In explaining why service prices differ across countries (both developed and developing countries), most studies have paid attention to the role of structural variables such as population, trade balance, resource abundance etc., by using a full employment assumption. Due to the existence of high urban unemployment in developing countries, the assumption of full employment is not suitable. The objective of this study is to build general equilibrium models that can be used to explain the service price differences across developing countries by incorporating rural-urban migration and urban unemployment. Internal migration from rural to urban areas is allowed because of distortions in labor market. The current work includes structural variables that are used in the literature, such as agricultural land, mineral resources, labor endowment, trade deficit, population, and tourism, along with 2 new variables, manufacturing capital and services capital. This study also considers the effects of macroeconomic policies (fiscal and monetary policies) on service prices which are neglected in the literature. The theoretical models suggest that, ceteris paribus, larger land area, mineral resources, higher trade deficits, tourist receipts, and money supply increase service prices, but larger populations reduce service prices. The effects of services capital, labor force, the terms of trade, and government spending are ambiguous from the theoretical models. An empirical study is performed to test the theoretical implications. The empirical results suggest that larger endowments of land, mineral resources, manufacturing capital, labor force, and services capital, as well as higher trade deficits, tourist receipts, government spending, and money supply increase the service prices. Conversely, larger populations reduce service prices as predicted. / Graduation date: 1993

In this thesis we study the interdependency of individual decisions on work and family, particularly the dynamic interaction of the marriage market and the labor market. My basic idea is that marital status affects individual labor supply decisions, and in turn, labor market condition influences marriage formation and dissolution. While these interactions are evident, the overwhelming majority of research on labor or family economics usually simplifies the individual decision-making by assuming that one of two markets outcomes is given while studying the other one. In the empirical study, endogeneity issues are troublesome, especially under the dynamic setting. My work takes a different approach. I directly model the individual decision-making, which describes how marriage market and labor market interact with each other; and matching with survey data we empirically recover the underlying economic environments that characterize the structure of the marriage market and the labor market. I further examine to what extent my model explains the observed facts. Very few studies have been conducted to explore work and family issues in this direction partly due to its complexity. The structural models, besides the conventional regression, improve our perceptions on how individuals form decisions on work and family, which have far-reaching implications on policy designs and welfare evaluations. In my thesis, I explore all these issues in three steps. In chapter 1, I explain a stylized fact that there exists a positive correlation between rising wage inequality and declining marriage rates. A two-sided matching model is developed to exploit a theoretical channel through which wage inequality affects marriage rates. My model features a steady state equilibrium in which the whole marriage market is divided into groups and only people in the same group will marry each other. Using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) data from 1970 to 2000, my estimates indicate that a structural change occurs in the U.S. marriage market. The higher matching efficiency and declining elasticity of men suggest that the nowadays marriage market provides more chance to meet and better gender equity, though higher arrival rates also raise the outside options of getting married. Additionally, I find that wage inequality accounts for over 38% of the decline in marriage rate, which is underestimated in Gould (2003). Chapter 2 examines household dynamic labor supply after introducing bargaining between husbands and wives, which has not been thoroughly studied previously in literature. Here bargaining between husbands and wives determines the amount of husbands' earnings that are transferred to wives for their private consumption. A household search model that incorporates the intrahousehold bargaining is developed and estimated using panel data from the year 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). My results show that the portion of household income shared by husbands for private consumption is responsive to their employment status, suggesting the existence of the bargaining between the U.S. couples. My findings also imply that the labor supply of women will increase with higher women wage and lower money transfer from husbands to wives, showing that the income effect dominates for wives. Moreover, the wage frontier of husbands is positively correlated with wives' wages and negatively correlated with husbands' earnings transferred to wives, highlighting that husbands are subject to both the income effect and intra-household bargaining, and their decisions depend on which effect dominates. In the third and the last chapter, I study household unemployment duration. Previously, most studies have addressed the topic of job search at the individual level. This chapter studies job search patterns of married couples and in particular compares couple's unemployment duration given their spousal earnings. A household search model is introduced, which includes the bargaining between husbands and wives. I use the year 2001 panel data Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to estimate the structural model of family decisions. Our findings reveal that there exists a gender asymmetry in job search of the U.S. household: The more husbands earn, the longer wives search for a job; but the more wives earn, the sooner husbands find a job. / text

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published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Real Estate and Construction / Master / Master of Science in Real Estate and Construction

This thesis focuses on the effects of development assistance (ODA), private foreign commercial capital (PFX), domestic savings (SAV), the openness of the economy and producer prices on agricultural output, and on export and domestic shares of agricultural output in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This study uses panel data spanning 27 countries and the period 1970 to 1993. / The production function is a Cobb-Douglas type. Static export and domestic share equations are derived from a specification of the agricultural gross domestic product function. Transformed auto-regressive distributed-lag versions of the static share models are used to investigate long-run dynamics, persistence and implementation lags in the share response model. / Agricultural output is affected as follows. ODA, PFX and SAV have small positive or negative impact depending on agricultural region or economic policy environment. The impact of openness of the economy is negative in all agricultural regions, however, there is evidence of positive effect of openness within improved policy environment. None of these effects are statistically significant. / Export share is affected as follows. ODA, PFX and SAV have small positive impact in some agricultural regions and policy environments, both in the short-run and in the long-run. PFX is not significant anywhere. ODA is significant only when countries are grouped by policy environment in the short-run. SAV is significant in the short-run only in some regions, and significant in the long-run only in others. Openness has positive impact in the short-run. This is significant in many regions. Its long-run impact is mostly positive but not significant anywhere. The impact of producer price is mostly positive but not significant. / Efforts to encourage economic activities in rural communities such as improvements in domestic terms of trade in favor of agriculture, together with the provision of infrastructure are likely to stimulate output. Strategies to diversify and process agricultural exports in the face of falling agricultural commodity prices should be pursued.

This exploratory research examines the wage effects of a variety of measures thought to be important in the employment income determination process. It does this by using ordinary least squares multiple regression techniques to construct wage equations for two samples of blue-collar workers in Montreal. Blue-collar wage equations are constructed for: (i) the Montreal labour market and (ii) the Montreal food processing industry. / The results of this study show that Montreal blue-collar wages are determined by a variety of factors. Most importantly, however, are the wage effects exhibited by a worker's gender, union membership status and whether or not a worker has received a promotion from his/her present employer. These factors show statistically significant effects on the wages of blue-collar workers in the Montreal labour market as well as on the wages of blue-collar workers in the Montreal food processing industry. The present research also finds that certain factors have distinct wage effects on the different samples of blue-collar workers examined. Data from the present study indicates that the wages of Montreal blue-collar workers are influenced primarily by: (i) on-the-job training, (ii) promotions received, (iii) job opportunities available, (iv) an interruption in one's studies, (v) trade union membership and (vi) gender. While the wages of blue-collar workers employed specifically in the Montreal-area food processing industry are affected principally by: (i) the use of computers, (ii) the use of machines, (iii) promotions received, (iv) a varied work experience, (v) trade union membership, (vi) marital status and (vii) gender. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1985. / Bibliography: leaves 209-214. / Photocopy. / Microfilm. / xiii, 214 leaves, bound

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1985. / Bibliography: leaves [125]-129. / Photocopy. / x, 129 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

This thesis models the Australian-US Dollar (AUD/USD) exchange rate with particular attention being paid to investor risk aversion. Accounting for investor risk aversion in AUD/USD exchange rate modelling is novel, so too is the method used to measure risk aversion in this thesis. Investor risk aversion is measured using a technique developed in Bliss and Panigirtzoglou (2004), which makes use of Probability Density Functions (PDFs) extracted from option markets. More conventional approaches use forward-market pricing or Uncovered Interest Parity. Several methods of estimating PDFs from option and spot markets are examined, with the estimations from currency spot-markets representing an original application of an arbitrage technique developed in Stutzer (1996) to the AUD/USD exchange rate. The option and spot-market PDFs are compared using their first four moments and if estimated judiciously, the spot-market PDFs are found to have similar shapes to the option-market PDFs. So in the absence of an AUD/USD exchange rate options market, spot-market PDFs can act as a reasonable substitute for option-market PDFs for the purpose of examining market sentiment. The Relative Risk Aversion (RRA) attached to the AUD/USD, the US Dollar-Japanese Yen, the US Dollar-Swiss Franc and the US-Canadian Dollar exchange rates is measured using the Bliss and Panigirtzoglou (2004) technique. Amongst these exchange rates, only the AUD/USD exchange rate demonstrates a significant level of investor RRA and only over a weekly forecast horizon. The Bliss and Panigirtzoglou (2004) technique is also used to approximate a time-varying risk premium for the AUD/USD exchange rate. This risk premium is added to the cointegrating vectors of fixed-price and asset monetary models of the AUD/USD exchange rate. An index of Australia???s export commodity prices is also added. The out-of-sample forecasting ability of these cointegrating vectors is tested relative to a random walk using an error-correction framework. While adding the time-varying risk premium improves this forecasting ability, adding export commodity prices does so by more. Further, including both the time-varying risk premium and export commodity prices in the cointegrating vectors reduces their forecasting ability. So the time-varying risk premium is important for AUD/USD exchange rate modelling, but not as important as export commodity prices.

This dissertation contains a series of essays that provide empirical evidence for Australia on some fundamental predictions of real business cycle models and on the convergence and persistence of real interest rates. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to the issues examined in each chapter and provides an overview of the methodologies that are used. Tests of various basic predictions of standard real business cycle models for Australia are presented in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. Chapter 2 considers the question of great ratios for Australia. These are ratios of macroeconomic variables that are predicted by standard models to be stationary in the steady state. Using time series econometric techniques (unit root tests and cointegration tests) Australia great ratios are examined. In Chapter 3 a more restrictive implication of real business cycle models than the existence of great ratios is considered. Following the methodology proposed by Canova, Finn and Pagan (1994) the equilibrium decision rules for some standard real business cycle are tested on Australian data. The final essay on this topic is presented in Chapter 4. In this chapter a large-country, small-country is used to try and understand the reason for the sharp rise in Australia??s share of world output that began around 1990. Chapter 5 discusses real interest rate linkages in the Pacific Basin region. Vector autoregressive models and bootstrap methods are adopted to study financial linkages between East Asian markets, Japan and US. Given the apparent non-stationarity of real interest rates a related issue is examined in Chapter 6, viz. the persistence of international real interest rates and estimation of their half-life. Half-life is selected as a means of measuring persistence of real rates. Bootstrap methods are employed to overcome small sample issues in the estimation and a non-standard statistical inference methodology (Highest Density Regions) is adopted. Chapter 7 reapplies the High Density Regions methodology and bootstrap half-life estimation to the data used in Chapters 2 and 5. This provides a robustness check on the results of standard unit root tests that were applied to the data in those chapters. Main findings of the thesis are as follows. The long run implications of real business cycle models are largely rejected by the Australia data. This finding holds for both the existence of great ratios and when the explicit decision rules are employed. When the small open economy features of the Australian economy are incorporated in a two country RBC model, a country-specific productivity boom seems to provide a possible explanation for the rise in Australia??s share of world output. The essays that examine real interest rates suggest the following results. Following the East Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 there appears to have been a decline in the importance of Japan in influencing developments in the Pacific Basin region. In addition there is evidence that following the crisis Korea??s financial market became less insular and more integrated with the US. Finally results obtained from the half-life estimators suggest that despite the usual findings from unit root tests, real interest rates may in fact exhibit mean-reversion.