This dissertation addresses three topics on the implications of firm behaviors in creating and adopting knowledge of production, choosing international location for production and market access, and using informative advertising in a market competition with multidimensional product characteristics. The first study investigates the empirical evidence of local knowledge spillovers in...
In this work, I address foundational concerns at the interface of institutions, governance structure, transaction costs, and efficiency in public-private contracting. Following transaction cost economic perspective, I build and justify the theoretical models explaining that institutions may affect the economic performance of public-private contracting through the effect of transaction costs....
This dissertation addresses three topics on applied microeconomics. First, we investigate issues of market power and tax incidence in the U.S. brewing industry. Since alcohol consumption can be addictive, we derive a structural econometric model of addiction from a dynamic oligopoly game. This model identifies the degree of market power...
Environmental sustainability and economic growth is at the forefront of international policy discussions. There is no question that climate change is happening, but also that countries all around the world aspire to continued economic growth. When it comes to climate change, scientists agree that increased carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in...
This dissertation explores the intricacies associated with the use of distance functions in empirical studies. It focuses on the measurement of advertising efficiency and investigates the properties of the models that seek to approximate the abatement costs of socially undesirable outputs. The first manuscript is devoted to the development of...
In this work I integrate some of my recent research developments in the theory and practice of Productivity and Efficiency Analysis of Economic Systems. In particular, I present some new theoretical relationships between various measures of efficiency and productivity, propose new solutions to some aggregation problems in efficiency analysis and...
This study has two main objectives. First, we propose an alternative way for treating deposits in modeling a banking firm, which account for both their input and output features. Second, we contribute to modeling failures in the banking sector by distinguishing three groups of factors affecting failures: bank level, industry...
This dissertation addresses issues of strategic behavior of firms in lobbying, brand and generic advertising, and advertising-price relationships in imperfectly competitive markets.
In the first study, we investigate conditions under which lobbying can improve social welfare and show that this type of lobbying will be undersupplied from society’s perspective. We...
The following three essays explore the use of the directional output distance function (Chambers et al., 1996), an economic model originally developed to measure efficiency and productivity for multi-input and multi-output production processes, to assess performance for multi-attributed environmental processes.
The first essay illustrates the use of the directional output...
Long-run food price changes respond to long-run changes in food demand, quasi-fixed and variable production factors, and agricultural productivity. Recent global food-price volatility puts a renewed spotlight on the trends and sources of any agricultural productivity growth. Because food prices’ most critical effects are on human hunger, it is especially...