The experience of intermediate steel-industry suppliers in the Pittsburgh region offers valuable insight into how traditional industrial clusters can serve as a source of economic resilience in regions, like Pittsburgh, where a “signature” industry contracts or relocates. We find that...

The first essay, "Producers and Predators in a Multiple Community Setting" investigates how different ways of organizing the provision of local policing services in a multi-community setting affect the level of criminal activity, the spatial distribution of the population, the cost of policing,...

This dissertation contains three essays that combine applied models, institutional analysis and empirical work in order to understand developments in the Russian and Caspian energy sector following the breakup of the former Soviet Union. In the first essay entitled Partial Privatization:...

Inefficiencies in private giving are a common occurrence in public good games. In this dissertation, we ask four questions: do subjects recognize the inefficiency due to the lack of coordination on group giving, is there a simple way to overcome this coordination problem, is there a mechanism...