Indebted to Growth explores how local public finance decisions made between the Gilded Age and the Great Depression laid the foundation for white suburbanization, spatial inequality, and urban fiscal strains in the postwar era and beyond. It makes this case by investigating conf…
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This thesis focuses on how the design of public insurance policies entails distributional consequences that impact macroeconomic aggregates, inequality, and welfare.
In this dissertation, I consider multiple dimensions of international integration. In chapter one, I consider the impact of immigration on public finance. In chapter two, I study capacity constrained firms and the transmission of foreign shocks to the domestic market through the…
This dissertation addresses three significant questions in public finance. The first chapter proposes a measure of the size of the intertemporal budget deficit which is called the intertemporal budget gap (GAP). The GAP can be used to correct for the deficiencies of annual budge…
Taxes are major source of public funds to finance government expenditures. Tax authorities impose different kind of taxes and employ many agents to collect taxes effectively. Some dutiful taxpayers will undoubtedly pay their tax liabilities while many others will not. The Intern…
Aid and welfare agencies typically target transfers to the poor and attempt to exclude the rich. But checking whether an individual is rich or poor is costly. This dissertation proposes mechanisms that use local information to save on audit costs. A cross reporting mechanism ind…
State governments establish “rainy day” funds, primarily to smooth state finances during years of fiscal downturns. This dissertation tests the effect of these funds on state governments' ability to mitigate tax rate increases throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Previous studies tes…
This dissertation has three distinct but related objectives. The first objective is to provide insights into the determinants of financial liberalization in a sample of 30 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The second objective is to explore the factors that led the Nigerian…