Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2006. / Page 157 blank. / Includes bibliographical references. / Chapter 1 analyzes the theoretical and quantitative implications of optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model with incomplete markets. I first consider the problem of a government facing expenditure shocks in an economy where the only asset is a real risk-free bond. The model features a representative-agent economy with proportional taxes on labor and capital. Taxes on capital must be set one period in advance, reflecting inertia in tax codes. This rules out replication of the complete markets allocation. In the model, capital taxation and capital ownership provide a state contingent source of revenues - creating a new potential role for capital taxation and ownership as risk sharing instruments between the government and private agents. For a baseline case, I show that the optimal policy features a zero tax on capital. Numerical simulations show that the baseline case provides an excellent benchmark: the average tax on capital, while not theoretically zero, turns out to be small. The volatility of capital taxes decreases sharply as the period length is increased. I then allow the government to hold a non trivial position in capital. Capital ownership allows the government to realize about 90% of the welfare gains from moving to complete markets. / (cont.) Large positions are typically required for optimality. But smaller positions achieve substantial benefits. In a business-cycle simulation, I show that a 15% short equity position achieves over 40% of the welfare gains from completing markets. Chapter 2 is the product of joint work with Ivan Werning and analyzes how estate taxes should optimally be set.For an economy with altruistic parents facing productivity shocks, the optimal estate taxation is progressive: fortunate parents should face lower net returns on their inheritances. This progressivity reflects optimal mean reversion in consumption, which ensures that a long-run steady state exists with bounded inequality-avoiding immiseration. Chapter 3 is the product of joint work with Stavros Panageas. We study optimal consumption and portfolio choice in a framework where investors save for early retirement and assume that agents can adjust their labor supply only through an irreversible choice of their retirement time. We obtain closed form solutions and analyze the joint behavior of retirement time, portfolio choice, and consumption. Investing for early retirement tends to increase savings and stock market exposure, and reduce the marginal propensity to consume out of accumulated personal wealth. / (cont.) Contrary to common intuition, prior to retirement an investor might find it optimal to increase the proportion of financial wealth held in stocks as she ages, even when she receives a constant income stream and the investment opportunity set is also constant. This is particularly true when the wealth of the investor increases rapidly due to strong stock market performance, as was the case in the late 1990's. We also show that the model can potentially provide a rational explanation for the paradoxical fact that some investors saving for retirement chose to increase their allocation to stocks as the market was booming and reduce it thereafter. / by Emmanuel Farhi. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-159). / This thesis consists of three essays in development economics. The first chapter investigates urban form in India. I focus on one of the determining factors of urban commuting efficiency, highlighted by urban planners but overlooked by economists: city shape. I retrieve the geometric properties of urban footprints in India over time, using satellite data on nighttime lights and historic maps. I propose an instrument for urban shape based on the interaction between topographic obstacles arid mechanically predicted city growth. I then investigate how city shape affects the location choices of consumers and firms, in a spatial equilibrium framework. More compact cities are characterized by larger population, lower wages, and higher rents, consistent with compact shape being a consumption amenity. The welfare cost of deteriorating city shape is estimated to be sizeable. The effects of unfavorable topography appear to be exacerbated by building height restrictions, and mitigated by infrastructure. The second chapter examines the human capital effects of inheritance law in Kenya. I study a 1981 statutory law reform granting Kenyan women equal inheritance rights. I employ a difference-in-differences strategy, exploiting variation in pre-reform inheritance rules across religious groups. Women exposed to the reform are more educated, less likely to undergo genital mutilation and more likely to be medically assisted during childbirth; they also tend to delay childbearing and to have better marriage market outcomes. These effects are more pronounced for women with fewer siblings, for whom the absolute inheritance share is potentially larger. In the third chapter, my coauthor Eliana La Ferrara and I conduct a disaggregated empirical analysis of civil conflict at the sub-national level in Africa over 1997-2011, using new gridded data. We construct an original measure of agriculture-relevant shocks exploiting within-year variation in weather and in crop growing season, and spatial variation in crop cover. Temporal and spatial spillovers in conflict are addressed through spatial econometric techniques. Negative shocks during the growing season of local crops affect conflict incidence persistently, and local conflict then spills over in space. We use our estimates to trace the dynamic response to shocks and predict how future warming may affect violence. / by Mariaflavia Harari. / Cities in Bad Shape: Urban Geometry in India -- Women's Inheritance Rights and Bargaining Power: Evidence from Kenya -- Conflict, Climate and Cells: a Disaggregated Analysis. / Ph. D.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 33-36). / Lenders typically learn new information about their borrowers over time but can be restricted from repricing debt in response to this information. I study a leading example of such re-pricing restrictions, the 2009 Credit CARD Act, to ask how such restrictions affect credit market efficiency. Using a near-universe of US consumer credit card account data as well as a large random sample of US consumer credit reports, I show evidence that the Act's restrictions had two competing effects: on the one hand, a decoupling between prices and default risk on existing loans over time, which engenders adverse selection through higher attrition of safe borrowers; on the other hand, lower markups on borrowers revealed to be inelastic, and hence lower price dispersion in the market overall. To quantify these two forces' net effect on market efficiency, I build a model of a competitive credit market with private information and changing borrower types over time, and I use the model to ask whether, and for whom, the Act's restrictions bring prices closer to an efficient benchmark of prices equaling marginal costs. While fully estimating the model remains a goal for future work, I here show preliminary results of how the model estimation is proceeding. / by Scott Thomas Nelson. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation consists of three essays which examine the impact of public policy on labor market outcomes of those with disabilities. The first essay analyzes a microlending program for people with disabilities in India. People with disabilities are disproportionately represented among the poorest of the poor in developing countries. An increasingly common method of combating poverty in developing countries, providing microlending through self help groups, has been largely unavailable to the disabled. This essay reports on one of the first programs in India to provide people with disabilities access to self help groups and microlending. Between 2002 and 2004, the Indira Kranthi Patham program began over 23,000 self help groups for people with disabilities in rural Andhra Pradesh. I evaluate the effect of this program on borrowing, education, labor market, and asset ownership outcomes by comparing people with disabilities to their non-disabled siblings in treatment and control villages. The estimates suggest that the program led to increased borrowing, education, and asset ownership, while having negative to zero impact on labor market participation among the disabled. The second essay evaluates the labor market effects of the American with Disabilities Act. In 1990, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act(ADA) to improve the labor market opportunities of the disabled. Immediately following the enactment of the ADA, the employment rate of people with disabilities declined. However, the longer term labor market consequences of the ADA have not been studied. Interest in the longer term post-ADA employment trends of people with disabilities derives from the weakening of the ADA's employment provisions by the Supreme Court. The weakening of these provisions has decreased the cost to employers of hiring disabled workers. This essay uses variation in state disability laws and data from twenty years of the March Current Population Survey to determine the short and longer term impact of the ADA on labor market outcomes of people with disabilities. The estimates suggest that the ADA led to a short-term decline in weeks worked and labor force participation of those with disabilities while having an insignificant impact on these outcomes in the medium and longer run. The final essay explores the wage implications of the American with Disabilities Act for those with disabilities. Those with disabilities have persistently lower wages than the non-disabled. To improve labor market outcomes of the disabled, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Immediately following the enactment of the ADA, the wages of people with disabilities decreased. However, the longer term wage consequences of the ADA have not been studied. Interest in longer term post-ADA wage trends of people with disabilities derives from the weakening of the ADA's employment provisions by the Supreme Court. This essay uses variation in state disability laws and data from twenty years of the March Current Population Survey to determine the short and longer term impact of the ADA on the log weekly wages of people with disabilities. Using data from the March Current Population Survey, this essay shows that the ADA led to a longer term increase in the weekly wages of those with disabilities. This finding is sensitive to the composition of the sample. Furthermore, this essay presents evidence that the wage effect of the ADA varies according to level of education. / by Allison V. Thompkins. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 119-120). / by Walter Novaes. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. Thesis. 1968. Ph.D. / Bibliography: leaves 240-242. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. / In the first essay, we investigate which provisions, among a set of twenty-four governance provisions followed by the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC), are correlated with firm value and stockholder returns. Based on this analysis, we put forward an entrenchment index based on six provisions - four "constitutional" provisions that prevent a majority of shareholders from having their way and two "takeover readiness" provisions that boards put in place to be ready for a hostile takeover. We find that increases in the level of this index are monotonically associated with economically significant reductions in firm valuation, as measured by Tobin's Q. We present suggestive evidence that the entrenching provisions cause lower firm valuation. We also find that firms with higher level of the entrenchment index were associated with large negative abnormal returns during the 1990-2003 period. Furthermore, we find that the provisions in our entrenchment index fully drive the correlation, identified by prior work, that the IRRC provisions in the aggregate have with reduced firm value and lower stock returns during the 1990s. We find no evidence that the other eighteen IRRC provisions are negatively correlated with either firm value or stock returns during the 1990-2003 period. The second essay investigates the effect the imposition of mandatory disclosure in 1964 on over-the-counter firms had on stock volatility, stock returns and stock synchronicity. This study finds that mandatory disclosure is associated with both a dramatic reduction in the volatility of OTC stock returns and with OTC stocks enjoying positive abnormal returns. / (cont.) The third essay investigates whether the empirical evidence favors state competition for corporate incorporations. The essay concludes that the existing empirical evidence does not favor state competition. Moreover, data on incorporation choices made by firms supports this conclusion. States with wealth-reducing state antitakeover statutes are not penalized in the market for incorporations. The fourth essay addresses whether dispersion of ownership in the United States can be explained by the U.S. having a strong corporate and securities legal regime. The essay concludes that dispersion of ownership cannot be so explained. / by Frank Allen Ferrell. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Steven Robert Postrel. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-158). / by Natalie Jean Tawil. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. Thesis. 1969. Ph.D. / Includes bibliographical notes. / Ph.D.