The measurement of productivity fluctuations has been the focus of decades-long interest. In addition to broad structural forces driving productivity changes, there is more recent interest in measuring and identifying the heterogeneous forces driving these changes. A major force is...

The efficiency measurement literature has been almost exclusively based on a static view of the firm. In this static context the optimality of decisions is measured against the best practice frontier in a period-by-period basis and without any connection along time. This dissertation departs...

Knowledge plays an important role in firm decision making as it involves the selection of technological systems and understanding and executing technologies that are implemented. Knowledge management therefore is a learning behavior which is undertaken to acquire additional knowledge and improve...

This paper develops and estimates a structural model of production and inventory behavior for manufacturing plants in two Colombian industries, metal products and plastic product, from 1977 to 1991. Plant level decisions on production, inventories, sales, entry, and exit are developed using an...

The gradual development of establishment and firm-level micro data has lead to a large body of empirical work in industrial organization. This dissertation extends this work by incorporating firm and market heterogeneity into the empirical analysis. Using the Census of Manufactures, we construct...

Commodity futures can supply fair investment return and unique diversification benefits to a portfolio manager. The relative performance between commodity futures and traditional financial assets is varied with business and market conditions. In general, commodity futures are negatively...

Motivated by several contemporary problems existing in U.S. agriculture, this thesis investigates three particular issues concerning different aspects of agricultural contracting between growers and processors. Specifically, the first essay investigates the relationship between the use of...

The static production efficiency model and the dynamic duality model of intertemporal decision making using a parametric approach have been continuously developed but in separate directions. The parametric approach takes statistical noise into account, which can provide accurate measures in a...