Three essays in economics

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This thesis comprises three essays across various economics fields. The first essay investigates microfinance and inflation in low-income countries, analyzing their welfare effects through a monetary search model that incorporates a moral hazard problem. It demonstrates how access to financial services influences borrowing, saving, and money-holding decisions. The group lending mechanism fosters peer monitoring, enhancing entrepreneurship. A key finding is the existence of an inflation threshold beyond which entrepreneurship declines, with the positive impact of microfinance peaking at moderate inflation rates before diminishing significantly. The second essay explores doping behavior among heterogeneous athletes in a private information context, modeled as an all-pay auction. Athletes, possessing private knowledge of their abilities, decide on the use of performance-enhancing drugs, which come with costs but lack regulation. The analysis reveals a doping threshold, where only stronger athletes engage in doping. This threshold is influenced by doping costs and prize levels, with increased competition incentivizing doping among strong athletes while discouraging weaker ones. The third essay addresses the substitutability patterns in Swiss manufacturing industries amid energy policy challenges, particularly following the nuclear phase-out and Kyoto protocol commitments. It fills a gap in estimating sectoral substitution elasti