This thesis studies the technological change in the US commercial banking market and its influence on banks' lending practices. The second chapter provides some empirical facts.

The third chapter studies the welfare consequences of the destructive creation (bank

branches replaced by internet banking) of the US commercial banking

market following the Great Recession of 2009. Using a structural model,

we find that the cleansing effect (closure of unproductive bank branches)

of the recession increases the units of internet banking by about 56\% in 2016, compared to the case where the cleansing effect is absent. The share of internet banking in the retail service market is increased from 48\% to 60\% and the price of internet banking service is decreased by a factor of 16 by the cleansing effect of the Great Recession.

The two changes lowers the price of retail banking services in 2016 by 37\%: 53\% of the price reduction is attributable

to the replacement

of branches by internet banking and 47\% is attributable to the reduction of the price of internet banking. However, this cleansing effect also

results in a 2.5\% decrease in small business services in small cities.

These findings suggest that the cleansing effect of the recession benefits

retail consumers. However, small business lending may suffer.

The fourth chapter evaluates how information technology (IT) improvements contribute to the decline of small business lending in the US commercial banking market from 2002 to 2017. This paper estimates a general equilibrium dynamic model with banks that differ in size and choose the level of the transaction (hard information intensive) and relationship (soft information intensive) lending. The model shows that banks’ costs of evaluating borrowers’ hard information declined over this period by 46\%, and small business loans fell by 7\% (12\% in the data). This paper finds that banks’ higher reliance on IT to issue transaction loans is responsible for 37\% of the decline in the data, and the consolidation caused by IT improvements caused 22\% of the decline. Contrary to previous findings, this paper finds that when general equilibrium is considered, policy protecting small banks cannot increase small business lending.

This dissertation focuses on democracies governed by a Parliament. In such democracies, the executive branch consists of a subset of parties in the Parliament, called the Government. A key feature is that the Government is only indirectly determined by the voters' electoral decisions. This dissertation address how parliamentary characteristics and institutions influence the composition of the Government and government outcomes. The composition of the Government reflects the size and ideological make-up of the Government. Government outcomes reflect the length the Government survives and the policy consequences of the Government. The literature focuses on the former criterion. The view is that, in parliamentary democracies, longer Government duration should be associated with stability and better policies. The latter is important from the perspective of directly evaluating whether Governments make good or bad decisions from the perspective of voters. The first chapter of this dissertation develop a model of the government formation process, where parties care about and bargain over both policy and office benefits. The model generate predictions that matches important features of the data. The second chapter uses data from western European parliamentary democracies to estimate the parameters of the model in chapter one. The estimation results suggest that coalitions care about both ideology and office benefits, but more about office benefits. The third chapter studies which (existing) institutional environments lead to `good' government outcomes. The results have a number of important implications for constitutional design.