With new tests being developed and marketed, the comparison of the diagnostic accuracy of two continuous-scale diagnostic tests are of great importance. Comparing the partial areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves (pAUC) is an effective method to evaluate the accuracy of two...

Anticipating the impact of changes in economic incentives on dietary quality and nutritional health requires knowledge of how physical quantities of food consumed respond to price and income variations. A problem arises, however, because physical quantities are: 1- not consistent aggregates in...

This paper uses suburb-level quarterly data to model residential water demand in Brisbane,Australia, from 1998 to 2003. In this system, residential consumption is charged usinga fixed annual service fee with no water entitlement followed by a fixed volumetriccharge per kilolitre. Water demand is...

This paper investigates the competition between domestic catfish filletsand imported tilapia fillets in the US market. The market segmentationbetween fresh and frozen fillets of both species is also considered. The substitutabilitybetween catfish and tilapia is of interest because market reports...

The Texas Pecan Board was established in 1998 to administer the Texas Pecan Checkoff Program and is financed through a one-half cent per pound assessment on grower pecan sales. The Board spends the assessment collections on a variety of advertising campaigns in an attempt to expand demand for...

In 1978, Roger Koenker and Gilbert Bassett, Jr. introduced a new econometric estimation method and entitled it quantile regression. Since then, many subsequent authors have elaborated and extended the underlying theoretical framework. Other contributions have successfully applied the procedure...

The objective of the study is to estimate demand for wine in Australia, based on both the systems approach and the single equation approach. Both approaches consider demand for three categories of alcoholic drinks (beer, wine and spirits) in a seemingly unrelated regression framework to take...

The study seeks to re-investigate the role of price, income and health awareness in the evolution of South African cigarette demand over the period 1996 to 2006. At first glance, rising cigarette prices appear to have played an important role in reducing cigarette consumption over the sample...

Neoclassical theory of consumer behavior posits a static framework for utility maximization from micro perspectives. The consumer is assumed to behave as if he maximizes a utility function subject to a set of non-stochastic restrictions like exogenous prices and predetermined income. Gary Becker...

This dissertation includes three separate papers that share an emphasis on the significance of socio-political and historical factors on the quality of demographic data in China and Vietnam. The first two papers investigate the interaction between data collection and family planning policy...