A seemingly unassailable consensus in political economy states that secure and private property rights are the institutional guarantor of economic growth. In this dissertation, I dispute this conventional account and propose a new understanding of property rights institutions, their effect on...

The diversification of the agrarian activities towards different branches of the economy seems a viable alternative to clear the gray horizon of this type of organizations. An emergent activity, Rural Tourism, appears as a very interesting option to complement partners’ income, as well as the...

Economic outcomes in Jamaica have fallen short of the authorities’ objectives in recent years. As the government looks to reinvigorate its growth and debt reduction strategy, it is instructive to examine how exogenous shocks and other unanticipated developments can affect economic...

We generalize two classes of statistical sequential incomplete information games: (1) those resembling typical signaling games, in which a single agent represents each player, allowing for information to be revealed about future play; and (2) those in which each player is represented by a set of...

Contrary to private enterprises, public enterprises can be unaware of the impact of their performance when providing services to the public. This is often the case when a small array of choices is in citizens’ hands or coercion is the only possibility and a public service must be received and...

The dominant approach to studying the effects of IMF programs has emphasized moral hazard, but we find that adverse selection has more impressive effects. We propose a novel strategic selection model to study the growth effects of IMF programs, which allows for the possibility of adverse...

The importance of exploiting degrees of freedom within a crude oil distillation process for improving energy performance has been a feature of process integration from the earliest days. Combining process changes with changes to the heat recovery system leads to far better results, compared with...

The extreme cost of fighting wildland fires has brought fire suppression expenditures to the forefront of budgetary and policy debate in the United States. Inasmuch as large fires are responsible for the bulk of fire suppression expenditures, understanding fire characteristics that influence...

Using the FEER approach we investigate the long-run equilibrium paths of the real effective exchange rates (REERs) of countries in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). In an attempt to address econometric estimation uncertainty, we employ both single-country (Johansen and ARDL)...