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Now showing items 11-18 of 18
Three Essays on Government Health Expenditure
(2013-07-25)
In 2010, governments spent over $4.05 trillion on health. This is 7% of the world economy. This dissertation measures the health outcomes achieved by this spending, how this spending changes upon the receipt of health aid, and the methods used to analyze this spending. The first chapter assesses the effect of government ...
Three Essays on Land Rights, Labor Mobility and Human Capital Investment in China
(2013-07-23)
The dissertation explores how institutional features of the Chinese economy impact the welfare and behavior of Chinese households. The first two chapters investigate the economic implications of varying land security in rural China. The third chapter provides an empirical test of household responses to China's One-Child ...
Essays on Empirical Macroeconomics
(2013-11-14)
The nonlinear time series analysis has been applied widely in many empirical macroeconomic studies and deepened our understanding of the economy. One of the traditional issues of most importance is how to describe the monetary policy conducted by the central bank. A monetary policy reaction function is a hypothetical function ...
Essays on Social Capital and Economic Growth
(2013-02-25)
In this thesis we present three models to analyze the dynamic relationship between social capital and economic growth. Throughout it is assumed that social capital increases with socialization while it decreases with labor migration. We consider two channels through which social capital affects the economy. First, social ...
Essays on Water Resource Economics
(2014-02-24)
A canonical example in economics of the difference between marginal and total value is the diamond-water paradox. The high price of diamonds is derived from their rarity; whereas the price of water is low due to its abundance, even though it is essential to sustain human life. Scarcity, rather than abundance, better ...
Inferential Theory for Factor Models of Large Dimensions under Monotone Missing Data
(2014-02-24)
In this dissertation we investigate the inferential theory for factor models with large cross-section ($N$) and time series ($T$) dimensions under monotone-missing data. The major contribution of the dissertation is the development and testing of an intuitive and parsimonious factor-based imputation (FBI) algorithm that ...
Essays on Traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs: Effects on Household Saving and the Participation Choice
(2014-02-24)
This dissertation studies the effects of traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs on household saving and the participation choice between the two types of IRAs in the U.S. The first chapter summarizes the previous literature on Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and household saving, which is still under debate with two competing ...
Jump Variation in High-Frequency Asset Returns: New Estimation Methods
(2013-02-25)
A large literature has emerged in the last 10 years using high-frequency (intraday) asset returns to estimate lower-frequency phenomena, several of which being conditional daily return variance and its components jump variation and integrated variance. We propose several new estimators of jump variation and integrated variance. ...