This thesis investigates several selected environmental issues in China from an economic perspective. It consists of four self-contained papers. Chapters 2-4 address the issues related to water shortage, while Chapter 5 focuses on the cost of air pollution. Chapter 2 analyses the potential...

Replaced with revised version of paper 09/12/07.

This dissertation examines three facets of U.S. energy use and policy. First, I examine the Gulf Coast petroleum refining industry to determine the structure of the industry. Using the duality between cost-minimization and production functions, I estimate the demand for labor to determine the...

We study how carbon dioxide (CO2) emission cuts affect income for 23 OECD countries over the 1980-2004 period. The importance of this question is manifested in the disagreements at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the 2010 State of the Union Address by United...

One of the major shortcommings of past environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) studies is that the spatiotemporal aspects within the data have largely been ignored. By ignoring the spatial aspect of pollution emissions past estimates of the EKC implicitly assume that a region’s emissions are...

Statistical flowgraphs represent multistate semi-Markov processes using integral transforms of transition time distributions between adjacent states; these are combinedalgebraically and inverted to derive parametric estimates for first passage time distributions between nonadjacent states. This...

We propose a new method to find spatially adaptive smoothing splines. This new method breaks down the interval [0, 1] into p disjoint sub-intervals. Then we define p functional components in [0, 1], which have two importantfeatures. First, the purpose of each of these p components is to estimate...

Functional data analysis (FDA) is an active field of statistics, in which the primary subjectsin the study are curves. My dissertation consists of two innovative applications offunctional data analysis in biology. The data that motivated the research broadened thescope of FDA and demanded new...

We consider a random design model based on independent and identically distributed pairs of observations (Xi, Yi), where the regression function m(x) is given by m(x) = E(Yi|Xi = x) with one independent variable. In a nonparametric setting the aim is to produce a reasonable approximation to the...

We apply semiparametric efficient estimation procedures for a seemingly unrelated regression model where the multivariate error density is elliptically symmetric to study the efficiency of the foreign exchange market. We consider both cointegrating regressions and standard stationary...