abstract: This dissertation consists of two essays with a macroeconomic approach to economic development. These essays explore specific barriers that prevent economic agents from exploiting opportunities across regions or sectors in developing countries, and to what extent the observed allocations are inefficient outcomes or just an efficient response to economic fundamentals and technological constraints. The first chapter is motivated by the fact that a prominent feature of cities in developing countries is the existence of slums: locations with low housing-quality and informal property rights. This paper focuses on the allocation of land across slums and formal housing, and emphasizes the role of living in central urban areas for the formation of slums. I build a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model to study the aggregate effects of anti-slum policies and use microdata from India for the quantitative implementation. According to my findings, demolishing slums in central urban areas leads to a decrease in welfare, aggregate labor productivity, and urban population. In contrast, decreasing formal housing distortions in India to the U.S. level increases the urban population share by 20% and labor productivity by 2.4%, and reduces the share of the urban population living in slums by 19%. The second chapter is motivated by the fact that labor productivity gaps between rich and poor countries are much larger for agriculture than for non-agriculture. Using detailed data from Mexican farms, this paper shows that value added per worker is frequently over two times larger in cash crops than in staple crops, yet most farmers choose to produce staples. These findings imply that the agricultural productivity gap is actually a staple productivity gap and understanding production decisions of farmers is crucial to explain why labor productivity is so low in poor countries. This paper develops a general equilibrium framework in which subsistence consumption and interregional trade costs determine the efficient selection of farmers into types of crops. The quantitative results of the model imply that decreasing trade costs in Mexico to the U.S. level reduces the ratio of employment in staple to cash crops by 17% and increases agricultural labor productivity by 14%. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Economics 2019

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-88).

Project (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Project (Dept. of Economics) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Economics." Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-122).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 2000. Graduate Programme in Economics. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 143-152). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ59142

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This dissertation is presented in the form of three essays on International Business studies. The purpose of the dissertation is to address the interdependence between the macroeconomy and finance at three levels of analysis: the conceptual level, the economic policy level, and the corporate policy level. Each essay addresses one of these levels. The empirical focus is on developing countries in general---and Latin America in particular---because in recent history these countries have experienced large economic fluctuations and major regime shifts. The introduction surveys the literature on the relationship between the financial sector and economic growth. The first essay synthesizes the literature concerning the benefits, risks, and costs of financial liberalization in developing countries and presents illustrative data on its recent implementation and outcomes. The second essay investigates the causal relationships between real activity, inflation, and financial assets' returns in seven major Latin American economies (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela) over the period 1976--1999, using vector autoregression analysis to explore the puzzling negative relationship observed elsewhere between real stock returns and inflation. The third essay investigates whether macroeconomic factors are as important as traditional firm-specific and country-specific factors as determinants of capital structure for a sample of firms from the seven Latin American countries mentioned above in the period 1986--2000 using panel data analysis. Empirical comparisons are drawn with industrial economies: the G-7 economies in the second essay and a subset of United States firms in the third. The final chapter presents the conclusions of this dissertation. The main finding is that differences between advanced and emerging economies in the relationship among economic variables do not seem as clear-cut as often assumed by academicians, policy

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