This thesis contains two essays that use state-of-the-art econometric methods to estimate the implicit prices of various housing and vehicle attributes in hedonic price analysis. The additive nonparametric regression proposed by Hastie and Tibshirani (1990) is applied to capture a series of nonlinearities relating prices to their attributes that cannot...
Least cost formulations for surimi seafood were studied
by linear programming (LP) and nonlinear programming (NLP).
The effects of water and starches on functional properties of
Alaska pollock and Pacific whiting surimi gels were
investigated. Six starches (modified potato starch, potato
starch, modified wheat starch, wheat starch, modified waxy corn...
Farm equipment is becoming an increasingly important
financial asset for many farmers. Tractors probably represent the
single largest component of equipment asset value. As such, changes
in tractor values can have a dramatic effect on a farmer's financial
situation. Changes in equipment value can be attributed to
depreciation and the...
Japan is the largest market for U.S. forest products.
Therefore, export of wood products to this country is
critical to the economic life of the forest industry in
the U.S. and particularly for the Pacific Northwest.
Hence, economic conditions and developments in Japan may
significantly affect the volume of trade...
This dissertation used land rent theory and an economic model of land-use conversion to examine the main drivers of the deforestation occurred in Antioquia,Colombia, between 1980 and 2000. Land-cover information at a semi-fine scale (1:25,000)
obtained largely from aerial photography was employed to calculate deforestation. In addition, free international databases...
Parameters of an econometric acreage response function were estimated for barley in the Northwest using pooled time-series and cross sectional data. Barley acreage was found to be significantly affected by the price of barley, the price of wheat and wheat acreage (a proxy for the "cross-planting" substitution component of government...
Recently, in an attempt to produce robust production frontier estimators, Aragon et al. [2005, Nonparametric frontier estimation: a conditional quantile-based approach. Econometric Theory 21, 358-389] and Martins-Filho and Yao [2008, A smooth nonparametric conditional quantile frontier estimator. Journal of Econometrics 143, 317-333] considered the estimation of nonparametric α- frontier models...
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...
Two essays are focused on semiparametric econometric methods. The first essay investigates applicability of the smooth back tting estimator (SBE) to statistical analysis of residential energy consumption. The second essay attempts to incorporate additivity restrictions into semiparametric stochastic frontier estimation. The procedure described in the first study is used to...