The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across...

This paper establishes theoretical and empirical linkages between union wage setting and the structure of the wage distribution. Theoretically, we identify conditions under which a right-to-manage model implies compression of the wage distribution in the union sector relative to the nonunion...

In this paper we experimentally test skewness seeking at the individual level. Several prospects that can be ordered with respect to the third-degree stochastic dominance (3SD) criterion are ranked by the participants of the experiment. We ¯nd that the skewness of a distribution has a...

This dissertation contains three applications of time series in finance and macroeconomics. The first essay compares the cumulative returns for stocks and bonds atinvestment horizons from one to ten years by using a test for spatial dominance.Spatial dominance is a variation of stochastic...

In this paper, we propose a theoretical model to study the effect of income insecurity of parents and offspring on the child’s residential choice. Parents are partially altruistic toward their childrenand will provide financial help to an independent child when her income is low relative to...

American call and put options on the S&P 500 index futures that violate the stochastic dominance bounds of Constantinides and Perrakis (2007) over 1983-2006 are identified as potentially profitable investment opportunities. Call bid prices more frequently violate their upper bound than put bid...

This study addresses inequality of opportunities in access to education for the school-age population and in labor income for the working-age population in Bolivia. Stochastic dominance criteria are used to evaluate the existence of these inequalities. Subsequently, we approximate them using...

This was a study on the Utah cattle industry which compared five different feeding enterprises. These feeding enterprises included feeding cull cows, finishing beef yearling steers, finishing Holstein yearling steers, backgrounding beef steer calves, and backgrounding Holstein steer calves. The...

The field of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) deals with the comparison of healthinterventions based on both costs and effectiveness (ability to improve health). Thisdissertation makes several methodological contributions to this area.Part I develops direct methods for computing mean costs and...

This study develops and implements a theory and method for analyzing whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for risk averse investors. We develop a test procedure for 'stochastic spanning' for two nested polyhedral portfolio...