This dissertation studies the roles that durable goods play in open economy macroeconomics. The three essays examine if and how durable goods improve the ability to understand business cycle features.The first essay shows how investment behavior and international risk sharing, two business cycle...

[This item is a preserved copy. To view the original, visit http://econtheory.org/] This paper studies the price-setting problem of a monopoly that in each time period has the option of failing to deliver its good after receiving payment. The monopoly may be induced to deliver the good if...

This dissertation comprises three individual chapters. Chapter Two examines how free riding across neighbors influenced the diffusion of color television sets in rural China. Chapter Three tests for asymmetric information between a firm’s management and other investors concerning its patent...

The dissertation studies a model of an economy which produces and exportsdurable goods. It analyzes the optimal monetary policy for such a country.Generally, monetary policy has a bigger economic effect on durable goods relative tonon-durable goods because durable goods can be stored and...

"The common-property literature has often focused on the question of efficiency. Here we consider distributional issues instead. How should the benefits of the commons (say, a fishery) be distributed? We approach the question from the viewpoint of ownership rather than income redistribution. "A...

"Institutional approaches to social dilemmas have so far focused on how to create incentive structures that channel individuals' behavior into socially desirable outcomes assuming that everyone is selfish. However, the presumption of universal selfishness is not only empirically invalid but may...

"In this study, individual level behavior is investigated in the context of computer assisted voluntary contribution mechanism public good (VCM) provision experiments and common pool resource (CPR) appropriation experiments. Previous studies of these environments have concentrated on aggregate...