<p>This essay analyzes the market for entertainment software by identifying and explain the products typical properties, in addition i clarifies the behavior of consumers and producers. One of the most important property related to software is the ease with which it can be reproduced. When such reproduction is done illicit it´s called piracy. The software industry often claims that piracy leads to big losses for the companies as well as in welfare, the essay clarifies that this doesn´t has to be the case. On the contrary the possibility to cheap production and distribution may lead to an increased welfare. The paper questions todays copyright law and suggests that a different legislation would lead to an increase in welfare.</p>

This essay analyzes the market for entertainment software by identifying and explain the products typical properties, in addition i clarifies the behavior of consumers and producers. One of the most important property related to software is the ease with which it can be reproduced. When such reproduction is done illicit it´s called piracy. The software industry often claims that piracy leads to big losses for the companies as well as in welfare, the essay clarifies that this doesn´t has to be the case. On the contrary the possibility to cheap production and distribution may lead to an increased welfare. The paper questions todays copyright law and suggests that a different legislation would lead to an increase in welfare.

<p>My dissertation focuses on employing microeconomic techniques to study markets and questions that are important and complex, and also have potential policy implications. Two of my chapters analyze the health industry with an emphasis on hospitals, patient welfare, and regulation. The remaining chapter focuses on the housing market in Los Angeles and explores real estate flipping.</p><p>The second chapter of my dissertation studies the impact of state level regulations on hospital bed capacity decisions. The regulations are intended to decrease hospital investments without diminishing patient access. I find that the regulation decreases total hospital investment in bed capacity as expected. When running simulations to estimate how hospitals would behave differently were the regulatory policy changed, I find that total patient utility is negatively affected by the presence of the regulation as many patients get turned away from their preferred hospital due to overcrowding. This analysis has important policy implications as it suggests that the regulation has been ineffective in ensuring that patient welfare was unharmed by the restrictions.</p><p>The third chapter is based on joint research with Patrick Bayer and James W. Roberts and studies the housing market in the Los Angeles metropolitan area from 1988 to 2009. Using novel data, I identify which housing transactions involve flippers who aim not to live in the house, but rather to quickly resell it for financial gain. I find that flipper behavior varies based on how frequently I observe the individual engage in such behavior. Experienced flippers, who are observed to flip many houses in the data, target homes being sold at below market value and earn their returns from buying them at a discount. Their effect on long term prices in the neighborhood is negligable. Inexperienced flippers who are less active, seek to earn their profits by timing the market and are more active when house prices were rapidly appreciating from 1999 to 2005. Their activity increases housing prices in the neighborhood in the short term, but decreases them in the long term. Such results are consistent with the claim that real estate flipping contributed to the housing bubble.</p><p>The fourth chapter of my dissertation again focuses on the hospital industry and looks at the question of how patient composition changes as a hospital becomes busier and has to turn patients away. I develop a theoretical model which predicts that hospitals are more likely to turn away less profitable patients. As a result, when a hospital becomes more full and therefore is more likely to have to turn patients away, its composition of patients will change and become more profitable on the whole. I test this theory by empirically analyzing the effect of hospital congestion on the composition of hospital patients using hospital discharge data. The findings are consistent with my theoretical model as when hospitals become more crowded, the fraction of uninsured patients and mental health patients (who are typically not profitable to a hospital) decreases. This result suggests that hospitals are more likely to turn away unprofitable patients while continuing to admit more profitable patients.</p> / Dissertation

This is the first paper to measure the efficiency of the Japan Professional Football League clubs both the first and the second divisions. In Chapter 1, a non-parametric method Data Envelopment Development (DEA) is used and the data covers six seasons from 2005 to 2010. The input variables are payroll, cost besides payroll, and total assets. The output variables are attendance, revenue, and points awarded. I use different output combinations in order to check the sensitivity of the efficiency of the clubs after the original composition. This is also the first research to include more than one division of the Professional Football League and hence, the promotion and relegation impact on the efficiency can be analyzed using unique data such as Tokyo Verdy 1969. Tokyo Verdy 1969 operated inefficiently in the second division because it spent so much on inputs hoping for promotion. It was efficient when in the first division. The results indicate that athletic rank in the league is not correlated with the efficiency scores. The efficient clubs in the second division are all ranked at the bottom in the league and this is because they have limited resource inputs, no expectation to promote, and because the expansion policy of the league precludes relegation. Chapter 2 is an extension of Chapter 1. In this chapter I check the exogenous factors impacting the efficiency scores but not involved in the DEA analysis as the input variables. I aim to estimate the relationship between the input-oriented DEA efficiency scores under the constant returns to scale assumption and use an exogenous variable ordinary least square (OLS) model to check the relationship between the efficiency scores and exogenous variables. I regress the DEA efficiency scores on all of the exogenous variables collected from various resources during the sample period. Chapter 3 estimates the productivity and efficiencies of the football clubs in Japan Professional Football League. This chapter is an extension of the first chapter. In this chapter I check the dynamic change of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) based on the calculation of the Malmquist Index, which consists of efficiency change and technical change between two time periods. Additionally, the production frontier used in this chapter was built by the non-parametric input-oriented CRS DEA approach as applied in the first chapter. Based on the results of the Malmquist Index, we find if the change in the TFP growth as increasing, declining or remaining the same.

In recent decades, a new direction of development economics has emerged, led by economists on a mission to improve the quality of life for citizens of developing countries through proven, cost-effective interventions. This micro-economic focus on development hinges on identifying barriers to growth and implementing targeted programs designed to alleviate these constraints. However, identifying constraints is far easier than measuring their magnitude, and designing effective measures to quantify these barriers remains a substantial challenge. Numerous microeconomic indicators of development are famously intractable and resist simple methods of accurate measurement. This dissertation tackles measurement challenges by quantifying three major development drivers: efficient investment, effective institutions, and public good provision. Using three case studies on business development and cooperation conducted in Russia and Kenya, I develop novel ways to quantify constraints and suggest methods to alleviate them. In the first chapter, I estimate marginal rates of return to capital for small retail firms, evaluate the causes of inefficiency and examine interventions that may aid growth. Next, I examine corruption as a barrier to small business growth and assess whether policy reform is capable of decreasing corrupt activity. Finally, I investigate the causes of heterogeneity in the financing of local public goods and experimentally document the conditions that improve communities’ ability to cooperate and coordinate on efficient Nash equilibria. In sum, I propose new ways of measuring marginal rates of return to capital, corruption incidence, and cooperation in public good provision; then leverage these measures to shed light on barriers to growth and to assess the effectiveness of possible interventions to enable development and achieve more efficient resource distribution.

This study analyzes the Bangladesh Crisis by building upon previous works that have applied microeconomic theory to international relations. One of the most innovative lines of inquiry from the realist school is to study international relations through analogy with microeconomic theory. Although used to analyze conflict, war, and the workings of the international system, a strict application of microeconomic theory to interstate crises is rare. This thesis will endeavour to contribute to this linkage.

Selection and adaptation paradigms have been jointly employed in the derivation of a theoretical model of firm evolution. This construct enabled researchers to explore: "why are there so many different kinds of organizations?". In that, evolutionary influences and adaptive firm behaviour were simultaneous forces that shape the survival of organizational forms over time. Such a notion was applied towards a dynamic programming context. This dynamic programming model was translated into a computer simulation such that an empirical representation of firm evolution was depicted. / The results from four computer simulations confirmed the selection and adaptation propositions described in this research. The simulations found evolutionary forces to be significant determinants to differentiating firm survival. While, adaptive firm behaviour only served to prolong organizational survivability with in the confines of the selection forces of the market. / Future organizational research should focus on expanding the dimensions of strategic adaptation, strategic, voluntarism, niche width dynamics, organizational inertia theory and organizational slack. By addressing these areas, a more comprehensive depiction of organizational evolution could be attained.

The lead essay measures the long-term impact of famine severity during the 1959-1961 Great Chinese Famine on contemporary per capita GDP and rural household income in China. Empirical results present a consistently negative relationship between famine severity and per capita GDP in 2010 supported using an instrumental variable approach. The instrumental variable (IV) based on the sequence in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took over continental China, exploiting the relationship between a local community's demonstration of loyalty to the new CCP regime, the radicalism of leadership during the Great Leap Forward social and agricultural reform starting in 1958, and the consequences of the Great Famine. The second essay utilizes the interaction of malaria prevention and the historical geographic distribution of malaria endemicity to estimate the average global impact mosquito-control has had on population growth. The differential benefit mosquito-control health campaigns may have had with respect to the initial malaria prevalence provides useful counterfactual groups for empirical analysis as well as possible evidence for the divergence in population development between the temperate and tropical regions of the world.

This D.Phil, thesis undertakes a theoretical analysis of the microeconomic incentives for scientific and technical knowledge-creating activities at the firm-level, the channels by which these activities impinge on industrial change and economic growth, and the effectiveness of governmental policies formulated to influence these systemic linkages. The motivation for this work is explained in Chapter 2, which reviews the state of the art in new growth theory and puts forward a typology of privately sponsored RandD activities and knowledge resources defining the premises on which the thesis rests. Chapters 3 and 4 investigate the RandD allocation and output decisions of a profitmaximising monopolist investing in exploratory- and applications-oriented research, dealing separately with product and process innovations. The characteristic properties of the optimal time paths are ascertained by means of formal and numerical optimal control methods, including comparative dynamics. The complementarity between the two modes of research is shown to generate increasing returns, but these turn out to be short-lived. The model is extended in Chapter 5 to study the development of multiple product lines. Knowledge spillovers and demand-side externalities across successive product lines can provide the basis for continued spending on RandD, allowing sustained output growth and profitability. Chapters 6 to 8 turn to the challenges of modelling the irreducible elements of uncertainty in the innovation process and their bearing upon the dynamics of market competition and industry structure. In the sequential game theoretic model introduced, firms can invest in fundamentally uncertain "innovative-RandD," or wait until the uncertainty surrounding original innovation is dispelled and invest in certain but costly "imitative-RandD." These decisions are taken in a vertically and horizontally differentiated market where noninnovating firms can compete with a "traditional" product. The industry-wide scale of RandD investments and the related evolution in market structure are determined endogenously. To do so, a symmetric equilibrium concept is defined and its uniqueness established. The model can support Schumpeterian industry evolutions, in which surges of innovative entry are followed by waves of imitation, and ensuing "creative destruction" in which traditional producers are driven out of the industry and innovators' rents are eventually eroded. Numerical simulations are employed in Chapter 7 to provide further insights into the evolution of product development, market structure, pricing, firm growth, profitability, and consumer welfare. The final chapter considers the implications of this game theoretic approach for competition and innovation policies.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, May 2007.