The literature on economic growth and development has focused considerable attention on questions of risk management and the possibility of multiple equilibria associated with poverty traps. We use herd history data collected among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia to study stochastic wealth...

This dissertation is an empirical investigation on the microeconomics of growth, focusing on the role of shocks and on the formation of credit networks. It uses original data, collected in Southern Ethiopia, an environment where nonlinear wealth dynamics that are at the root of persistent...

The thesis addresses the question of how poverty can be overcome by education. The starting point is the following type of poverty trap: poverty forces parents to send their children to work to secure the survival of the household. Due to child labor, children do not attend school and do not...

Firm panel data sets over the period 1993 to 2002 are used to estimate translog production functions with labour, capital and material inputs for 9 Spanish food industries. To tackle the endogeneity of the regressors, the generalized method of moments estimations is employed. The specification...

There has been considerable recent interest in the valuation of ecosystem services. We focus here on the value of such services in the production of market goods. Although the conceptual basis for conducting such exercises is straightforward, the data with which to implement them empirically is...

The objective of this work was to estimate and to analyze the elasticity ofsubstitution between Brazil, the USA and Argentina in the soybeans exports in theselected importers markets. This fact is important, considering that, it increases theintegration of the world economies, placing in...

This thesis explores whether scanner data can be used to inform Consumer Price Index (CPI) construction, with particular reference to the issues of substitution bias and choice of aggregation dimensions. The potential costs and benefits of using scanner data are reviewed. Existing estimates of...

The production structure of the lumber manufacturing sector in western Washington was investigated using a translog cost function with capital, labor, and sawlog inputs. Analyses were performed with a panel data set of biennial observations from 1972 to 2002 on a cross section of sixteen western...

We estimate the elasticity of substitution using two different production functions. The usual Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) production function and a Box-Cox production function for Japan (1890-1991), UK (1870-1991), and US (1890-1992; 1929-2000). The main results are that we find the...

This dissertation brings health policy forward to the macroeconomic arena and explores how policy reforms impact the U.S. economy and well-being of the people in the long run. This research builds a stochastic overlapping generations (OLG) model and applies it in a dynamic general equilibrium...