Due to the lack of political consensus at the previous General Agreement on Trade on Services (GATS), negotiations on the temporary movement of natural persons (Mode 4) have stagnated. The growth in the economic literature surrounding this issue has also been lackluster; despite the large...

This paper presents a new bilateral database documenting international migration stocks by gender, education level, origin and destination. We build on existing databases of OECD host countries in 1990 and 2000 and expand their coverage by collecting or estimating migration to all non-OECD...

We estimate the relationship between international youth and professional tennis rankings. We find no difference between the predictiveness of rankings from age 14 & Under versus age 16 & Under competitions. The most persistent predictor of professional success is beating older top ranked...

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...

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 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 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...