CHAPTER 1: Productivity Improvements and Falling Trade Costs: Boon or Bane?This essay looks at two features of globalization, namely, productivity improvements and falling trade costs, and explores their effect on welfare in a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms and...

This dissertation consists of three essays in process improvement and assortment planning. In the first essay, we study firm's strategies on balancing two conflicting manufacturing process improvement activities: learning and process change. Learning deepens the firm's knowledge of the...

The traditional education system in Qing China has been widely debated over the past decades. Some have argued it was efficient and furthered economic growth, while others have stressed its inefficient nature, which led to the introduction of the modern education system in the closing decades of...

In recent decades, national income has become increasingly important as a measure of a nation’s economic health. In this study, we used a wide array of primary and secondary sources to arrive at values of the Chinese per capita gross domestic product (GDP) during the period of 1661–1933. We...

In this dissertation we study several key issues faced by firms while introducing new products to market. The first essay looks at product rollovers: introduction of a new product generation while phasing out the old one. We study the strategic decision of dual vs. single roll jointly with...

This paper develops and estimates a structural model of production and inventory behavior for manufacturing plants in two Colombian industries, metal products and plastic product, from 1977 to 1991. Plant level decisions on production, inventories, sales, entry, and exit are developed using an...

This thesis consists of three chapters on dynamic oligopoly models. In the first chapter, I emphasize the importance of strategicbehavior by entrants. I provide a model of endogenous entry in which potential entrants can influence their product quality in the entrystage by varying the level of...

Increases in wages and the appreciation of the New Taiwanese dollar since the mid-1980s have significantly altered the environment in which firms operate and survive. In particular, as more countries have liberalized their trade and foreign investment policies, Taiwanese firms have been...

We observe a very distinct pattern of entry and exit in the oil industry. Significant numbers of well openings and closings are only observed during periods of very high oil prices and very low oil prices, respectively. A band of inaction lies between the high entry and the low exit price....

ABSTRACTThis research examines three aspects of upstream oil and gas management covering organizational choice, safety and environmental performance, and hurricane evacuation decision making. The work applies current microeconomic and econometric methods to structure practical management...