This dissertation consists of three essays in process improvement and assortment planning. In the first essay, we study firm's strategies on balancing two conflicting manufacturing process improvement activities: learning and process change. Learning deepens the firm's knowledge of the...

ABSTRACTCHAPTER 1: A Structural Empirical Model of R&D Investment, Firm Heterogeneity, and Industry EvolutionThis paper develops and estimates a structural model of R&D investment and productivity evolution of manufacturing plants in the Korean electric motor industry from 1991 to 1996....

In this dissertation we study several key issues faced by firms while introducing new products to market. The first essay looks at product rollovers: introduction of a new product generation while phasing out the old one. We study the strategic decision of dual vs. single roll jointly with...

This thesis empirically investigates the effects of agency problemson endogenous managerial effort, firm performance, corporatestructure and industry-wide productivity.In the second chapter, I develop an industrial evolution model withendogenous managerial effort and endogenous organizational...

Endogeneity and misspecification of models are two main concerns in structural estimation, which usually involves the optimal choices of economic agents with unobservable characteristics. In estimating production functions, input variables are endogenous because input decisions depend on...

This dissertation consists of the three essays on R&D project choice in the presence of compatibility externality.In the first essaywe consider a R&D contest between two firms who can choose to concentrate their research in one of two avenues or approaches. In the R&D contest, firms compete in...

CHAPTER 1 (with Joris Pinkse, Margaret Slade, and John Van Reenen): Spillovers in Space: Does Geography Matter?We simultaneously assess the contributions to productivity of three sources of research and development spillovers: geographic, technology and product--market proximity. To do this, we...

This thesis consists of two chapters. In the first chapter, we provide an explanation for the common observation in the market for upgrades, which is that firms tend to offer small upgrades very frequently instead of significant ones less frequently. We explain this problem using the...

The synthetic lease is a hybrid financing structure that allows a company to have many of the benefits of asset ownership, including capital lease treatment for tax purposes, while treating lease payments as operating expenses on the firms income statement. Proponents of these transactions argue...

The main objective of this research is to discuss and extend the existing literature that is concerned with the estimation of demand and supply parameters to determine unobserved prices, quantities, quality and marginal costs at the firm-level using data sets that reports only revenue and cost...