ESSAYS IN APPLIED EMPIRICAL ECONOMICS

Hanouf Alhunayshil

This dissertation consists of three empirical studies examining how structural constraints and market frictions shape economic outcomes across financial, household, and transportation markets. The first chapter investigates the causal effect of female financial technology adoption on divorce rates using a country-year panel of 52 countries across four waves of the World Bank Global Findex database (2011, 2014, 2017, and 2021). I address the endogeneity of fintech adoption through two-stage least squares, instrumenting the fintech index with the first difference of fixed broadband subscriptions. The results show that a ten-percentage-point increase in the fintech index is associated with approximately 0.55 additional divorces per 1,000 population. Female savings at formal institutions enter negatively and significantly when included as a control, consistent with a stabilizing liquidity channel. The findings suggest that fintech adoption expands women's exit options within the household bargaining framework, while formal savings buffers households against financial shocks. The second chapter examines the determinants of credit gap dynamics in Saudi Arabia over 2010Q1-2025Q2, combining Bry-Boschan Quarterly cycle dating with a five-variable vector autoregression. The cycle dating reveals pronounced asymmetries between contraction and expansion phases, with non-oil GDP displaying steeper recoveries than total GDP. The VAR analysis identifies non-oil GDP as the dominant predictor of the Saudi credit gap, with evidence of a two-stage transmission mechanism in which oil price shocks propagate to non-oil economic activity, which in turn drives credit gap fluctuations. When total GDP replaces non-oil GDP, the system loses predictive content, confirming that non-oil GDP is the economically relevant measure for understanding credit dynamics in oil-exporting economies. The third chapter, co-authored with Jake C. Wagner, Wisnu Sugiarto, and Eric Jessup, analyzes the determinants of bulk truck rates in the United States using weekly transaction data from Bulkloads.com spanning 2017-2023. Using System GMM estimation to address the dynamic panel structure and endogeneity of input costs, the results show that bulk truck rates exhibit strong persistence and that fuel prices are a significant determinant, with a one percent increase in fuel prices associated with a 0.49 percent increase in per-mile truck rates. Across the three studies, the common methodological thread is the identification of causal mechanisms in markets where structural constraints, whether institutional, macroeconomic, or infrastructural, shape the transmission of economic shocks to observed outcomes.

ESSAYS IN APPLIED EMPIRICAL ECONOMICS

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