The proposed 2008 TARP auction was intended to facilitate rapid purchases by the U.S. department of Treasury of a wide array of mortgage-backed securities in order to remove these “toxic assets” from the portfolios of financially stressed banks. The Treasury had selected a Reference Price...

The first chapter of my thesis develops and estimates a dynamic structural partial equilibrium model of schooling and work decisions.  The estimated model explicitly accounts for the simultaneous choice of enrolling in school and working.  It also allows for endogenous leisure choices,...

This thesis is organized in three chapters. In the first two chapters, an econometric model selection procedure and a method to improve some existing estimators are proposed. In the third chapter, a theoretical microeconomic analysis of herd behavior is performed under a fairly new set of...

This dissertation consists of three essays that study the industrial organization of Chinas manufacturing sector from an empirical perspective. It focuses on applying industrial organization theory and econometrics to the analysis of the effects of market forces and globalization forces on the...

This dissertation contains three essays that combine applied models, institutional analysis and empirical work in order to understand developments in the Russian and Caspian energy sector following the breakup of the former Soviet Union. In the first essay entitled Partial Privatization:...

The first essay uses a model of profit-maximizing hospitals to examine hospital responses to global budgeting in the forms of dumping and cost shifting. The main findings include: (1) Hospitals dump insured patients when the covered services are priced under costs. Whetherthe budget target is...