The Mexican maquiladora industry was thirty-four years old in 1999, the second summer of my field work. Many maquiladora workers are second and in a few cases third generation in their families in the industry. This dissertation is about the spaces they have negotiated. Maquiladora workers live...

The dissertation is focused on studying the behavior of aggregate asset market and its relationship to real economic activity. Chapter 1 offers a new empirical perspective on the relationship between the conditional mean and volatility of stock returns. Chapter 2 builds a general equilibrium...

This dissertation explores the effect of trade liberalization on income distribution under conditions which depart in one or more ways from the Heckscher-Ohlin model. Each essay was written with Mexico in mind, but the results are stated in terms as general as possible. The first essay shows...

This dissertation analyzes the relation between industrial organization, technological change and economic policy-making. The secrets to long-term growth are hidden in this complex relation, which explains the forces that enable and hinder learning in production. The recent changes in the...

The first essay examines the phenomenon of free riding and underinvestment in noncooperative entry deterrence in the Gilbert and Vives (1986) model with differentiated products. Our analysis proves that when both entry allowing and entry deterring equilibria coexist, underinvestment can occur in...

We model divisionalization as a two-stage simultaneous move duopoly game. In stage one, firms simultaneously establish divisions. In stage two, all divisions play a Cournot game. The major contribution of this thesis is to generalize the analysis of strategic firm structure in simultaneous move...

Essay 1 provides an analytical model for risk segmentation in the perfectly competitive consumer loan market by incorporating the fact that a parental durable good seller with market power to some degree in its product market can earn rents. In this context, there is a gain to granting credit...

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...

Empirical research in manufacturing and service operations management is an emerging and promising area of research with potential to contribute significantly to our understanding of companies' operational practices. In the first part of the dissertation, we describe a study of the consequences...

This thesis maintains that transaction cost analysis provides a well grounded theoretical foundation for strategic management research. The paradigmatic issues involve vertical integration theory, the evolution of vertical integration in the American enterprise, diversification and the...