Without change, stagnation is inevitable. Never has this truth been more obvious than during the current epoch of industrial decline in North America. This research provides two economic narratives that exemplify the struggles of industrial communities as they strive to regenerate. The research...

When a farmer delivers his cotton to the Société des Fibres Textiles (SOFITEX), a quasi-monopsony in Burkina Faso, a cut of two kilograms, is taken off of the final buying price, accounting for “transportation losses”. Often the farmers spend the night filling the containers of the SOFITEX...

As use of the Internet becomes pervasive, user interface design of web sites becomes increasingly important. Consumers must be able to easily and quickly perform the functions they desire. Travel industry applications have a large market potential on the Internet. Because of the geographical...

Virginiaâs temperate climate is suitable for several mosquito species capable of transmitting pathogens to humans. In southwest Virginia, La Crosse encephalitis and West Nile fever are most prominent. The objective of this research, which uses the Health Belief Model (HBM) as a theoretical...

Input users and producers seek to increase their profitability by locating near each other. This self-reinforcing relationship between input producers and users can be views as a basic agglomeration force to enable the modeling of agglomeration economies based on a standard monopolistic...

Traditional theory of international trade has been developed on the assumption of homogeneous country in which identical consumers and production factors are all uniformly distributed. In the real world, however, most countries are composed of heterogeneous regions, and in accordance the above...

This dissertation focuses on two topics that are important to regional economists. The first is the development of a hybrid method for input-output table compilation which distinguishes between economic relationships that need to be surveyed and those that can be obtained by other means. The...

This thesis groups three papers examining the role of multi-location firms in the geographic diffusion of knowledge. The first chapter examines whether a firm's headquarters can tap into the knowledge pool in a remote location through FDI. Using U.S. patent data, I show that an R&D headquarters...