Three Essays on Economic Development and International Economics

Abstract

The dissertation consists of three chapters reflecting on economic development and International Economics. Chapter One sheds light on how women's bargaining power proxied by different indicators stands in responding to various requirements of married payments from the groom to the bride at the time of marriage. This study utilizes the average deflated price of gold and oil as IV to correct for the potential endogeneity of women's wealth. The main result of this chapter, along with several anthropological literatures, is that marriage payments are a normative constraint over women's autonomy in the MENA region. Chapter 2 discusses whether government institutions have a role in Trade-Health Nexus. This chapter uses data from the World Bank in the case of the MENA region from 1996 to 2018. The methodology used in this chapter is based on the OLS along with the GMM estimator technique of Hansen (2001) and Arellano & Bond (1991). The main finding of this chapter is that the MENA region is more likely to benefit from a high level of trade to improve their health outcomes as long as they have better government institutions and health infrastructure. Chapter 3 examined how government subsidies, financial liquidity, and financial factors affect corporate investment behavior and its efficiency for 17 industrial sectors in the Saudi financial market using a quarterly data set from 2010 to 2020. The empirical outcome shows that government subsidies' enormous liquidity injection in the financial markets incentivizes corporations to conduct more investments.