This paper studies acquisitions of nursing home facilities by chains. We first test alternative ‘cream-skimming’ and ‘turn-around’ arguments concerning nursing home acquisitions. We then consider post-acquisition changes in nursing home health performance, differentiating effects of the...

My dissertation is about joint optimization of firms' operations and marketing decisions with explicit modelling of customer behavior. It includes three essays:The first essay, ``Advance Selling -- The Effect of Capacity andConsumer Valuation Interdependence,'' considers a seller who canoffer a...

Thus most early American manufacturing firms existed as a partnership (formal or informal) between technically knowledgeable factory owners or managers on the one hand, and mercantile capitalists on the other. Sometimes (as in the rail and textile mills) these alliances developed when merchants,...

The ability of households to insure consumption from adverse shocks is an important aspect of vulnerability to poverty. How is consumption insurance achieved in a low-income setting where formal credit and insurance markets have been observed to be imperfect or missing? Using 2003 data from the...

This dissertation shows how the transformation of social ownership to private ownership affected the behavior of firms and entrepreneurship in selected former Yugoslav countries. The goal was to determine whether firms’ objective remains the maximization of income per worker and, on the other...

Technological developments have been reshaping existing markets and giving rise to new ones. In my dissertation, I address several questions that emerged as a result of these changes. In the first two chapters, I study strategies in two different markets: a simultaneous ascending auction (SAA)...

This dissertation empirically investigates macroeconomic fluctuations.In the first chapter, I study nontechnology shocks. It is popular to identify technology shocks as shocks permanently affecting labor productivity in SVAR. However it potentially misidentifies nontechnology shocks permanently...

In the first section, a firm with two servers must decide how to dynamically route arriving customers and allocate servers to two separate queues. The servers may work together or separately, and we provide insights into how the firm should optimally route customers and assign servers to queues....

This dissertation focuses on issues related to economic globalization and its implications for the domestic economy. The first two chapters pertain to international financial integration, while the last chapter studies the impact of interprovincial migration in China as a result of...

This dissertation addresses three questions that arise out of the voluntary and subjective provision of feedback and its subjective interpretation. The first study is an experimental investigation of a mechanism designed to give buyers incentives for feedback provision. It starts from the...