Chapter 1: Why Is the Sex Ratio Unbalanced in China? The Roles of the One-Child Policy, Underdeveloped Social Insurance, and Parental ExpectationsThe sex ratio imbalance in China has reached such an alarming level that, by 2020, men of marriageable age are estimated to outnumber women by 24...

There are hundreds of thousands of crude oil and natural gas wells across North America that are currently not producing oil or gas. Many of these wells have not been permanently decommissioned to meet environmental standards for permanent closure, but are in an inactive state that enables them...

Chapter 1: Capacity and Utilization Choice in the US Oil Refining IndustryThis paper presents a new dynamic model of the operating and investmentdecisions of US oil refiners. The model enables me to predict how shocks to crudeoil prices and refinery shutdowns (e.g., in response to hurricanes)...

We extend economic analysis of the nuclear power industry by developing and employing three tools. They are 1) compilation and unification of operating and accounting data sets for plants and sites, 2) an abstract industry model with major economic agents and features, and 3) a model of nuclear...

Abstract We analyze a data set containing rental revenues, maintenance costs, and sale prices of five different types of rental machines to econometrically estimate key relationships needed to implement a dynamic programming model of the optimal timing of replacement of rental equipment owned by...

This paper presents a dynamic model of the joint labor/leisure and consumption/saving decision over the life cycle. Such a dynamic model provides a framework for considering the important policy experiments related to the reforms in Social Security. We address the role of labor supply in a life...

This paper estimates the expectations of older male workers in the form of a 130 million element Markov transition probability matrix specifying the joint stochastic process for workers’ income, health, martial and employment status, conditioned on workers’ decisions about labor force...

We provide an empirical analysis of the Social Security disability application, award, and appeal process using the Health and Retirement Survey. We show that the appeal option increases the award probability from 46\% to 73\%. However, this comes at the cost of significant delays: the duration...

This paper compares the performance of the Howard (1960) policy iteration algorithm for infinite-horizon continuous-state Markovian decision processes (MDP's) using alternative random, quasi- random, and deterministic discretizations of the state space, or grids. Each grid corresponds to an...

We consider the problem of computing approximations to fixed points of quasilinear contraction mappings defined on the space of continuous functions of $d$ variables. Our main emphasis is on large d. Examples of such mappings include the Bellman operator from the theory of dynamic programming....