Electricity industry is important for our society and the nation's economic strength, and this dissertation includes two important topics in the industry: electricity market auctioning, and short-term load forecasting. In the first part of this dissertation, an optimization algorithm to solve...

This dissertation examines how households should optimally allocate their portfolio choices between risky stocks and risk-free bonds over their lifetime. Traditional lifecycle models in previous work with normal-distributed stock returns suggest that the allocation toward stocks should start...

Abstract Understanding how people make decisions from risky choices has attracted increasing attention of researchers in economics, psychology and neuroscience. While economists try to evaluate individual’s risk preference through mathematical modeling, neuroscientists answer the question by...

As a function of time t, mean residual life is the remaining life expectancy of a subject given survival up to t. The proportional mean residual life model, proposed by Oakes & Dasu (1990), provides an alternative to the Cox proportional hazards model to study the association between survival...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision....

We analyze a legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive issue. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological positions. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority-rule voting determines the outcome. We compare the outcome of the...

Risk attitude and perception is reflected in brain reactions during RPID experiments. Given the fMRI data, an important research question is how to detect risk related regions and to investigate the relation between risk preferences and brain activity. Conventional methods are often insensitive...

We propose the use of a local autoregressive (LAR) model for adaptive estimation and forecasting of three of China’s key macroeconomic variables: GDP growth, inflation and the 7-day interbank lending rate. The approach takes into account possible structural changes in the data-generating...

But when a policy dimension and a distributive dimension are both present, we show that in equilibrium, the demands by the legislators have some influence on the bargaining outcome but they are not fully informative about the legislators' true preferences. We characterize equilibria under the...

Which budgetary institutions result in efficient provision of public goods? We analyze a model with two parties deciding the allocation to a public good each period. Parties place different values on the public good, but these values may change over time. We model a budgetary institution as the...