| This thesis is divided in two chapters. The first one deals with interlinked credit and labor markets in rural economies, and the reason for their existence when workers are heterogeneous in cost of providing labor, and cost of relocating to another landlord or village. A landlord can offer wages, loans and interest rates in a combination that permits to minimize the number of workers who accept the job but do not perform their tasks. The results in terms of whether a lending contract is better than a non-lending one differ depending on the distribution of workers and the lending capacity of the landlord. If workers are distributed in such a way that they have low costs of moving the landlord should offer an interlinked contract. This would explain the finding that such contracts are offered to migrant workers. However, when he is limited in the amount of funds available for loans, the difference between lending and non-lending decreases. Moreover, when moving casts are high a lending contract is still profitable if workers value the loan enough; otherwise, a lending and a non-lending contract are equivalent. Lending contracts should also be preferred when workers are more diverse in their willingness to work and ability to move.;The second chapter is an empirical investigation of the relation between crime and age in a sample representative of the population in an American urban area. The literature suggests that the age effect should become negligible once explanatory factors such as salaries, previous contacts with the police, and expected sentences are accounted for. The results from a reduced form probit model show a persistent effect of age on the probability of participating in criminal activities after these factors identified in the literature are accounted for, even though they contribute to create the profile. The results of this study indicate that there might be a pure age effect, or the factors identified in the literature are not sufficient to explain the profile. |
