Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. Thesis. 1973. Ph.D. / MICROFICHE COPY ALSO AVAILABLE IN DEWEY LIBRARY. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 412-417. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis consists of three studies in the economics of higher education. The first two chapters investigate the impacts of mergers of colleges and universities within US higher education markets. Chapter 1 is a case study of five recent consolidations within the University System of Georgia. Using student-level administrative data, I show that four-semester student persistence improves by 7 percentage points for cohorts who matriculate post-consolidation relative to cohorts at similar non-consolidated institutions. These large and significant gains do not come at the cost of increases in spending per student, which is indicative of improved productivity. Moreover, I find no evidence that USG takes advantage of increased market power to raise tuition and fees. In Chapter 2, I investigate whether the impacts of the recent consolidations within the University System of Georgia are typical of mergers throughout the public and private non-profit sector. Using institution-level panel data, I find that the average merger between 2000 and 2013 was not beneficial for students. The average merger had no impact on retention rates, and merging institutions raised tuition and fees for students by an average of 7 percent relative to non-merging institutions. To assess whether market power is the most likely explanation, I investigate and rule out three alternative explanations for price increases: higher educational costs, higher quality, and new degree offerings. The evidence is consistent with the exercise of market power. Chapter 3 evaluates a freshman learning community at MIT featuring smaller classes, revamped introductory courses, and a high proportion of female instructors called the Experimental Study Group (ESG). I exploit the lottery-based admission system to generate causal treatment effect estimates. Using detailed Registrar data, I find no statistically significant effects on academic outcomes for ESG enrollees generally. However, there is marginally significant evidence that women who participate in the program have higher GPAs and complete more credits of coursework. An analysis of the effect of instructor gender suggests that though female students earn higher grades when courses are taught by female instructors, the higher proportion of female instructors in ESG cannot fully explain the academic effects for women. / by Lauren Russell. / 1. Short-Term Impacts of College Consolidations: System of Georgia -- 3. Market Power Effects of College and University Mergers -- 3. Learning Community Impacts at a Selective, STEM Institution: Evidence from MIT. / Ph. D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 155-164). / Game theory is one of the main tools currently used in Economics to model strategic behavior. However, game theory has come under attack because of the strong assumptions it makes on people's behavior. Because of that, alternative models of bounded rationality, with more realistic assumptions, have been proposed. In the first chapter, I develop a game theoretic model where players use two different reasoning processes: cooperative and competitive. The model generalizes Level-k and team reasoning, and provides a unified explanation for several important phenomena. In Rubinstein's Email game, players coordinate successfully upon receiving enough messages. In 2 x 2 games of complete information, the solution concept lies between Pareto dominance and risk-dominance. In coordination games, the model explains several experimental facts that cannot be accounted for by global games, especially the fact people coordinate more with public rather than private information. I show the importance of public events in revolutions: a self-interested government prevents the generation of common knowledge among the citizenry when times are bad. In the second chapter, I develop a model of cognitive type spaces which incorporates Level-k and Cognitive Hierarchy (CH) models into games of incomplete information. CH models make two assumptions: agents of higher level have richer beliefs and can perform more computations. In my model, like in Level-k and CH models, an agent's level determines how complex her beliefs are. However, given their beliefs, agents are fully rational and behave according to Interim Correlated Rationalizability. My main result is that, restricted to cognitive type spaces, the product topology and the uniform strategic topology coincide, what implies that two players with similar beliefs behave similarly. This means that, unlike for general type spaces, predictions will be robust to small specification errors and suggests that incorporating cognitively plausible assumptions into game theory can increase robustness. As an application, I show that in the Email game, when players receive few messages they never attack; however, when they receive enough messages, they behave as if there was complete information, and both actions are rationalizable. In the third chapter, I develop a dynamic model of forward-looking agents in the presence of social pressure. I show that social pressure is effective in generating public good provision: after an agent starts contributing to the public good, other agents decide to contribute as well because of fear of being punished, what generates contagion in the network. In contrast with the previous literature, contagion happens fast as part of the best response of fully rational individuals. The network topology has implications for whether the contagion starts and the extent to which it spreads. I find conditions under which an agent decides to be the first to contribute in order to generate contagion in the network, as well as conditions for contribution due to a self-fulfilling fear of social pressure. / by David Jimenez-Gomez. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 123-125). / by José V. Rodríguez Mora. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1990. / Title as it appears in the June, 1990 M.I.T. Graduate List: Financial and tax aspects of firm's choice of employee benefits. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Mitchell A. Petersen. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Alexander Strickland Putalik Pfaff. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. / These four essays concern the theory of games and its application to economic theory. The first two, closely linked, chapters are an investigation into the foundational question of the sensitivity of the predictions of game theory to higher-order beliefs. Impact of Higher-Order Uncertainty with Muhamet Yildiz In some games, the impact of higher-order uncertainty is very large, implying that present economic theories may be misleading as these theories assume common knowledge of the type structure after specifying the first or the second orders of beliefs. Focusing on normal-form games in which the players' strategy spaces are compact metric spaces, we show that our key condition, called "global stability under uncertainty," implies a variety of results to the effect that the impact of higher-order uncertainty is small. Our central result states that, under global stability, the maximum change in equilibrium strategies due to changes in players' beliefs at orders higher than k is exponentially decreasing in k. Therefore, given any need for precision, we can approximate equilibrium strategies by specifying only finitely many orders of beliefs. Finite-Order Implications of Any Equilibrium with Muhamet Yildiz Present economic theories make a common-knowledge assumption that implies that the first or second-order beliefs determine all higher-order beliefs. / (cont.) We analyze the role of such a closing assumption at any finite order by instead allowing higher orders to vary arbitrarily. Assuming that the space of underlying uncertainty is sufficiently rich, we show that, under an arbitrary fixed equilibrium, the resulting set of possible outcomes must include all outcomes that survive iterated elimination of strategies that are never a strict best reply. For many games, this implies that, unless the game is dominance-solvable, every equilibrium will be highly sensitive to higher-order beliefs, and thus economic theories based on such equilibria may be misleading. Moreover, every equilibrium is discontinuous at each type for which two or more actions survive our elimination process. Conversely, the resulting set of possible outcomes must be contained in rationalizable strategy profiles. This yields a precise characterization in generic instances. Price Dispersion and Loss Leaders Dispersion in retail prices of identical goods is inconsistent with the standard model of price competition among identical firms, which predicts that all prices will be driven down to cost. One common explanation for such dispersion is the use of a loss-leader strategy, in which a firm prices one good below cost in order to attract a higher customer volume for profitable goods. / (cont.) By assuming high transportation costs which indeed force each consumer to buy all desired goods at a single firm, we create the possibility of an effective loss-leader strategy. We find, however, that such a strategy cannot be effective in equilibrium, so that additional assumptions limiting price search or rationality must be introduced to explain price dispersion or loss leaders. Two Notes on the Blotto Game We exhibit a new equilibrium of the classic Blotto game in which players allocate one unit of resources among three coordinates and try to defeat their opponent in two out of three. It is well known that a mixed strategy will be an equilibrium strategy if the marginal distribution on each coordinate is U [0, 2]. All known examples of such distributions have two-dimensional support. Here we exhibit a distribution which has one-dimensional support and is simpler to describe than previous examples. The construction generalizes to give one-dimensional distributions with the same property in higher-dimensional simplexes as well. As our second note, we give some results on the equilibrium payoffs when the game is modified so that one player has greater available resources. Our results suggest a criterion for equilibrium selection in the original symmetric game, in terms of robustness with respect to a small asymmetry in resources. / by Jonathan Weinstein. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation studies the role of signaling concerns in discouraging access to liquidity facilities like the IMF contingent credit lines (CCL) and the Discount Window (DW). In Chapter 1, I analyze the introduction of IMF CCL in an economy with asymmetric information and financial frictions. Countries have private information about the probability of a being hit by a negative aggregate shock. IMF insurance provides outside liquidity that partially alleviates financial frictions. In the absence of IMF CCL, weak countries face inefficient project termination when the economy is hit by the negative shock, but receive cheaper credit ex ante as they are pooled with strong countries. Once contingent credit lines are introduced, weak countries have to choose between reducing inefficient liquidation and losing the ex ante cross subsidy from pooling. Introducing the CCL leads to a Pareto improvement relative to the no-IMF benchmark only if the IMF can offer a sufficiently large amount of outside liquidity or if it can allow for cross subsidization from strong to weak countries. Chapter 2 studies the role of eligibility requirements that make the CCL close to a rating agency. Risk-averse countries, with private information regarding the probability of being hit by an aggregate income shock, seek insurance in international capital markets. I focus on a No-IMF benchmark in which the target economies for the facility manage to separate from weaker countries by underinsuring. I model IMF CCL as the introduction of an imperfect stress test that countries may voluntarily take. If the stress test is good enough, the IMF generates a Pareto improvement by providing target economies with a cheaper way to separate from weaker economies. However, if the quality of the stress test is low enough, there exists an equilibrium in which no country chooses to take the exam. Provided that the cost of the exam is low enough, I show that forcing all countries to take the exam Pareto dominates the equilibrium in which no country takes the exam. In Chapter 3, I study the role of the DW in the presence of competing liquidity facilities with market determined interest rates. There is stigma attached to borrowing at the DW. Stigma costs are assumed to be fixed costs and therefore banks borrow at the DW only when the fed funds market is severely tight. A more attractive discount window (lower discount rate or lower signaling costs) results in higher total DW borrowing and a higher fraction of banks borrowing from the facility. It is also accessed in more states of the world. I propose an empirical approach based on cross-district data to test for the stigma hypothesis. / by Nicolás Arregui. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.) Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics, 1956. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 199-200. / by Robert Alexander Mundell. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. Thesis. 1968. Ph.D. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 226-230. / Ph.D.