Government policies increasingly promote ethanol and other biofuels for security, air quality, and climate benefits. One chapter of this dissertation develops a model that links the distribution of preferences for ethanol to aggregate price responses and then estimates the model using data from...

The main problem of underdeveloped countries consists in an inflexible productive structure which makes it difficult to adopt to changes in world markets. There are three important instruments to improve their flexibility. The first instrument are the investments - not investments in general...

The hypothesis that marriage increases men's earnings has contributed to legislative support for the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI). However, previous studies of this phenomenon have not controlled for many relevant characteristics that select men into marriage, nor have they focused on...

Luce's Biased Choice Model has never had a serious competitor as a model of identification data. Even when it has provided a poor model of such data, other models have done even less well. Two alternative models are presented and the three are fit to a published data set. One alternative model...

Recent research has provided strong evidence that, in the United States in particular and in high- or middle-income economies in general, mortality tends to evolve better in recessions than in expansions. It has been suggested that Sweden may be an exception to this pattern. The present...

We present in this paper a computational model of world production, trade, and employment that is disaggregated by country and sector and report on the application of the model to the changes in tariffs and quantifiable nontariff barriers negotiated in the Tokyo Round that was concluded in 1979....

Companies in a broad range of industries and economies rely heavily on external sources to finance their operations. But, external financing could be expensive and/or difficult to obtain due to imperfections in real capital markets. I focus on cash-constrained manufacturers that rely on external...

This dissertation focuses on under-explored impacts of taxation, including how it influences the behavior of individuals, the interaction between firms and workers, and the economy as a whole. In the three essays, I test theoretical predictions through empirical analyses, from both micro and a...