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Yang Li, 2012
Faculty Advisor: Brett Gordon
Geographic price discrimination is generally considered beneficial to firm profitability. Firms can extract higher rents by varying prices across markets to match consumers' preferences. This paper empirically demonstrates, however, that a firm may instead prefer a national pricing policy that fixes prices across geographic markets, foregoing the opportunity to customize prices. Under appropriate conditions, a national pricing policy helps avoid intense local competition due to targeted prices.
Ravindra Sastry, 2012
Faculty Advisor: Michael Johannes
Building on insights from the economics of superstars, I develop an efficient method for estimating the skill of mutual fund managers. Outliers are especially helpful for disentangling skill from luck when I explicitly model the cross-sectional distribution of managerial skill using a flexible and realistic function. Forecasted performance is dramatically improved relative to standard regression estimates: an investor selecting (avoiding) the best (worst) decile of funds would improve risk-adjusted performance by 2% (3%) annually.
Emily Bianchi, 2012
Faculty Advisor: Daniel Ames
Recently economists have shown that people who graduate during recessions earn less money (e.g., Kahn, 2010) and hold less prestigious jobs (Oyer, 2006) even decades after entering the workforce. This dissertation argues that despite these suboptimal outcomes, these graduates are likely to be happier with their jobs, even long after these economic conditions have changed.
Bjarni Torfason, 2012
Faculty Advisor: Robert Hodrick
This dissertation is composed of three chapters. In Chapter 1 I look at the role of real exchange rates in the asset pricing of currencies. I construct portfolios based on signals about the real exchange rate and analyze the returns of these portfolios as they relate to traditional asset pricing factors and especially how they correlate with carry trade portfolios. Deviations from long term averages of real exchange rates are found to be predictors of crash risk. I also show that there is significant information in real exchange rate signals that does not seem to be priced.
Peter Jarnebrant, 2012
Faculty Advisor: Eric Johnson
This dissertation consists of three essays. The first examines analytically as well as empirically the mental accounting principle that Thaler (1985) termed the "silver lining principle." The second and third essays investigate the link between attention and preferences. In the first essay, loss aversion is an important antecedent and moderator of the principle's effect on preferences, and in the latter two we hypothesize both antecedent (Essay Two) and consequent (Essay Three) roles for loss aversion with respect to attention.
Min Wang, 2012
Faculty Advisor: Awi Federgruen
This dissertation addresses a few fundamental questions on the interface between supplier financing schemes and inventory management. Traditionally, retailers finance their inventories through an independent financing institution or by drawing from their own cash reserves, without any supplier involvement ( Independent Financing ).
Xiaojing Wang, 2012
Faculty Advisor: Tim Baldenius
Strategic information transmission models, also called cheap talk models, have become increasingly popular in accounting, as they have successfully brought new insights to various accounting topics. This dissertation consists of two chapters, each analyzes a model of strategic information transmission between an expert and a decision maker.
Dongyoup Lee, 2012
Faculty Advisor: Jialin Yu
My dissertation aims at understanding the dynamics of asset prices empirically. It contains three chapters.
Olga Kuzmina, 2012
Faculty Advisor: Maria Guadalupe
Different fields of economics have historically tended to focus on firms' strategies in isolation. In contrast, a lot of the recent work explores how various aspects of firm behavior interact with each other.
Damla Gunes, 2012
Faculty Advisor: Michael Johannes
The purpose of this dissertation is to understand the risks embedded in Carry Trades. For this, we use a broad range of stochastic volatility (SV) models, estimate them using Bayesian techniques via Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, and analyze various risk measures using these estimation results.
