The first essay uses a model of profit-maximizing hospitals to examine hospital responses to global budgeting in the forms of dumping and cost shifting. The main findings include: (1) Hospitals dump insured patients when the covered services are priced under costs. Whetherthe budget target is...

Using a firm-level data set for 1998 and 2005 including all of China's 'above designated size' enterprises that together account for more than 85% of China's industrial output, this paper investigates three issues. One key issue in China's industrial system is the extent to which growth has been...

Tunneling behavior, which is defined as the transfer of assets and profits out of a firm for the benefit of the firms controlling shareholders, has become the focus of increasing attention in the theoretical and empirical literature. There are some corporate governance procedures, however, that...

In my thesis I address two questions regarding the aluminum market in China. The first question analyzes the degree to which the Chinese aluminum market is integrated into the world market. I use the Johansen test for cointegration of time series data in SAS statistical software to compare the...

This dissertation contains three essays that combine applied models, institutional analysis and empirical work in order to understand developments in the Russian and Caspian energy sector following the breakup of the former Soviet Union. In the first essay entitled Partial Privatization:...

Expert judgment (or expert elicitation) is a formal process for eliciting judgments from subject-matter experts about the value of a decision-relevant quantity. Judgments in the form of subjective probability distributions are obtained from several experts, raising the question how best to...

This paper analyzes the causal relations between firms’ productivity, factor intensity and export participation. Using propensity score matching techniques and firm-level panel data for Chinese manufacturing firms over the 1998-2007 period, we find strong evidence of domestic firms...

This paper analyzes the causal relations between firms' productivity, factor intensity and export participation. Using propensity score matching techniques and firm-level panel data for Chinese manufacturing firms over the 1998-2007 period, we find strong evidence of domestic firms...