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...

Binding liquidity constraints is a commonly cited explanation for the empirical failure of the standard life-cycle permanent income hypothesis. The down payment required for a mortgage loan is a well defined liquidity constraint and an average household faces this limitation at some point in...

Prerecorded music is a $12 billion industry in the United States and nearly \$40 billion worldwide. To date, very little economic research has been done to define and explain those factors that are responsible for this multi-billion-dollar industry. The focus of this research is to develop an...

This research focused on two main problems. The first problem concerns the use of loglinear smoothing for estimating the latent trait distribution, and how this may improve the recovery of item response theory (IRT) item parameters in marginal maximum likelihood estimation. The second problem...

Reliability and risk assessment play an important role in product design, development and production. In mass production items, data is abundant and testing in product development and certification is usually thorough. In contrast, for nonparametric applications, product cost is high, there is...

The purpose of this dissertation was to compare the Type I error and power properties of the Rank Transform Hotelling's T 2 with the parametric Hotelling's T2 in one sample and two sample cases with continuous and ranked data using Monte Carlo techniques. The ranked data violates the normality...