In a healthcare system, resource allocation mechanisms should promote efficiency, improve quality of care and reduce practice variation. This paper presents a framework that has been used at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, VA Healthcare Network Upstate New York, to guide resource...

This dissertation studies the consumer demand system focusing on its functional forms in the theoretical aspect and the empirical aspect. The theoretical part investigates the regularity property of the consumer demand system with the normalized quadratic functional form. We display the regular...

This paper aims to conduct a precise test of the political economy hypothesis linking income inequality and economic growth. By choosing covariates from a detailed county-level dataset and assuming that U.S. counties experience perfect capital mobility, I shut off the four possible channels...

In the United States the 1996 agricultural policy reform ushered in market-oriented farm policies and also gave farmers a seven-year lump-sum payment that was not tied to production. Some scholars argue that farm program payments have changed the distribution of income among farm households. Our...

Ph. D.

The rise of the service sector has been offered as a possible reason for rising income inequalities in highly developed countries. Here, data from 1980, 1990 and 1995 are analyzed to investigate the effects of growth in the service sector on income inequalities for 77 nations around the world....

Many developing countries are afflicted by persistent inequality in the distribution of income. While a growing body of literature emphasizes differential fertility as a channel through which income inequality persists, this paper investigates differential child mortality – differences in the...

This thesis consists of three chapters, each of which focuses on different aspects of economic inequality.First, we investigate the differences in wage inequality between the United States and continental European countries (CEU). Wage inequality has been significantly higher in the US compared...

This dissertation consists of three essays in Macroeconomics. The first essay assesses the impact of offshoring on aggregate productivity and on labour market outcomes by developing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which workers acquire task-specific human capital. The dynamic nature of...

Financial instability has increased for many economies in the face of greater capital mobility. Eliminating capital flows, especially portfolio investment flows, may reduce volatility, but it could also result in domestic capital constraints. To overcome this dilemma, policymakers may consider...