The Antebellum Puzzle' describes the situation of declining stature and rising mortality in the three decades prior to the American Civil War (1861-65). It is labeled a puzzle, since this period was one of rapid economic growth and development in the United States. Much of the debate regarding...

We model the relationship between local agricultural surpluses, nutritional status, and height, and we test the hypothesis that adult height is positively correlated with the local production of nutrition in infancy. We test the hypothesis on two samples of Union Army recruits - one consisting...

Antebellum critics of slavery argued that it was responsible for the relative inefficiency of free southern farms. We examine this issue, employing a stochastic production function, which allows us to distinguish between technological superiority and technical inefficiency, and controlling for...

ABSTRACTMIN, KYUNG-SEOL, An Empirical Investigation of Lending to Small Businesses. (Under the direction of Douglas K. Pearce and Karlyn Mitchell.) This dissertation analyzes lenders' two important decisions (loan approval decision and loan rate decision) in their loan evaluation procedures...

Historically, scholars of economic growth have focused almost exclusively on aggregate output or income as a way to assess the standard of living in a society. The purpose of this dissertation is to supplement and challenge this methodology by using evidence of the biological standard of living...

My dissertation is titled 'Creating the Hot Hand Effect with a Grand Prize.' It develops a theory of how the addition of a grand prize for performance in a sequence of tournaments affects agents' effort and participation decisions. The theory's predictions are empirically tested with data from...