Small enterprises, whether start-ups or spin-offs from former state owned enterprises, are a growth engine in post-socialist economies. This paper argues that privatization can either enhance or deter small enterprise formation because of its impact of the local business environment. Using the...

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...

A number of recent papers using a linear specification have indicated that private property institutions are a fundamental determinant of growth. In my first paper, I use a semi-nonparametric partially linear model to provide evidence against a linear specification and to support nonlinearities...

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...

This dissertation consists of the three independent chapters in the areas of Public Economics and Microeconomic Theory. The first two chapters use experimental and computational techniques to address two important behavioral issues in Public Economics. In particular, the first chapter (with Lise...

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...

Tunneling behavior, which is defined as the transfer of assets and profits out of a firm for the benefit of the firms controlling shareholders, has become the focus of increasing attention in the theoretical and empirical literature. There are some corporate governance procedures, however, that...

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...

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:...