University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. January 2009. Major: Statistics. Advisor: Douglas M. Hawkins. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 87 pages, appendices: pages 67-87. Bibliographical references: pages 63-66.

In the process of implementing market reforms, many post-socialist countries have struggled to preserve economic and political integration. Using a statistical model of commodity trade, we quantify the evolution of economic integration observed among regions within Russia during 1995-1999, and...

Las iniciativas de fijación de precios del carbono, diseñadas para incrementar los precios relativos de los bienes y servicios intensivos en gases de efecto invernadero, no solo podrían incidir en la inflación del IPC, sino también en su volatilidad. La literatura empírica ha encontrado,...

Este documento propone un modelo estadístico y un marco conceptual para estimar la volatilidad de la inflación suponiendo rational inattention, donde la caída del nivel de atención responde a la llegada de noticias al mercado. Estimamos la tendencia y la volatilidad condicional de la...

In this paper, I develop and estimate a dynamic model of strategicnetwork formation with heterogeneous agents. The main theoretical resultis the existence of a unique stationary equilibrium, which characterizesthe probability of observing a specific network in the data. As aconsequence, the...

Dynamic factor models (DFM) and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models are widely used for empirical research in macroeconomics. The empirical factor literature argues that the co-movement of large panels of macroeconomic and financial data can be captured by relatively few common...

In models with unobserved taste heterogeneity, distributional assumptions can be placed in two ways: (1) by specifying the distribution of coefficients in the utility function and deriving the distribution of willingness to pay (wtp), or (2) by specifying the distribution of wtp and deriving the...

Estimation of liquidity costs in agricultural futures markets is challenging because bid-askspreads are usually not observed. Spread estimators that use transaction data are available,but little agreement exists on their relative accuracy and performance. We evaluate fourconventional and a...

Understanding the determinants of liquidity costs in agricultural futures markets ishampered by a need to use proxies for the bid-ask spread which are often biased, and by a failure to account for a jointly determined micro-market structure. We estimate liquidity costs and its determinants for...

This paper examines the health effects of a fiscal food policy based on a combinationof fat taxes and thin subsidies. The fat tax is based on the saturated fat content of fooditems while the thin subsidy is applied to select fruit and vegetbale items. The policy is designed to be revenue neutral...