This dissertation addresses three questions that arise out of the voluntary and subjective provision of feedback and its subjective interpretation. The first study is an experimental investigation of a mechanism designed to give buyers incentives for feedback provision. It starts from the...

This paper reviews recent work on macroeconomic management with varying organization of wage/price bargaining and degrees of credible monetary conservatism. The emerging literature synthesizes and extends theory and empirics on central bank independence (CBI) and coordinated wage/price...

The essays of this dissertation examine the determinants of cross-border flows, in the form of immigrants and foreign aid, as well as the impact of those flows on receiving markets. The first essay finds that the composition of immigrant inflows into local markets is a significant determinant of...

The history of development shows convincingly that no country has substantially reduced poverty without massively increasing the use of electricity. The development of micro-enterprises in rural areas of Uganda is linked with increased access and useof electricity services. In this study, I...

Mainstream economists were puzzled by the global depression (the so-called Great Recession) that started late in 2007. In the Unites States, after an almost unanimous consensus of the economic profession and the Republican and Democratic politicians in their support of the bailouts of banks and...

We show that the effects of overfitting and underfitting a vector autoregressive (VAR) model are strongly asymmetric for VAR summary statistics involving higher-order dynamics (such as impulse response functions, variance decompositions, or long-run forecasts) . Underfit models often...

This dissertation develops and tests a theory of how technology entrepreneurs shape their business opportunity and the organizing practices that facilitate that process. I suggest that entrepreneurial opportunities are not predetermined phenomena discovered by vigilant individuals but rather are...

Network analysis has become a popular method for identifying the communication structure in a system where positional and relational aspects are important. In this paper, a maximum likelihood based methodology is presented that allows for the analysis of binary sociometric data. This methodology...

Government policies increasingly promote ethanol and other biofuels for security, air quality, and climate benefits. One chapter of this dissertation develops a model that links the distribution of preferences for ethanol to aggregate price responses and then estimates the model using data from...

Luce's Biased Choice Model has never had a serious competitor as a model of identification data. Even when it has provided a poor model of such data, other models have done even less well. Two alternative models are presented and the three are fit to a published data set. One alternative model...