We consider a make-to-stock production/inventory system consisting of a single deteriorating machine which produces a single item. We formulate the integrated decisions of maintenance and production using a Markov Decision Process. The optimal dynamic policy is shown to have a rather complex...

A "sales tax holiday" is a period of time, usually lasting a few days, during which state and sometimes local sales taxes are not levied on a set of goods, typically clothing, footwear, and school supplies. Prior to enacting, eliminating, or altering a tax holiday, policy-makers should...

There has been recent interest in the implications of expectations about changesin future fundamentals for the business cycle. This dissertation is broadly concernedwith the identifcation and study of so-called "news shocks" about future productivity.The effects of news shocks shed light on...

This dissertation examines how a fundamental group decision-making bias referred to as group polarization may influence boards’ major strategic decisions (i.e. acquisition premiums, executive compensation, and diversification) and the diffusion of practices through interlock networks. I begin...

This dissertation brings health policy forward to the macroeconomic arena and explores how policy reforms impact the U.S. economy and well-being of the people in the long run. This research builds a stochastic overlapping generations (OLG) model and applies it in a dynamic general equilibrium...

This dissertation consists of three essays studying various issues in applied microeconomic theory.The first essay proposes a model of two-party elections in which voters' preferences over candidates is affected by their perception on candidates' sincerity. In equilibrium, the following...

This dissertation is comprised of three essays that examine various aspects of macroeconomics linked to labor economics. The first essay develops an understanding of how, in addition to search frictions, labor heterogeneity can influence aggregate labor-market fluctuations, and, in particular,...

Managing commodity price uncertainty is an integral part of many firms' business process. Firms adopt a variety of operational strategies to manage this uncertainty, subject to operational constraints such as finite procurement and processing capacities. The availability of financial derivative...

In this dissertation, I study three resource allocation problems. In the first study, I present joint work with Yan Chen, Thomas Finholt, and Kan Takeuchi on a laboratory study evaluating three different package auction mechanisms for allocating access to large scientific equipments. I found...