The dissertation consists of four chapters. The first chapter presents a model that incorporates product market competition into the standard neoclassical framework. The model explains why value-maximizing firms conduct mergers that appear to lower shareholder value. In a Cournot setting, the...

My dissertation aims at understanding the economic force behind the success of long-run consumption-based asset pricing models, it consists of three chapters. It also provides us a new approach to test consumption-based asset pricing models. Chapter one provides a brief summary of the...

In this paper, we present a general guideline to find a better distance measure for similarity estimation based on statistical analysis of distribution models and distance functions. A new set of distance measures are derived from the harmonic distance, the geometric distance, and their...