Economics is the study of choices, and how they are made compatible. The issue of global warming can be viewed in the context of a set of choices that lead to climate change. In a free society choices are made compatible via the price system. If prices do not reflect the true cost of carbon,...

Despite the voluminous literature on North-South macroeconomic interactions and the key role of terms of trade variations in growth transmission from one region to another, a significant research gap persists for two reasons. First, there has been very little empirical work on testing of the...

The equal split is a widely observed outcome in experimental studies of two-person bargaining. We report on an experiment that controls for the preferences of subjects and therefore sheds light on the social orientation of those proposers who offer the equal split. The data suggest that when the...

Contingent valuation (CV) is a surveying technique used to estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) by individuals for non-market goods (goods for which no market of exchange exists). Many CV studies have shown the existence of hypothetical bias which occurs when individuals are asked a...

A primary focus of empirical earnings research is whether accounting earnings contain meaningful and timely information that can be used by market participants to value securities. Empirically, accounting earnings numbers are considered to be reliable representations of economic performance if...

The emergence of the international debt crisis in the 1980s is typically explained through exogenous shocks to the global economic system, first generating excess liquidity and then creating conditions which render previously attractive lending operations unprofitable. Thus, the international...

As progress has been made on tariff reduction by recent trade agreements, barriers to freer international trade arising from nontariff sources have become more prominent. Regulation of product quality and in particular food safety can be a major source of such barriers. Lowering them requires...

This dissertation studies the volume, nature, direction and determinants of capital flight and FDI in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in relation to certain structural and institutional characteristics. The results show that the resource-based economies of region have experienced...

This dissertation investigates whether or not there is a clear break between neoclassical economics (up to the 1970s) and the contemporary mainstream economic approaches. The term "contemporary mainstream economic approaches" refers to a seemingly heterogeneous set of approaches that include,...

The three essays in this dissertation address issues pertinent to hypothetical bias in the contingent valuation (CV) mechanism. Empirical evidence gathered through several experiments conducted at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is used to provide a better understanding of the cause...