Two interesting dissertations from 2008

Three Essays on Openness, International Pricing, and Optimal Monetary Policy is Rick's dissertation. It explores questions about openness and inflation in two-country environments in which monetary authorities set monetary policy to optimize the welfare of their own citizens and account for the actions of the other country's monetary authority. The key finding is that theory and data both provide evidence of a channel through which more openness to international trade can actually give a monetary authority incentive to create more inflation. This finding is in contrast to the more standard theory that more openness leads to more competition, lower prices, and lower inflation.

Essays on Dynamic Political Economy is Jason's dissertation.  In this dissertation, Jason studies American politics.  In particular, he uses economic models to answer questions that are dynamic in nature. The first chapter focuses on the role of the seniority system in pork barrel politics and the subsequent effect on the quality of Representatives in the U.S. House. The second chapter analyzes candidate positioning in a dynamic environment where there are electoral costs to changing position. The third and final chapter is a test of the role of political parties in time consistency problems when candidates cannot commit to future policies. Collectively, these chapters extend the research of empirical political economy in an important direction, one that accounts for the inherent dynamics of politics.