The increasing trends of integrated and concentrated broiler production results in a serious threat to environment through excessive litter production and lack of its proper disposal. Production concentration in limited area is a major source of surface as well as ground water pollution....

In this work, we begin with an investigation into the temporal correlation in default risk. We first establish a link between the dynamics of house price changes and the dynamics of default rates in the Gaussian copula framework by specifying a time series model for a common risk factor. We show...

This dissertation focuses on the mortgage default behavior and the valuation of distressed properties. Three essays are included.The first essay uses New Orleans foreclosure data, where each property has three appraisals, to investigate the factors affecting appraisal bias and accuracy, and to...

The two basic models used for constructing price indexes for durable assets (such us real estate assets) have been the hedonic and repeated sales models. Case and Quigley (1991)-CQ proposed a generalized least squares (GLS) procedure to estimate a combined (single and repeated sales information)...