The dissertation is composed of three papers on institutions and development, with special focus on Vietnam. The first paper, "Club Good and Contract Enforcement," investigates the contract enforcement power of the communities whose members participate voluntarily. By investing in club goods,...

This paper generalizes the results of Hausman and Taylor (1981), Schmidt and Sickles (1984), Cornwell, Schmidt and Sickles (1990) and Park and Simar (1992) to the efficient IV estimation of panel models in which the random effects are correlated with a subset of the regressors. The model in...

We consider the bootstrap method for the covariates augmented Dickey-Fuller (CADF) unit root test suggested in Hansen (1995) which uses related variables to improve the power of univariate unit root tests. It is shown that there are substantial power gains from including correlated covariates....

This paper relates physical and mental health status to labor force participation and compares these relationships among self-report and proxy respondents. Previous research has conjectured that self-reports of health status may lead to an upward bias in the estimated effect of health on labor...

This paper explores a relatively new methodology, the directional distance function method, to analyze productivity growth. The method explicitly evaluates the role undesirable outputs of the economy, such as carbon dioxide and other green-house gases, have on the frontier production process...

It is common in firm level environmental efficiency studies for pollution to form part of the production technology. We omit nitrogen and sulphur emissions from the spatial analysis of production in European countries (1995 - 2008) because we find they are not significant inputs. Efficiency and...

In this paper we construct a short run model of the firm describing the behavior of thirteen U.S. airlines during the difficult transition to deregulation. Several modeling scenarios are developed to assess three common assumptions in cost studies: the use of time as a proxy for technological...