Over the past two decades, China has been the worlds fastest-growing economy. My dissertation focuses on several important issues in Chinas recent development and reform:(1) Financial development and economic growth. It is widely recognized that financial sector reform is crucial to Chinas...

This study provides a detailed quantitative analysis of a transition to inflation targeting with a focus on the role of expectations. I investigate the impact of the Turkish central bank's inflation reduction programs on inflation in Turkey from 1996 to 2005. Over this period there was a...

Temporary price reductions or sales account for a small fraction of price quotes and a large fraction of items sold. Nevertheless, several recent macroeconomic studies have concluded that sales are not an important source of price flexibility. Using a large set of scanner data covering 31...

The dissertation studies the effect of trade liberalization in one sector on factor prices, employment, and average productivity of firms in the other sector (spillover effect) in a two-country, specific-factors model of international trade where the industry structure of the sector affected by...

This study contributes to the scarce empirical literature on dollarization by investigating the short and long-run effects of dollarization on the dynamics of prices at the macro and the micro level. This study also presents a survey of the available literature.This study examines the short-run...

My dissertation empirically addresses some unanswered questions that have motivated much debate among banking practitioners, government lawmakers and economists by investigating two natural experiments provided by regulatory reforms.The first study examines the impact of the Federal Deposit...

Chapter I investigates how the fertility, marriage and labor supply decisions of American women changed between 1870 and 1930. The proposed explanation for the historical trends in marriage and labor market behavior is based on the premise that gradual improvements in technology drew single...

My dissertation studies the dynamics of primary commodity prices empirically and theoretically. In Chapter II, I provide empirical evidence on the time series behavior of commodity price movements. Employing monthly prices for 36 individual commodities, I find that the commodity price to CPI...