This dissertation is divided into three essays. The first essay focuses on the question of enfranchisement of groups of individuals. Existing research work in the area has not adequately addressed this question. Indeed, previous analyses have focused on the value of a vote for a single...

The focus of this study was to learn more about a critical commodity market participant, the long term speculator. The speculator's activity broadens a market, creates essential liquidity, and performs an irreplaceable pricing function. Working knowledge of the profiles, motivations, and modes...

The choice problem between a profit and an investment center revolves around whether it is desirable to delegate investment decision responsibility to a divisional manager who is better informed about the investment opportunities of the division. We show that an accounting performance measure...

It is well known that most of the standard specification tests are not robust when the alternative is misspecified. We consider the three types of typical misspecification encountered in econometric model specification testing, namely, complete misspecification, underspecification, and...

This dissertation explores two subjects. The first one is the relationship between low liquidity in secondary markets for capital and the insufficient supply of long term funding for productive investment. The first chapter shows how shallow or non-existent secondary markets for capital can...

The main purpose of this dissertation was to evaluate how liberalization of agricultural markets, as emerged from the Uruguay round of negotiations, alter existing trade patterns. The study provides welfare estimations of full and partial trade liberalization in selected agricultural processed...

Recently, the call for external auditor reports on client internal control structures has come from many fronts (i.e., Public Oversight Board, GAO, FDIC, etc.). The parties calling for these auditor reports typically assert that these auditor reports will serve to reduce management fraud. Before...

In this dissertation, the microtheoretic measurement of technical change (TC) is developed as an alternative to the index number approach to total factor productivity (TFP) growth, incorporating recent theoretical developments in dynamic cost functions that shed light on the effects and role of...

Following Farrell's (1957) definitions of firm's technical and allocative efficiencies and the formulation of composite error stochastic frontier model by Aigner, Lovell and Schmidt (1977), a substantial amount of research work has been performed measuring firm's technical inefficiency using...

This thesis is in two parts. The first part is an extensive literature survey that summarizes and synthesizes several works on bureaucracy from sociology, business administration, and political science as well as economics, prominently featuring selections from Herbert Simon, Anthony Downs,...