Essays on Development, Finance, and International Law

Abstract

This dissertation presents three chapters about development, finance, and international law. The first chapter investigates the effect of human rights litigation on market valuations of publicly traded defendants. I find little evidence of trial court filings and closures affecting stock prices, but I find suggestive evidence of an effect from domestic appellate jurisprudence that changes the viability of such litigation. The second chapter uses detailed state administrative data on individual students to examine how eliminating public subsidies to attend for-profit institutions impacts students’ college enrollment and completion behavior. We find little evidence that the elimination of public subsidies to attend for-profit institutions led students to pursue higher education in community colleges and public universities. The third chapter analyzes field experiments pertaining to Indian life insurance agents’ quality of advice. We document how agents recommend strictly dominated products because they provide high agent commissions. We also exploit a policy change requiring disclosure of a particular product’s commissions to show how agents respond by simply substituting to other products with high commissions but no disclosure requirements.