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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
The decision to be self-employed has been studied in numerous scholarly papers. In particular, there has been interest in the decision to become an entrepreneur in relation to the macroeconomic climate. Scholars reference the potential...
The first essay conducts robustness analysis on Gali's (1999) results. Following Gali's identification strategy, the model is extended to the sectoral level within the private sector. The paper also looks at the two important breaks, ...
My dissertation investigates the dynamics of international capital flows, distinguishing between net and gross flows. Chapter One considers both net and gross capital flows. I develop a small open economy model which endogenous sudden...
This dissertation is entitled "Essays in Fiscal Policy: Computational Accuracy and Optimal Investments in Public, Private, and Human Capital." The dissertation tries to answer three questions. First, how good are linearization and higher...
There is a breadth of literature analyzing how particular institutional frameworks affect the propensity to engage in violent conflict. The democratic peace theory suggests that democracies will be less likely to engage in conflict with...
We live in a highly connected world and individuals rarely, if ever, make decisions in complete isolation. Rather, our decisions and subsequent outcomes are often influenced by the decisions of others around us. Social, economic, and...
This dissertation involves the relationship between market structures and innovation, with an eye to implications for antitrust. The first chapter considers whether more competitive market structures encourage more cost-reducing, process...
One of the main concerns about immigration is knowing whether immigrants will assimilate into American society. To assess whether immigrants have fully assimilated, the economic outcomes of their children must be analyzed. Previous...
Local governments are becoming an increasingly important arm of governance and public goods provision. As the role of counties and municipalities continues to expand so must our understanding of their inner workings and relationships to...
The purpose of this research is to construct an understanding of the factors that account for observed distributions. While much of the previous work has focused on developed countries, this dissertation focuses on developing countries...
This dissertation seeks to understand the human decision-making process, not only in the context of neoclassical economics, but also in consideration of social and psychological factors. Through both qualitative and quantitative...
The essays comprising this dissertation intersect public policy and consequential personal decisions: attending college, adopting a child, or choosing the right neighborhood. These selections have an enduring effect on an individual’s...
Empirical studies that explicitly seek to identify the motives behind local land use regulations are relatively scarce in the existing literature. Of the few such studies that exist, a substantial share focus specifically on the...
This dissertation explores the factors that determine the variation in institutional quality among nations. Previously, a growing body of literature has demonstrated the importance of economic institutions in determining prosperity, but...
The financial economics profession has determined that identical agents in a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium (DSGE) model does not provide price and trading dynamics realized in financial markets. There has been quite a bit of...
This dissertation utilizes experiments to test theoretical predictions regarding the impact of resale on behavior in an auction. In the first essay I examine how the existence of an inter-bidder resale opportunity impacts bidder behavior...
Recent trends in housing prices and wages have made it increasingly difficult for moderate-wage workers such as teachers and police officers to afford housing in the communities in which they work. Commonly referred to as the workforce...
It is commonly asserted that free market capitalism promotes economic efficiency at the expense of equality. This view is reflected in the common claim that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The current research...
Living wage laws are a common local government policy to mandate higher wages for a subsection of the labor market. Advocates of these policies suggest the higher mandated wage will lead to greater effort contrary to predictions made by...
Capital control policies, such as certificate of need (CON) regulations, are often touted as a means of combatting the rising costs of healthcare. However, such policies often have little to no concern with their impact on health...
Until the 1980's, business cycle and growth theory were viewed as separate and unrelated. However, the last two decades were characterized by growth in literature that examined the link between growth and short term fluctuations. Two...
Competitiveness indices are used widespread for assessing nations' capabilities of prospering. However, the existing indices have so far focused on cross-sectional analyses, which prove disadvantageous when trying to monitor nations'...
The Race to the Top (RTTT) federal grant program was an initiative that targeted improving Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education. However, the evaluation of the program reported only student outcomes for...
In this dissertation, I examine other regarding preferences and anti-social behavior using economic experiments that I conjecture share key elements to human interactions that would be difficult to study outside the lab. The first essay ...
The increase of hospital mergers and consolidations in the 1990s has raised concerns about hospital market power. Some mergers have significantly lessened competition and caused a sharp increase in insurance premiums and hospital prices;...
In this dissertation, I examine juror decision making behavior in economic contexts using economic experiments and field data from a natural field experiment. Using these methods I am able to test if behavior conforms to traditional...
Book's are information goods, and this paper considers the possibility to measure the information available from the pages of a book. Book demand is also explored; I find evidence that price and book sales are positively related for two...
This paper examines whether receptive tourism has an impact on subjective poverty in host communities in Peru. Controlling for household characteristics, as well as district, province, and region characteristics, it is found---by means...
Randomized quasi-Monte Carlo methods have been shown to offer estimates with smaller variances compared with estimates obtained with Monte Carlo. This dissertation examines the application of randomized quasi-Monte Carlo methods in the...
An oft-neglected pattern of behavior in the industrial organization literature occurs when firms time the release of their products so that they are not released on the same date. Because of the potentially collusive nature of this...
This dissertation is a collection of three essays that employ experiments to study how economically relevant outcomes and institutions are influenced by behavioral heterogeneity in decision making. The first essay is a study of the...
Problems of income distribution are a major concern of current socio-economic research and constitute the basis for numerous governmental policies. But before one can understand any problems of income distribution one must examine the...
The relationship between political parties and the economy in the United States is investigated from 1953 and 2012. Regression models are used to calculate the effect political parties have on the percent change in real gross domestic...
There are many characteristics of a good life including a sense of meaning and happiness. A historical introduction presented here illustrates this dual conceptualization as existing since ancient times. Recent work by Baumeister, Vohs, ...
This dissertation examines causes of poor financial performance in rural hospitals, including the determinants of patient choice of hospital and the hospital's choice of service configuration. When rural residents choose non-local...
The capture theory of regulation concludes that regulatory agencies tend to be captured by the firms they are regulating, so that regulations benefit those regulated firms. This paper examines the cumulative effects of federal...
The present research addresses the dynamic transaction between extrinsic (occupational prestige, income) and intrinsic (job satisfaction) career success and the Five-Factor Model of personality. Participants (N = 731) completed a...
Prior research using the ex ante real interest rate has led to mixed evidence about the validity of the Fisher relationship and for the Real Interest Parity hypothesis. In particular, authors have disagreed over whether the ex ante real...
This dissertation is an economic analysis of the private security industry in the United States. In particular, private security's effect on crime, the rise of varied state level private security regulatory institutions, and the...
In practice, economist do not observe the discount function, spot or forward curves so we must extract them from a few observed points along the yield curve. To do this I introduce a new method called the Global Piecewise Quartic...
The Retained Earnings Maximizing Non-Profit Enterprise (REM) is a new business model that approximates a hyper socially responsible firm by selling goods that people would ordinarily buy and then donates the retained earnings to charity....
This paper explores the ritualized gift-giving that occurs at funerals in the Volta Basin. Other studies of hierarchical gift exchange in the region have failed to notice the salience of funeral gifting, which is actually the most...
The successful emergence of the Low Cost Carriers (LCCs) represents one of the most important structural developments in the U.S. airline industry after it was deregulated in 1978. With a more efficient cost structure and a different...
Ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) have emerged as a preferred setting, in lieu of traditional hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs), for many types of surgical care. Critics claim that the profit incentive, cream skimming and conflict...
Randomized quasi-Monte Carlo (RQMC) methods were first developed in mid 1990’s as a hybrid of Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods. They were designed to have the superior error reduction properties of low-discrepancy...
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