In this paper, I study many-to-one matching markets in a dynamic framework with the

following features: Matching is irreversible, participants exogenously join the market

over time, each agent is restricted by a quota, and agents are perfectly patient. A

form of strategic behavior in such markets emerges: The side with many slots can

manipulate the subsequent matching market in their favor via earlier matchings. In

such a setting, a natural question arises: Is it possible to analyze a dynamic many-to-one

matching market as if it were either a static many-to-one or a dynamic one-to-one

market? First, I provide sufficient conditions under which the answer is yes. Second,

I show that if these conditions are not met, then the early matchings are "inferior"

to the subsequent matchings. Lastly, I extend the model to allow agents on one side

to endogenously decide when to join the market. Using this extension, I provide

a rationale for the small amount of unraveling observed in the United States (US)

medical residency matching market compared to the US college-admissions system.

Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) are designed to improve the welfare of the poor.

Group lending with joint liability is the standard contract used by these institutions.

Such a contract performs two roles: it affects the composition of the groups that form,

and determines the properties of risk-sharing among their members. Even though the

literature suggests that groups consist of members with similar characteristics, there

is evidence also of groups with heterogeneous agents. The underlying reason is that

the literature lacked the risk-sharing behavior of the agents within a group. This

paper develops a model of group lending where agents form groups, obtain capital

from the MFI, and share risks among themselves. First, I show that joint liability

introduces inefficiency for risk-averse agents. Moreover, the composition of the groups

is not always homogeneous once risk-sharing is on the table.

In the first chapter, I study the two-sided, dynamic matching problem that occurs in the United States (US) foster care system. In this market, foster parents and foster children can form reversible foster matches, which may disrupt, continue in a reversible state, or transition into permanency via adoption. I first present an empirical analysis that yields four new stylized facts related to match transitions of children in foster care and their exit through adoption. Thereafter, I develop a two-sided dynamic matching model with five key features: (a) children are heterogeneous (with and without a disability), (b) children must be foster matched before being adopted, (c) children search for parents while foster matched to another parent, (d) parents receive a smaller per-period payoff when adopting than fostering (capturing the presence of a financial penalty on adoption), and (e) matches differ in their quality. I use the model to derive conditions for the stylized facts to arise in equilibrium and carry out predictions regarding match quality. The main insight is that the intrinsic disadvantage (being less preferred by foster parents) faced by children with a disability exacerbates due to the penalty. Moreover, I show that foster parents in high-quality matches (relative to foster parents in low-quality matches) might have fewer incentives to adopt.

In the second chapter, I study the Minnesota's 2015 Northstar Care Program which eliminated the adoption penalty (i.e., the decrease in fostering-based financial transfers associated with adoption) for children aged six and older, while maintaining it for children under age six. Using a differences-in-differences estimation strategy that controls for a rich set of covariates, I find that parents were responsive to the change in direct financial payments; the annual adoption rate of older foster children (aged six to eleven) increased by approximately 8 percentage points (24% at the mean) as a result of the program. I additionally find evidence of strategic adoption behavior as the adoption rate of younger children temporarily increased by 9 percentage points (23% at the mean) while the adoption rate of the oldest children (aged fifteen) temporarily decreased by 9 percentage points (65% at the mean) in the year prior to the program's implementation.

I study the design of two different institutions to evaluate the welfare implications

of counterfactual policies. In particular, I analyze (i) the problem of assigning

students to colleges (majors) in a centralized admission system; and (ii) an auction

where the seller can use securities to determine winner’s payment, and bidders

suffer negative externalities. In the former, I provide a novel methodology to

evaluate counterfactual policies when the admission mechanism is manipulable.

In the latter, I determine which instrument yields the highest expected revenue

from the class of instruments that combines cash and equity payments.

This dissertation focuses on democracies governed by a Parliament. In such democracies, the executive branch consists of a subset of parties in the Parliament, called the Government. A key feature is that the Government is only indirectly determined by the voters' electoral decisions. This dissertation address how parliamentary characteristics and institutions influence the composition of the Government and government outcomes. The composition of the Government reflects the size and ideological make-up of the Government. Government outcomes reflect the length the Government survives and the policy consequences of the Government. The literature focuses on the former criterion. The view is that, in parliamentary democracies, longer Government duration should be associated with stability and better policies. The latter is important from the perspective of directly evaluating whether Governments make good or bad decisions from the perspective of voters. The first chapter of this dissertation develop a model of the government formation process, where parties care about and bargain over both policy and office benefits. The model generate predictions that matches important features of the data. The second chapter uses data from western European parliamentary democracies to estimate the parameters of the model in chapter one. The estimation results suggest that coalitions care about both ideology and office benefits, but more about office benefits. The third chapter studies which (existing) institutional environments lead to `good' government outcomes. The results have a number of important implications for constitutional design.

One theoretical research topic in organizational economics is the information issues raised in different organizations. This has been extensively studied in last three decades. One common feature of these research is focusing on the asymmetric information among different agents within one organization. However, in reality, we usually face the following situation. A group of people within an organization are completely transparent to each other; however, their characters are not known by other organization members who are outside this group. In my dissertation, I try to study how this information sharing would affect the outcome of different organizations. I focus on two organizations: corporate board and political parties. I find that this information sharing may be detrimental for (some of) the members who shared information. This conclusion stands in contrast to the conventional wisdom in both corporate finance and political party literature.