M.Ing. / Engineering is both an art and a science. Although engineering demands a lot in the way of energy, imagination and creativeness, it offers one of the most satisfying careers with a sense of adequacy and balance that may be lacking in many other occupations. To stay marketable, engineers should promote their problem solving, interpersonal, technical, financial, and communication skills. Most of these factors, however, are not necessarily part of an engineer's formal education Motivated employees with the necessary competencies and skills are generally recognized as the key to successful organizations. In order to effectively and efficiently manage technical employees, managers should gain insight into their attitudes by understanding their personality traits and core beliefs, and fostering longterm and well-conceived employee development plans. Because people are unique in their needs, values, and systems of motivation, it is practically impossible to tailor jobs and organizational objectives to individual workers. Management education is often a combination of training and experience. The optimal strategy is often not clear. It is the engineering manager's responsibility, then, to optimize the fit between factors of production and worker motivation in order to maximize the performance and productivity of the manager's department or organization. The literature indicates that turnover and motivation of engineers is the product of complex linkages among role stressors, task characteristics, job involvement, job satisfaction, career satisfaction and organizational commitment, to name but a few factors. A problem with having to deal with motivation is that there are no universal solutions. What motivates one person will not necessarily motivate another. Also, much of a person's motivation comes from within him or herself Although the perception.may exist amongst engineers that society in general has little appreciation for them and their accomplishments, engineers themselves feel positive about themselves and their careers. In general, engineers appear to be more involved, more satisfied with their jobs, and more committed to their orgmizations than the non-technical employee. It remains the responsibility of the engineers themselves to change society's preoccupation with glamorous, high-paying jobs, in order for them to be recognized for their contribution to society's standard of living and general well-being. A case study on young engineers is presented to highlight some of the above mentioned issues.

Thesis advisor: Julie H. Mortimer / My doctoral research focuses on empirical investigations of contracting in intermediate markets and its effects. I am currently pursuing two research projects that together constitute the chapters of this dissertation. The first chapter focuses on contracting between hospitals and insurers and a pricing practice in place in Maryland. In the second chapter, which is joint work with Julie Holland Mortimer and Sylvia Hristakeva, we instead investigate contracting practices in the national television advertising market. Chapter 1) In recent years researchers and policymakers have shown renewed interest in various types of health care reforms in the United States. In "Welfare Effects of Using Hospital Rate Setting as an Alternative to Bargaining" with Ayse Sera Diebel we investigate a potential health care reform. Prices paid by insurers to hospitals are determined by bilateral negotiations in all U.S. states except Maryland, where a unique all-payer rate setting health care regulation sets common prices for all insurers. Theory models of bilateral bargaining are unable to assign welfare effects when contracts are unobserved. We empirically analyze how a Maryland style regulation would affect overall welfare relative to bilateral bargaining, using the New Jersey health care market as an example. Using hospital-, insurer-, and patient-level data from 2010, we estimate a structural model of hospital and insurer demand, and simulate consumer and insurer responses to the new price regime. We find that replacing bargaining with all-payer rate setting increases total surplus in the market. However, not all agents benefit, and the effects depend on how the largest player in our market, Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS), sets premiums. If BCBS sets premiums a la Bertrand Nash, consumer surplus decreases, but joint hospital-insurer surplus increases by more. The number of uninsured increases by two percent. Surplus changes are robust to different pricing strategies of BCBS, that account for its non-profit status but, diminish the magnitude of surplus changes. Chapter 2) In "Contracts in the upfront market for national television advertising'' with Sylvia Hristakeva and Julie Holland Mortimer, we investigate unique pricing practices. We focus on advertising and treat it as an input to a firm's production process. The market of national television is of interest because it still commands the majority of advertising in the United States. Yet, firms face different costs when accessing the market for national television ads. Industry practices suggest that (legacy) firms with long histories of participation in the market benefit from favorable prices to reach the same audiences. We confirm empirically whether there are important differences in firms' costs to advertise nationally. Contracts between advertisers and networks are considered trade secrets, so we combine data on national ad placements and program viewership demographics with average ad prices in each program airing to perform our analysis. We find model-free evidence that firms who have longer relationships with broadcasters face lower prices in those networks. We use a structural model to quantify these price differentials, allowing for differences in firms' payoffs from advertising to different audiences. Preliminary results suggest that legacy firms obtain an 8\% discount relative to non-legacy firms. This discount translates into a $2 million efficiency that would be available to a non-legacy firm if it were to merge with a legacy firm. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

This dissertation consists of three chapters covering topics in empirical industrial organization. The first chapter considers how consumers respond to reductions in the net weight of packaged goods. The second chapter documents the use of pricing zones among US grocery retailers. Finally, the third chapter analyzes the market power of Visa credit cards. The first chapter examines how consumers respond to product downsizing where firms increase unit prices by reducing the content of their packaging. I consider whether consumers are inattentive to reductions in package content since they tend to underuse statements of net weight. I build a structural model of consumer preferences that incorporates inattention to changes in net weight and apply it to grocery store scanner data. I apply the model to a downsizing event in the black pepper industry where the industry’s largest firm shrunk five of its products. I show that approximately half of all consumers fail to notice the reductions. With full information, consumers would switch to larger packages that provide greater welfare. In the second chapter, Joseph Simmons and I document the extent of zone pricing among top grocery retailers. Using data from grocery and home improvement retailers, we develop a machine learning algorithm that identifies pricing zones from point of sale data. We apply our method to pricing data from some of the top grocery retailers. We find that these large grocery retailers price their products using a small number of zones. Moreover, the number of zones does not change over a nine-year period, despite significant improvements in information technology during this time. This suggests that an inability to distinguish demand across stores is the primary impediment to greater price discrimination. The third chapter evaluates the market power of Visa credit cards by exploiting an event where the grocery retailer Kroger stopped accepting Visa credit cards at two of its grocery chains. I employ an event study methodology to examine how foot traffic changes at the beginning and end of the ban. I find that foot traffic decreases by six percent at the start of the ban, implying that Visa has substantial market power. Because Kroger offered price discounts and other promotions during this time, my result may represent a lower bound on the true effect. However, the results are sensitive to violations in the identifying assumptions.

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Thesis advisor: Arthur Lewbel / This dissertation comprises three essays on empirical industrial organization (IO) and applied econometrics. The first and third chapters focus on identification approaches in structural models, with the first chapter dedicated to addressing limitations in demand modeling, while the third chapter studies identification in a triangular two-equation system. The second chapter applies modern econometric tools to understand policy-related topics in IO. The first chapter deals with identification in structural demand modeling, and generalizes the current framework in the literature to achieve a more accurate estimation of differentiated products demand. Within the framework of Berry (1994) and Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995), the existing empirical industrial organization literature often assumes that market size is observed. However, the presence of an unobservable outside option is a common source of mismeasurement. Measurement errors in market size lead to inconsistent estimates of elasticities, diversion ratios, and counterfactual simulations. I explicitly model the market size, and prove point identification of the market size model along with all demand parameters in a random coefficients logit (BLP) model. No additional data beyond what is needed to estimate standard BLP models is required. Identification comes from the exogenous variation in product characteristics across markets and the nonlinearity of the demand system. I apply the method to a merger simulation in the carbonated soft drinks (CSD) market in the US, and find that assuming a market size larger than the true estimated size would underestimate merger price increases. Understanding consumer demand is not only central to studying market structure and competition but also relevant to the study of public policy such as taxation. In the second chapter, we examine household demand for sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) in the U.S. Our goal is to understand the distributional effect of soda taxes across demographic groups and market segments (at-home versus away-from-home). Using a novel dataset that includes at-home and away-from-home food purchases, we study who is affected by soda taxes. We nonparametrically estimate a random coefficient nested logit model to exploit the rich heterogeneity in preferences and price elasticities across households, including SNAP participants and non-SNAP-participant poor. By simulating its impacts, we find that soda taxes are less effective away-from-home while more effective at-home, especially by targeting the total sugar intake of the poor, those with high total dietary sugar, and households without children. Our results suggest that ignoring either segment can lead to biased policy implications. In the final chapter, we show that a standard linear triangular two equation system can be point identified, without the use of instruments or any other side information. We find that the only case where the model is not point identified is when a latent variable that causes endogeneity is normally distributed. In this non-identified case, we derive the sharp identified set. We apply our results to Acemoglu and Johnson's (2007) model of life expectancy and GDP, obtaining point identification and comparable estimates to theirs, without using their (or any other) instrument. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 229-248).

This dissertation focuses on the welfare implications of different government policies aimed to diminish the consumption of energy produced from fossil fuels in the United States. The first of these policies, taxation on gasoline consumption, diminishes consumption by increasing the cost per mile traveled. However, this policy measure has not been favored by policy-makers, and instead, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, CAFEs, were put in place since the seventies. This policy consists of a pre-established threshold of fuel-efficiency, measured in miles per gallon, that car manufacturers selling cars in the United States are subject to each year. For each manufacturer, the CAFE is calculated, which weights the fuel-efficiency of each car model by the number of units sold of that car model. If the CAFE for a given manufacturer lies below the pre-established standard for that year, the manufacturer is subject to a fine. I exploit the manufacturers' past behavior in setting prices for their car models to estimate structural demand and supply parameters that characterize the car industry facing these policies. With those parameters, I can estimate the welfare impacts of tightening the CAFE standard to the new threshold set by the Obama administration and compare those impacts to the ones from raising gasoline taxes to obtain the same gasoline reduction in consumption. The findings are that in the short run, taxation is a less costly policy than tightening the CAFE standard. The second and third essays study the consequences of adopting renewable sources for electricity production. These technologies bring reductions in emissions of pollutants to the atmosphere, but not at no cost. They are expensive and their introduction to already existing electricity systems requires modifications to the usual scheduling of power plants because of the intermittent nature of the renewable sources, such as solar. We compute the equilibrium effects of this policy finding that if the environmental benefits are not taken into account, these policies are welfare decreasing with the amount of renewable sources. Some lower levels of penetration are more cost efficient if we take into account dynamic considerations in the scheduling of the plants.