This thesis is composed of four chapters.The first chapter is titled "The Impact of Cost Synergies on Bidding in the Georgia School Milk Market," co-authored with Robert C. Marshall, Matthew E. Raiff, and Jean-Francois Richard. Each summer milk processors around the country participate in sealed...

The first chapter, Trasferability of Migration Licenses and the Distribution of Potential Rents,compares the effects of migration restrictions using licenses which are freelytraded to those that occur when licenses are allocated tofirms who are not permitted to trade them. Both domestic and...

The first chapter of my thesis (co-authored with David N. DeJong, Jean-Francois Richard and Roman Liesenfeld) develops a numerical procedure that facilitates efficient likelihood evaluation and filtering in applications involving non-linear and non-Gaussian state-space models. These tasks...

This dissertation consists of three empirical chapters. The first chapter examines the extent to which real-world agents are rational in making quantitative expectations, an issue over which there is much debate. In this chapter dynamic models for new plant-level survey data are estimated in...

Limited dependent variable (LDV) panel data models pose substantial challenges in maximum likelihood estimation. The likelihood function in such models typically contains multivariate integrals that are often analytically intractable. To overcome such problem in a panel probit model with...

First chapter of my dissertation uses an EGARCH method and a Stochastic Volatility (SV) method which relies upon Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) framework based on Efficient Importance Sampling (EIS) to model inflation volatility of Turkey. The strength of SV model lies in its success in...

In the economic literature there are divergences on a number ofissues between the results obtained with macro- and micro-basedmodels. Habit formation in consumption is one example of suchdisagreement. Another example is the discrepancy between thetheoretical prediction that all investors should...

Models of dynastic households have been traditionally used to analyze persistence in earnings and wealth across generations, more recently to study patterns of wealth and fertility, transfers to children and education choices. However most of those models have looked at the theoretical outcomes...

In this dissertation, I develop empirical methods, built on the recent advances in industrial organization, to study charitable giving and fundraising in the charity market. In the first essay, we propose a multiple discrete choice model with differentiated charitable products and estimate the...