Essays in applied economics

This dissertation examines several themes in applied economics. Specifically, Essay 1 examines the dynamics in an overlapping generations model with three-period lived agents, fiat money, and credit, Essay 2 reviews literature on value-added modeling and discusses a paper previously published, Essay 3 concludes by examining efficiency in the US bond market. While Essay 1 examines dynamics and 2 reviews tools used in estimating panel data, Essay 3 combines elements of both-empirically evaluating the efficiency of the bond market by looking at the movement of prices through time. That is, deriving the integral over t of the bond spread. While opportunities for more work exists, this paper suggests that the US Bond Market (the market for corporate debt) is informationally efficient, though it takes longer to converge than previously reported in the literature.