The increasing trends of integrated and concentrated broiler production results in a serious threat to environment through excessive litter production and lack of its proper disposal. Production concentration in limited area is a major source of surface as well as ground water pollution....

In this work, we begin with an investigation into the temporal correlation in default risk. We first establish a link between the dynamics of house price changes and the dynamics of default rates in the Gaussian copula framework by specifying a time series model for a common risk factor. We show...

This dissertation focuses on the mortgage default behavior and the valuation of distressed properties. Three essays are included.The first essay uses New Orleans foreclosure data, where each property has three appraisals, to investigate the factors affecting appraisal bias and accuracy, and to...

The two basic models used for constructing price indexes for durable assets (such us real estate assets) have been the hedonic and repeated sales models. Case and Quigley (1991)-CQ proposed a generalized least squares (GLS) procedure to estimate a combined (single and repeated sales information)...

This dissertation investigates the role of fiscal policy on economic activity by analyzing the response of major macroeconomic variables to innovations to the average marginal income tax rate (AMTR) measures in the U.K. by employing vector autoregressive (VAR) models. We identify these...

This dissertation relates the information contained in past trading volume to investor sentiment, and investigates its ability in predicting stock returns. Investor sentiment here refers to the enthusiasm of irrational investors on an asset, relative to that of rational investors. Motivated by...

This project examines the relationship between patterns of crime and the development of the oil and gas extraction industry in the coastal regions of Louisiana. The suggestion of a link between these phenomena has often been made, but little systematic research has been conducted to determine if...

This dissertation consists of essays relating to the three important real estate research topics: spatial statistics, mortgages, and real estate investment trusts (REITs). In the first essay, Spatial Distribution of Retail Sales, we apply retail gravity models to examine the spatial distribution...

The Hausman test is used in applied economic work as a test of misspecification. It is most commonly thought of (wrongly some would say) as a test of whether one or more explanatory variables in a regression model is endogenous. There are several versions of the test available with modern...

The executive compensation literature argues that executives generally value stock options at less than market value because of suboptimal ownership and risk aversion. Implicit in this finding is the assumption that executives are, like shareholders, price takers. That is, they have no ability...