to mitigate the physician agency problem, patients may attempt to ensure doctors' commitment to prioritizing their patients' best interest when the physician agency problem is perceived. Chapter 3 investigates the informal payment (red-packet) phenomenon in the medical setting using data from China, which can be regarded as an informal gift-exchange institution initiated by patients. We provide supportive evidence that, when patients report low trust in their doctors and indicate poor communication and lack of empathy of their doctors, they tend to offer red packets.

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Web services refer to a family of technologies that can universally standardize the communication of applications in order to connect systems, business partners, and customers cost-effectively through the World Wide Web. Web services will ease the constraints of time, cost, and space for discovering, negotiating, and conducting e-business transactions. As a result, they dramatically changed the way businesses design their applications as services, integrate with other business entities, manage business process workflows, and conduct e-business transactions. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the current state of Web services technology and to evaluate the potential effectiveness of this technology for financial industry. By conducting several case studies, the advantages of Web services implementation are discussed, including financial areas and other related E-businesses. Non-technical aspects of Web services such as the value added, cost reduction, implementation contraction, project reusability, and business expanding are discussed as well. To demonstrate the use of Web services for financial industry, three Web service application prototypes were built within different domains relevant to international trading procedure. This simulation project is judged to be a successful demonstration of the potential applications of Web services for financial industry.