Understanding how households escape poverty depends on understanding how they accumulate assets over time. Therefore, identifying the degree of linearity in household asset dynamics, and specifically any potential asset poverty thresholds, is of fundamental interest to the design of poverty...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/22/10.

We investigate whether relative contributions of genetic and shared environmental factors are associated with an increased risk in melanoma. Data from the Queensland Familial Melanoma Project comprising 15,907 subjects arising from 1912 families were analyzed to estimate the additive genetic,...

In this paper, we study a general class of semiparametric optimization estimators of a vector-valued parameter. The criterion function depends on two types of in nite-dimensional nuisance parameters: a conditional expectation function that has been estimated nonparametrically using generated...

Bulgaria's transition to a market economy has coincided with a large increase in wage inequality. Given the emphasis on wage leveling in pre-transition Bulgaria, the rise in wage inequality may be due to managers rewarding more productive workers; or it may be the result of rewarding...

This dissertation consists of three essays whose unifying topical theme is the study and application of semiparametric methods for the evaluation of social programs. The first essay evaluates the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ) program using an inverse probability weighting (IPW)...