Essays in finance and macroeconomics
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The first chapter of this dissertation, Due Diligence and Security Design, studies equilibrium security design in a setting in which firms possess private information about the quality of their projects but investors have access to an information production technology. In the model, firms and investors enter into contracts directly and seek counterparties in a competitive environment. Once a deal is reached, investors have an opportunity to perform due diligence on the target firm before deciding whether to accept or reject the offer. I show that when information acquisition is endogenous, firms with higher quality projects may actually be more information-averse, choosing to deter screening by issuing more valuable and more information-insensitive securities while firms with lower quality projects do the opposite. The second chapter, Inequality Shocks and Redistribution, is co-authored with Michael Boskin and studies how democratic political systems generally respond - through redistributive fiscal policy - to changes in income inequality. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we explore the mapping between the distribution of market income and the distribution of post-tax, post-transfer disposable income among U.S. states over the last quarter century. Various instrumental and control variables make it possible to isolate shocks to inequality which are both pure (independent of overall prosperity as well as the demography of need/social insurance) and exogenous (e.g. unrelated to the reverse causal effects of taxes and transfers on work incentives, etc.). The third and final chapter, Production, Predation, and Path Dependence, is co-authored with Mohammad Akbarpour and studies the choice between production and predation (e.g. petty crime, fraud, rent-seeking, corruption) in the pursuit of income. We show that the influence of aggregate behavior on individual incentives generates strategic complementarity and multiple equilibria. A given set of institutions and policies may be consistent with a range of possible crime rates, and the ultimate outcome is determined by history. As a result of this path dependence, temporary changes in enforcement policy can have permanent effects on output and welfare.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Elnahal, Kareem |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics. |
| Primary advisor | Boskin, Michael J |
| Primary advisor | Kurlat, Pablo |
| Thesis advisor | Boskin, Michael J |
| Thesis advisor | Kurlat, Pablo |
| Thesis advisor | Vanasco, Victoria |
| Advisor | Vanasco, Victoria |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Kareem Elnahal. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Kareem Elnahal
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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