The first part of this doctorate dissertation examines the factors influencing the occurrence and costs of pinhole leak corrosion as well as the household decisions for corrosion prevention and plumbing material selection. Three mail surveys of households were used to elicit the experiences with...

This dissertation consists of three essays that examine consumer behavior with respect to drinking water quality issues. The first essay uses contingent valuation method to explore consumersâ willingness to pay (WTP) for a hypothetical material in home drinking water infrastructure that will...

In an excellent article from a recent issue of this journal, Sellar, Stoll and Chavas (1985) make a technical error which causes them to misstate their closed-ended estimates of willingness to pay. Truncation of the estimated cummulative distribution function must we made explicit in compution...

Choice modelling is increasingly being used to generate estimates of the value of changes in environmental quality. This is partly because of the informational efficiencies of the technique, but also because of concern about the accuracy of contingent valuation. Experimental evidence has,...

Monotonicity of the equilibrium bidding strategy is a key property of structural auction models. Traditional nonparametric estimators provide a flexible means of uncovering salient features of auction data, but do not formally impose the monotonicity assumption that is inherent in the models...

Recent research on macroeconomic growth has been focused on resolving several key issues, two of which, specification uncertainty of the growth process and variable uncertainty, have received much attention in the recent literature. The standard procedure has been to assume a linear growth...

Monotonicity of the equilibrium bidding strategy is a key property of structural auction models. Traditional nonparametric estimators provide a flexible means of uncovering salient features of auction data, but do not formally impose the monotonicity assumption that is inherent in the models...

While economies of scope of lending and mobilizing deposits in banking are justifiedtheoretically (Diamond, 1984) and found empirically (see Saunders, 1999), in microfinance, theexistence and the magnitudes of scope economies has not been investigated. We use a semiparametric smooth coefficient...

This thesis explores constraints to the development of markets for high quality cacao in Ecuador. It focuses on the role of market level constraints, particularly the transmission of quality incentives along the marketing chain and their effects on farmersâ incentives to invest in quality...

This dissertation comprises three essays on theoretical and empirical issues in industrial organization. Chapter 1 outlines the issues explored in the subsequent chapters and briefly describes their conclusions.Chapter 2 explores how product differentiation impacts the incentive compatibility...