Traditional theory of international trade has been developed on the assumption of homogeneous country in which identical consumers and production factors are all uniformly distributed. In the real world, however, most countries are composed of heterogeneous regions, and in accordance the above...

There are many situations in which individuals have a choice of whether or not to observe the eventual outcome. In these instances, individuals often prefer to avoid observing the outcome. The standard von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) Expected Utility model cannot accommodate these cases, since it...

General financial models have become workhorse models in the fields of macroeconomics and finance. These models have been developed and extensively studied by general equilibrium theorists. What makes them so applicable for macroeconomics and finance is the well accepted fact that models with a...

This dissertation is composed of three essays considering the role of private information in economic environments. The first essay considers efficient investments into technologies such as auditing and enforcement systems that are designed to mitigate information and enforcement frictions that...

This dissertation addresses a basic difficulty in accommodating other-regarding preferences within existing models of decision making. Decision makers with such preferences may violate the property of stochastic dominance that is shared by both expected utility and almost any model of...

In the first two essays, I study value discovery in discrete-time dynamic markets with imperfect information. One model examines a market with no payoff externalities while the other studies a market with a negative or crowding payoff externality. Short-lived buyers encounter infinite-lived...

The three essays in this dissertation address current issues in international trade and economic dynamics. In the first essay a model of international trade and quality differentiation is introduced that explains why rich countries produce and export goods of a higher quality than poor...

This dissertation consists of a preface and three chapters each examining how pension actuarial principles distort the financial management of U.S. defined benefit pension plans. Pension actuarial methods were originally developed to assess the relationship between plan assets and liabilities...

The first chapter considers a two-country two-sector third-market Cournot competition model to show that (i) a non-uniform rearrangement of the initially-uniform R&D subsidy/tax in a way which preserves the net government expenditure, or (ii) a non-uniform combination of R&D subsidies and...

One of the puzzles of development is that while survey research demonstrates female education has positive impacts on a number of key development indicators, these effects do not show at the national level, or at least in terms that cross-country regressions can demonstrate. In fact in some...