Abstracts Category : Other

Essays on inequality and finance

by Mintra Dwarkasing

This dissertation studies how locality, in the form of inequality, historical events and regulation matter for financial outcomes. The first two chapters, joint with Fabio Braggion and Steven Ongena, shed light on how local inequality can affect the financing choices of start-up firms and entrepreneurial dynamism and how it is associated with local judicial decision making in the US. The third chapter of this thesis shows that a local shock in trust and culture from the past can lead to an unequal probability of obtaining a mortgage loan for similar applicants from neighboring affected and non-affected areas today. It additionally studies whether this finding can be explained by a possible dark side of social capital. The last chapter of this thesis, joint with Narly Dwarkasing and Jasmin Gider, investigates the real effects of tax avoidance. In particular, it studies how tax avoidance practices of US firms are related to their innovation in- and output, exploiting a shock in the cost of tax avoidance.Advisors/Committee Members: Ongena, S.R.G., Braggion, F., Research Group: Finance.