Outsourcing can be defi ned as the delivery of public services by the private sector. The sign of the effect of outsourcing on public spending is ambiguous ex-ante. While outsourcing may reduce public spending through higher competition in the private sector, it may also increase public spending...

Summary of Banco de España Working Paper no. 1939

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...

My dissertation research is composed of two parts: a theoretical part on semiparametric efficient estimation and an applied part in energy economics under different dynamic settings. The essays are related in terms of their applications as well as the way in which models are constructed and...