Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Lee Wai-yee. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-103). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Literature Review --- p.4 / Chapter 2.1 --- Trade Models --- p.4 / Chapter a. --- Ricardian model --- p.4 / Chapter b. --- Heckscher-Ohlin model --- p.4 / Chapter c. --- Specific Factor model --- p.5 / Chapter 2.2 --- Policy Implications --- p.5 / Chapter 2.3 --- Factor Mobility --- p.5 / Chapter 2.4 --- Imperfect Competition and Trade Policy --- p.6 / Chapter 2.5 --- Capital Taxation --- p.7 / Chapter 2.6 --- Unemployment --- p.9 / Chapter 2.7 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.13 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Capital Taxation under Perfect Competition --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.13 / Chapter 3.2 --- The Model --- p.16 / Chapter 3.3 --- Comparative Static Analysis --- p.20 / Chapter 3.4 --- Welfare Analysis --- p.23 / Chapter 3.5 --- Conclusions --- p.26 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- Capital Taxation under Imperfect Competition --- p.27 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.27 / Chapter 4.2 --- The Model --- p.28 / Chapter 4.3 --- Comparative Static Analysis --- p.36 / Chapter 4.4 --- Welfare Analysis --- p.40 / Chapter 4.5 --- Conclusions --- p.44 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- Capital Taxation and Unemployment under Perfect Competition --- p.47 / Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.47 / Chapter 5.2 --- The Model --- p.48 / Chapter 5.3 --- Comparative Static Analysis --- p.53 / Chapter 5.4 --- Welfare Analysis --- p.57 / Chapter 5.5 --- Conclusions --- p.59 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- Capital Taxation and Unemployment under Imperfect Competition --- p.61 / Chapter 6.1 --- Introduction --- p.61 / Chapter 6.2 --- The Model --- p.62 / Chapter 6.3 --- Comparative Static Analysis --- p.68 / Chapter 6.4 --- Welfare Analysis --- p.74 / Chapter 6.5 --- Conclusions --- p.77 / Chapter Chapter 7 --- Conclusions --- p.79 / Appendices --- p.83 / Appendix I --- p.83 / Appendix II --- p.83 / Appendix III --- p.84 / Appendix IV --- p.85 / Appendix V --- p.86 / Appendix VI --- p.87 / Appendix VII --- p.88 / Appendix VIII --- p.88 / Appendix IX --- p.89 / Appendix X --- p.90 / Appendix XI --- p.91 / Appendix XII --- p.92 / Reference --- p.93

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-88). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

The three chapters of my dissertation study imperfect competition, multiproduct firms, and consumer demand. Chapter 1 estimates a structural model of consumer demand and oligopolistic retail competition in order to study three mechanisms through which retailers affect allocative efficiency and consumer welfare. First, variable markups across retail stores within a location induce a misallocation of resources. The deadweight loss from this retail misallocation can be large since a significant fraction of household consumption comes from retail goods. Second, across locations, retail markups may vary with market size. This regional variation plays an important role in recent economic geography models as an agglomeration force. In the limit, models predict that the distortion from variable markups disappears in large markets, although it is an open question, How Large is Large? Third, since retail stores are differentiated, differences in the variety of retail stores available to consumers matters for consumer welfare across locations. To quantify the importance of these mechanisms, I estimate my model using retail scanner data with prices and sales at the barcode level from thousands of stores across the US. I find that the deadweight loss and consumption misallocation from variable retail markups are economically significant. I estimate that retail markups are smaller in larger cities, and that markets the size of New York City and Los Angeles are approximately at the undistorted monopolistically competitive limit. My results show that retail store variety significantly impacts the cost of living and could be an important consumption-based agglomeration force. The second chapter of my dissertation develops and structurally estimates a model of heterogeneous multiproduct firms that can be used to decompose the firm-size distribution into the contributions of costs, quality, markups, and product scope. In this joint work with Stephen J. Redding and David E. Weinstein, we find that variation in firm quality and product scope explains at least four fifths of the variation in firm sales using Nielsen barcode data on prices and sales. We show that the imperfect substitutability of products within firms, and the fact that larger firms supply more products than smaller firms, implies that standard productivity measures are not independent of demand system assumptions and probably dramatically understate the relative productivity of the largest firms. Although most firms are well approximated by the monopolistic competition benchmark of constant markups, we find that the largest firms that account for most of aggregate sales depart substantially from this benchmark, and exhibit both variable markups and substantial cannibalization effects. The final chapter of my dissertation develops a new integrable demand system, called the Doubly-Translated CDES demand system, which is well suited to theoretical and empirical work. Commonly used analytically and computationally tractable demand systems severely restrict key properties of demand, which parametrically pins down the answers to many important economic questions. The Doubly-Translated CDES demand system is flexible in important ways that common demand systems are not, while maintaining effective global regularity and global consistency. Using data, I provide examples of this demand system's flexibility by calibrating different parameter values. I discuss how this demand system can be estimated with regularity imposed and correcting for the endogeneity of prices using constrained Nonlinear GMM.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1996. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-147).

by Richard L. Schmalensee. / "April 1984." / Bibliography: p.17-18.

In this thesis, we analyze the impact of the decentralization of price and leadtime decisions made by the marketing and production departments, respectively, in a make-to-order firm. We first study a monopoly environment, and find that in the decentralized setting, the total demand generated is larger, leadtimes are longer, quoted prices are lower, and the firm profits are lower as compared to the centralized setting. We show that coordination can be achieved using a transfer price contract with bonus payments, where both departments receive a fraction of the total revenues generated as a bonus payment. In the second study, we extend this work to a duopoly environment, where two firms compete on the basis of their price and leadtime quotes in a common market. We find that under intense price competition, firms may suffer from a decentralized structure, particularly under high flexibility induced by high capacity, where revenue based sales incentives motivate sales/marketing for more aggressive price cuts resulting in eroding margins. We take the parameters of the demand models in the first two studies as constant, while estimating those parameters based on historical data is a very important problem in practice. In the last study of this thesis, we address the challenges encountered in estimating the price sensitivity of customers shifting focus to the passenger travel industry. We explore how to obtain better price elasticity estimates through an empirical study with an emphasis on the endogeneity problem, which arises as a result of the simultaneous determination of supply and demand. We show that if one does not account for endogeneity, price elasticities may induce an upward-sloping demand curve suggesting that high price produces high demand, or may be biased downward to the extent that elastic demand curves are incorrectly classified as inelastic. We show the improvement in price elasticities through an instrumental variable approach.