Recent social spending inflation in China has led to its growth rate far exceeding that of income and other consumption. In this paper, we estimate private returns to social spending, such as higher social status and larger social network that serve as certain functions. In almost all...

This paper studied the giving patterns of Filipino evangelicals and what the implications of these giving patterns are in developing fund raising strategies of evangelical non-government organization (NGOs) in the Philippines. The main methodology used by the study was a random survey of...

The literature of private provision of public goods suggests thatincentive to contribute is inversely related to group size. This paperempirically tests this relationship using field data from ChineseWikipedia, an online encyclopedia. We exploit an exogenous reduction ingroup size as a result of...

Peer-to-peer networks have emerged as a popular alternative to traditional client-server architectures for the distribution of information goods. Recent academic studies have observed high levels of free-riding in various peer-to-peer networks, leading some to predict the imminent collapse of...

As networks improve and new services emerge, questions arise that affect service deployments and network choices. The Internet is arguably a successful example of a network shared by many services. However, combining heterogeneous services on the same network need not always be the right answer,...

This dissertation contains three essays that can be read independently. The first chapter examines how a debt crisis can occur and persist as a result of unanticipated, transitory, real interest rate and commodity price shocks. Using an optimal stopping framework, the debtor country's optimal...

This study is an empirical analysis of household expenditure behavior using the Linear and Quadratic Expenditure Systems. The expenditure systems are estimated using data collected in 1972 by the Departmento Administrativo Nacional de Estadisticas (DANE) of Bogota, Colombia. The Linear...