How resources are allocated across plants is crucial for understanding cross-country output and productivity differences. This thesis contributes to the growing literature on resource misallocation by studying the particular channels through which misallocation can arise. In Chapter 1, I examine extortion at the plant-level, its effects on individual incentives to become an entrepreneur, and how production is affected by the presence of extortion. I show that extortion is especially burdensome on moderate-ability entrepreneurs forcing them to either forgo entry into entrepreneurship or produce at an inefficiently small scale. When property rights are weak, the frequency of extortion is higher producing a society where much of it's entrepreneurial talent is heavily under-utilized. In Chapter 2, I study plant-level distortions and it's effects on incentives to improve productivity. I build a model where plant innovation improves future productivity so that productivity dynamics are endogenous. Distortions that are tied to productivity are introduced to the model to examine how plant innovation is affected. All plants lower innovation resulting in a distribution over productivity that is right-skewed and a distribution over plant size that is left-skewed, consistent with empirical findings in developing countries. The final Chapter is closely related to Chapter 1 but is more empirically focused. I study the role of theft as a means to explaining the abundance of small plants in developing countries and estimate the causal effect of theft on plant capital demand. I find that plant capital would be significantly higher if theft is eliminated.

How resources are allocated across plants is crucial for understanding cross-country output and productivity differences. This thesis contributes to the growing literature on resource misallocation by studying the particular channels through which misallocation can arise. In Chapter 1, I examine extortion at the plant-level, its effects on individual incentives to become an entrepreneur, and how production is affected by the presence of extortion. I show that extortion is especially burdensome on moderate-ability entrepreneurs forcing them to either forgo entry into entrepreneurship or produce at an inefficiently small scale. When property rights are weak, the frequency of extortion is higher producing a society where much of it's entrepreneurial talent is heavily under-utilized. In Chapter 2, I study plant-level distortions and it's effects on incentives to improve productivity. I build a model where plant innovation improves future productivity so that productivity dynamics are endogenous. Distortions that are tied to productivity are introduced to the model to examine how plant innovation is affected. All plants lower innovation resulting in a distribution over productivity that is right-skewed and a distribution over plant size that is left-skewed, consistent with empirical findings in developing countries. The final Chapter is closely related to Chapter 1 but is more empirically focused. I study the role of theft as a means to explaining the abundance of small plants in developing countries and estimate the causal effect of theft on plant capital demand. I find that plant capital would be significantly higher if theft is eliminated.

Thesis advisor: Ryan Chahrour / Thesis advisor: Fabio Schiantarelli / This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter, "The Supply-Side Effects of India's Demonetization", investigates the supply-side effects of a unique monetary shock – the 2016 Indian demonetization – that made 86% of currency in circulation illegal overnight. Exploiting cross-sectional variation in firm and industry characteristics that correlate with cash usage and exposure to the informal sector, I find that firms that use cash more and obtain larger shares of labor or material inputs from the informal sector, experienced declines in their labor and material shares after demonetization. I also show that casual laborers were more likely to report being unemployed in the months following demonetization. These findings document a supply channel for demonetization and also show that cash plays an essential role in India's informal sector. Crucially, given that India's formal sector is highly dependent on the informal sector for labor and materials, any shock to the supply of cash is likely to have affected the economy as a whole. In the second chapter, "Directed Lending and Misallocation: Evidence from India", joint with Deeksha Kale, we leverage a natural experiment to study whether targeted credit policy can help reduce misallocation. In 2006, the Government of India modified the definition of small firms thereby expanding eligibility to a directed credit program. We show that the credit policy changed eligible firms' input wedges and thereby reduced misallocation. For firms with initially higher MRPK, the policy resulted in relatively larger increases in physical capital and decreased the MRPK. This policy moderately reduced within-industry dispersion of MRPK and increased aggregate productivity. Finally, in the third chapter, "Victims of Consequence: Evidence on Child Outcomes using Microdata from a Civil War", joint with Sajala Pandey, we study the short-run impacts of violent events on child time allocation, curative health-care, and education. Exploiting spatial and temporal variation in exposure to local-level armed conflict, we find that an increase in violent events: (i) leads to an increase in contemporaneous hours worked by children, with the effect being substantial for agricultural work; (ii) decreases the likelihood of parents taking their children to visit a health-care facility to seek curative care; and (iii) results in a reduced likelihood of attending school, along with a decline in years of education. Overall, the results indicate that the war affected schooling and time allocation of boys whereas girls were less likely to get curative health-care. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Water is among the most abundant of all materials known to man. In all its various forms, water covers 75 percent of the earth's surface. It is estimated that the total physical quantity of water on the earth is 326,000,000 cubic miles. This apparent abundance belies the true nature of the water resource as it relates to the needs of man. At any given point in time, only a rather minute portion of this vast quantity of water is found in those forms and locations which render it useful to man. This may be attributed to the fact that utility in water is perishable and the efforts of man to amend the hydrological cycle have been successful only to a limited extent.

Thesis advisor: Anant Nyshadham / Thesis advisor: Kit Baum / The dissertation consists of three independent explorations of labor market dynamics in developing countries. I first investigate how minimum wages affect employment and investment decision of firms in India and how they can lead to accelerated automation and offshoring. Then, I investigate how managers of garment production lines in India's largest ready-made garment producer establish informal agreements to deal with worker absenteeism shocks. Finally, I study how Indonesian households learn about their productivity in different sectors of the economy and show that they often spend years, if not decades, in sectors where they are less productive which depresses their earning potentials, but they converge to their most productive sector over time. In the first chapter, "Effect of Minimum Wages on Automation and Offshoring Decisions of Firms: Evidence from India", I study the effect of India's local minimum wages on the production structure of firms in the formal economy. I compile data on the country's numerous minimum wages which vary at the state, year, and industry level, and show that changes to these wages have important effects on firm-level capital investment and employment of different types of employees. The effects depend on the firms' ability to automate and offshore certain tasks. Using a difference-in-difference approach, I show that firms in the average industry, that is, firms in industries neither intensive in routine nor offshorable tasks, continue to invest in machinery and computers at a rate of 8% per year following a minimum wage hike. However, they substitute payroll workers with managers and contract workers less likely to be bound by the minimum wage. Firms in industries intensive in routine tasks that are easier to automate invest 6.1% more in machinery and 4% more in computers, at the expense of payroll workers. Firms in industries intensive in tasks easier to do remotely continue to invest in machinery and computers, but the rate of investment in computers falls by 6.2% following a minimum wage hike, and payroll worker employment falls as well. This suggests that some tasks that combine workers and computers, like data analysis, may be offshored. These results support the predictions of a task-based production model, and indicate that minimum wages have a strong effect on the structure of production at the firm level, leading some towards increased rates of automation and offshoring. In the second chapter, "Absenteeism, Productivity, and Relational Contracts Inside the Firm", joint with other researchers, we study relational contracts among managers using unique data that tracks transfers of workers across teams in Indian ready-made garment factories. We focus on how relational contracts help managers cope with worker absenteeism shocks, which are frequent, often large, weakly correlated across teams, and which substantially reduce team productivity. Together these facts imply gains from sharing workers. We show that managers respond to shocks by lending and borrowing workers in a manner consistent with relational contracting, but many potentially beneficial transfers are unrealized. This is because managers' primary relationships are with a very small subset of potential partners. A borrowing event study around main trading partners' separations from the firm reinforces the importance of relationships. We show robustness to excluding worker moves least likely to reflect relational borrowing responses to idiosyncratic absenteeism shocks. Counterfactual simulations reveal large gains to reducing costs associated with forming and maintaining additional relationships among managers. In the last chapter, "Learning, Selection, and the Misallocation of Households Across Sectors", joint with other researchers, we study the role of labor misallocation (i.e., suboptimal sorting of households across sectors) in explaining low productivity in developing countries. We estimate a generalized earnings equation with dynamic correlated random coefficients, allowing households to learn about their relative productivity across the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. Estimates show that households sort across sectors on comparative advantage, but learn and converge slowly over time, with many households spending substantial time in a suboptimal sector. Roughly 33% of households are misallocated to start, earning 64% less on average than they could have if they were properly sorted across sectors. Our approach nests several alternative models which can be ruled out, including those without dynamics and/or heterogeneity in relative productivity across sectors. We also evaluate alternative interpretations for the dynamic sorting we observe in the data such as saving out of financial constraints and skill accumulation or learning by doing. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Essa dissertação estuda os efeitos de políticas de direcionamento de crédito sobre alocação de recursos na economia brasileira. Esse é um tópico particularmente importante para o Brasil, dado que a proporção do crédito que é direcionada no Brasil é próxima a 40%. As regras de direcionamento provavelmente geram distorções no preço de empréstimos, afetando assim o retorno marginal de fatores entre firmas e entre setores, consequentemente gerando misallocation de recursos. Fazendo uso de um modelo de agentes heterogêneos em tempo contínuo, se é capaz de estudar efeitos distributivos de tais políticas e explorar vantagens computacionais na solução do modelo. Calibra-se o modelo usando dados da economia brasileira e estatísticas de microdados de crédito que conectam informações sobre crédito e tamanho de firmas. Adicionalmente, verifica-se como tais políticas de direcionamento de crédito interagem com restrições ao crédito. / This paper looks at misallocation effects of earmarked credit in the Brazilian Economy. This is a very important topic in Brazil, where the proportion of credit earmarked for specific types of loans reach about 40% of total credit. The earmarking rules are likely to generate distortions in loan\'s prices, producing differences in marginal returns to inputs across firms and sectors, and therefore misallocation of resources. Using a heterogeneous agents in continuous time model, we are able to study distributional effects of such policies and explore some computational advantages to solve the model. Furthermore, we calibrate such model using Brazilian credit microdata statistics linking firm size and loans. Additionally, we will verify how these earmarked resources interact with credit constraints that are probably present in the Brazilian economy

Este trabalho apresenta um modelo com firmas heterogêneas e aprendizagem. As predições desse modelo mostram que, sob certas condições, as políticas de desenvolvimento podem gerar aumento de produtividade no curto prazo, masmisallocation e perda de produtividade agregada no longo prazo. Isso ocorre caso um componente de produtividade de longo prazo seja imperfeitamente observável no curto prazo devido a choques temporários, e o capital seja especifico e irreversível em alguns setores. Os resultados mostram que o ideal seria aprender sobre componentes de longo prazo da produtividade antes de investir. No entanto, acelerar investimentos nos setores de maior produtividade gera ganhos de produtividade no curto prazo, uma vez que maior produtividade no curto prazo está correlacionada com maior produtividade no longo prazo. Como será discutido, este fato poderia motivar governos à incentivar setores de alta produtividade observada, ainda que estes incentivos fossem socialmente subótimos. / This project aims to present a model that shows that, in a single economic environment, government stimulus to sectors, which features high productivity, can generate short-term productivity gains aggregates, but misallocation and long-term aggregate productivity loss. This may occur if a long-term productivity component is imperfectly observable in the short term due to temporary shocks, and capital is specific and irreversible in some sectors. The ideal be learn about long-term components of the productivity before investing. However accelerate investments in the sectors of higher productivity generates productivity gains in the short term, since higher productivity in the short term this correlated with higher productivity in the long run. As discussed, this fact would motivate governments to encourage high productivity observed sectors, although these incentives were socially suboptimal.

Essa dissertação estuda os efeitos de políticas de direcionamento de crédito sobre alocação de recursos na economia brasileira. Esse é um tópico particularmente importante para o Brasil, dado que a proporção do crédito que é direcionada no Brasil é próxima a 40%. As regras de direcionamento provavelmente geram distorções no preço de empréstimos, afetando assim o retorno marginal de fatores entre firmas e entre setores, consequentemente gerando misallocation de recursos. Fazendo uso de um modelo de agentes heterogêneos em tempo contínuo, se é capaz de estudar efeitos distributivos de tais políticas e explorar vantagens computacionais na solução do modelo. Calibra-se o modelo usando dados da economia brasileira e estatísticas de microdados de crédito que conectam informações sobre crédito e tamanho de firmas. Adicionalmente, verifica-se como tais políticas de direcionamento de crédito interagem com restrições ao crédito. / This paper looks at misallocation effects of earmarked credit in the Brazilian Economy. This is a very important topic in Brazil, where the proportion of credit earmarked for specific types of loans reach about 40% of total credit. The earmarking rules are likely to generate distortions in loan\'s prices, producing differences in marginal returns to inputs across firms and sectors, and therefore misallocation of resources. Using a heterogeneous agents in continuous time model, we are able to study distributional effects of such policies and explore some computational advantages to solve the model. Furthermore, we calibrate such model using Brazilian credit microdata statistics linking firm size and loans. Additionally, we will verify how these earmarked resources interact with credit constraints that are probably present in the Brazilian economy

Este trabalho apresenta um modelo com firmas heterogêneas e aprendizagem. As predições desse modelo mostram que, sob certas condições, as políticas de desenvolvimento podem gerar aumento de produtividade no curto prazo, masmisallocation e perda de produtividade agregada no longo prazo. Isso ocorre caso um componente de produtividade de longo prazo seja imperfeitamente observável no curto prazo devido a choques temporários, e o capital seja especifico e irreversível em alguns setores. Os resultados mostram que o ideal seria aprender sobre componentes de longo prazo da produtividade antes de investir. No entanto, acelerar investimentos nos setores de maior produtividade gera ganhos de produtividade no curto prazo, uma vez que maior produtividade no curto prazo está correlacionada com maior produtividade no longo prazo. Como será discutido, este fato poderia motivar governos à incentivar setores de alta produtividade observada, ainda que estes incentivos fossem socialmente subótimos. / This project aims to present a model that shows that, in a single economic environment, government stimulus to sectors, which features high productivity, can generate short-term productivity gains aggregates, but misallocation and long-term aggregate productivity loss. This may occur if a long-term productivity component is imperfectly observable in the short term due to temporary shocks, and capital is specific and irreversible in some sectors. The ideal be learn about long-term components of the productivity before investing. However accelerate investments in the sectors of higher productivity generates productivity gains in the short term, since higher productivity in the short term this correlated with higher productivity in the long run. As discussed, this fact would motivate governments to encourage high productivity observed sectors, although these incentives were socially suboptimal.

Directors in not-for-profit organizations are not only monitors who ensure that financial reports are free from misreporting but also often act as fundraisers. This paper examines the intensity of directors’ monitoring when management misallocates expenses to solicit donations; especially whether the directors’ oversight is influenced by the organization’s expense disclosure transparency and the donors’ evaluation focus. The results from two experiments indicate that directors play a monitoring role to not allow management’s expense misallocation. Further, the enhanced transparency of expense disclosures increases directors’ tendency not to endorse management’s expense misallocation. However, the donors’ adoption of a balanced evaluation process (i.e., considering both financial and nonfinancial performance metrics) reduces directors’ monitoring compared to the donors’ adoption of an expense-focused evaluation process (i.e., focusing solely on financial metrics). This effect of the donors’ adoption of a balanced evaluation process occurs when directors anticipate donors will not donate to the not-for-profit organization, but not when directors anticipate donors will donate. This paper contributes to a richer understanding of directors’ role in not-for-profit organizations’ expense misallocations. Implications for nonprofit governance are discussed. / Thesis (Ph.D, Management) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-29 14:29:22.41