As progress has been made on tariff reduction by recent trade agreements, barriers to freer international trade arising from nontariff sources have become more prominent. Regulation of product quality and in particular food safety can be a major source of such barriers. Lowering them requires...

The three essays in this dissertation address issues pertinent to hypothetical bias in the contingent valuation (CV) mechanism. Empirical evidence gathered through several experiments conducted at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is used to provide a better understanding of the cause...

This dissertation explores in one essay the modeling of quality management systems and in two essays the estimation of market power exertion. The first essay models the impact of food quality management systems on competitiveness and markets considering specifically credence attributes. The...

This study is intended to address the question of structural change in meat demand. Inverse demand systems are modified to accommodate a variant of the Smooth Transition Autoregressive (STAR) models, the Smooth Transition Regression (STR) models. Structural change has been a contentious topic in...

The analysis of consumer demands is limited by data availability. Typically, aggregate consumption and expenditure data are all that is available to draw conclusions based on the theory of individual consumer behavior. Such limitations are problematic as some demand systems possess non-linear...

This dissertation consists of three essays. They examine diverse economic phenomena, but they are bound by a need to treat randomness effectively and practically. Each essay seeks to demonstrate enhanced capacity to effectively and practically treat randomness in specific problems of data...

Fishers are faced with multiple risks, including unpredictability of future catch rates, prices and costs. While the latter are largely beyond the control of fisheries managers, effective fisheries management should reduce uncertainty about future catches. Different management instruments are...

This dissertation studies the role of the collective action sector for rural development. A combination of formal modeling, historical and institutional analysis, and econometric methods is used in this research. I develop microeconomic models to analyze the determinants of peasants' decisions...

This research examines groundwater protection programs as a case study of investments to address long-term environmental health risks. The value individuals place on reducing their risk of exposure to chemical contaminants is estimated using stated preference methodology, accounting for the...

This dissertation explores the interconnection between land ownership inequality and functioning of rural factor markets in Turkey. It investigates the effectiveness and efficiency of land and labor markets in generating and distributing economic opportunities within agriculture and, thereby, in...