This thesis consists of three essays.In the first essay, we examine the option compensation problem of how to optimally set the option exercise price when options have conflicting roles in both inducing management effort and encouraging management cheating. In the risk-neutral setting with both...

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...

Probabilistic forecasts play a significant role in a wide variety of economics activities. However, established econometric modeling approaches for probabilistic forecasts may yield unsatisfactory forecasting performance due to model misspecification. In my dissertation, I try to minimize such a...

The analysis of auctions is an active area of research for both theoretical and empirical economists. Concentrating on a particular auction format, namely the First--Price Sealed--Bid auction, this dissertation contributes to the analysis of auction both from a methodological viewpoint and from...

CHAPTER 1: The Great Russian Devaluation and Labor DemandDoes a greater degree of integration into world markets lead to a more elastic demand for labor? Often referred to as the Rodrik hypothesis, this question, despite being important from both theoretical and applied policy standpoints, is...

This dissertation concerns the relationship between education and health. While this is not a new topic, the focus of this research is to explicitly model the education and health decision process and estimate such a model. Compared to current literature which focuses on statistical modeling as...

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...

The subject of the present thesis is to apply microeconometrictechniques to labor economics and criminal behavior. There are twoindependent chapters. The aim of chapter one is to build andestimate an econometric model of recidivism for the United Statesusing data set of released prisoners from...

Essay 1: Integrated Conditional MomentTest for Parametric Conditional Distributions (with Herman J. Bierens)This paper extends the Integrated Conditional Moment (ICM) test for the functional form of nonlinear regression models to tests for parametric conditional distributions. This test is...

It is unrealistic to conceive that economic variables or relationships follow a statistical law in which moments or parameters are kept constant over time. The focus of this dissertation is on model specification and testing of time series that are subject to gradual or sudden structural changes...