This dissertation explores the problems of low productivity in the microenterprise sector and of low formal credit use, principally microfinance, by poor households. I propose vulnerability to risk, defined as the inability to smooth consumption across negative income shocks, as a new...

This dissertation explores the measurement and determinants of product-specific rules of origin (PSRO) in preferential trade agreements (PTAs). In order to study PSRO empirically it is necessary to be able to measure them in some objective way. We analyze in great detail the mechanisms for...

This dissertation investigates the relationship between industrial and trade policies and their impact on firm-level incentives to become more productive. In Chapter two we use a two-sector growth model and show that the impact of a rise in competition in the intermediate goods sector (that...

This dissertation examines the effects of commodity market liberalization on the farmer's price. Chapter two of this dissertation presents a theoretical model of commodity market liberalization which aims to analyze the impact of market liberalization on the farmer's price. This monopsony-type...

This dissertation develops and tests a theoretical model of multinational corporation technology transfer to affiliates in developing countries. A bi-lateral moral hazard model is used to analyze a multinational corporation's decision to enter a new market via a wholly owned subsidiary, a joint...

The first chapter of this dissertation studies the growth effects of regional integration agreements. During the 1990’s the world experienced a new wave of regional integration agreements (RIAs) that reached unprecedented proportions. In the presence of economies of scale or extent-of-the...

This dissertation explores the role of efficiency of redistributive institutions (ERI)on redistribution. The first substantive essay proposes a theoretical model to explain thelack of strong empirical evidence in favor of a positive relationship between incomeinequality and redistribution. This...

The first part of my dissertation considers the estimation of a panel data model with error components that are both spatially and time-wise correlated. The dissertation combines widely used model for spatial correlation (Cliff and Ord (1973, 1981)) with the classical error component panel data...

The dramatic increase in outsourcing has led to a burgeoning theoretical literature that tries to explain the associated organization of production. So far the literature has focused solely on analyzing the determinants of decisions by outsourcing firms, but has ignored the firms to which...

An industrial cluster is a group of firms that are specialized by sector, located in close geographic proximity and consist of mostly small and medium sized enterprises. An introduction to these clusters is provided in Chapter One.Chapter Two develops a model to examine the conditions under...