Despite promotion by well-known economists and supporting economic theory, econometric analyses of voucher systems often find that they have been unsuccessful in improving traditional measures of educational success. This paper examines a possible explanation of this phenomenon by comparing the drivers of educational achievement and of school popularity by examining private school choice. The findings of this paper indicate that there is a disconnect between school success and school popularity, which adversely effects both the demand and supply-side benefits of voucher systems. Additionally, this paper reviews matching mechanisms that seek to efficiently match students with schools based on both student and school preferences.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 168-172). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 168-172). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Economics." Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-120).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 105 p. : ill. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-105).

This study investigates the behaviour of stock prices or stock returns in an oil exporting developing country (Iran). Following an examination of the role of the Iran stock market and oil revenues in the Iranian economy in chapter 2, the extensive review of theoretical and empirical literature on stock market efficiency is provided in chapter 3. Chapter 4 empirically investigates the efficiency of Iran stock market in weak form. Empirical findings from employing conventional and nonlinear unit root tests even in presence of endogenous and exogenous structural break pOints indicate that the daily Iran stock prices index follow random walk theory and Iran stock market is efficient in weak form. In view of the distributional characteristics of stock returns, chapter 5 models the volatility dynamics of the Iran stock market. Due to existence of risk premium, in this market investors with long horizon are compensated with high returns for bearing high risk. On the other hand, the empirical analysis shows lack of asymmetric volatility in the behaviour of Iran stock return series. In view of the dominant role of oil export revenues in Iranian economy, chapter 6 examines the possible dynamic relationship between the Iran stock market and international oil market. The results from adopting symmetric and asymmetric mUltivariate GARCH models based on underlying data generating process indicate lack of return and volatility spillover between Iran stock returns and international oil prices.

This report examines two trading strategies on crude oil futures contracts by employing four time series models. Using daily prices of crude oil futures contracts in recent two years, we found that those models with better predictive ability will generate more profitable opportunities with lower risk from the result of simulated trading process. However, the two trading strategies associated with different models perform completely different. The empirical reasoning for the performance of different model-strategies is discussed, as well as applying the appropriate models and strategies in different markets. This work helps the research and development in statistical trading strategies / text

While political scientists have traditionally examined social influence through social network or contextual studies, this dissertation argues for the use of spatial econometrics as an alternative approach. While spatial econometrics is not new to political science, the dissertation attempts to broaden its application by exploring spaces based on geography, demographic characteristics, and ideology. Social influence can be understood as a form of spatial interdependence among individuals in these spaces and can be analyzed as spatial autocorrelation. In the dissertation, I discuss the dimensions of the three spaces, what might account for mutual influence in these spaces, how to measure distances in these spaces, and how to use these distances for estimating social influence in models of political attitudes using ANES data. By taking a broader approach to space, I show that spatial econometrics can offer many advantages over more conventional approaches. / text

This dissertation consists of three studies in the field of health economics. The first chapter studies the market situation of the U.S. nursing home industry. It uses the most recent data available from the Annual Survey of Nursing Homes conducted in Wisconsin. In this study, we derive theoretical predictions from an optimization problem of a representative nursing home under various assumptions. We introduce a new measure, a home's bed-utilization rate, in our empirical strategy and find evidence of excess demand from Medicaid patients in Wisconsin. A positive relationship between Medicaid payment rates and private-pay prices is found in homes with high bed utilization. Additionally, we find strong adverse effects of higher reimbursement rates on quality measures. These findings prove there is an excess demand from Medicaid patients in Wisconsin. This conclusion has direct implications for the quality of care that a nursing home provides for its patients. The second study takes advantage of the "natural experiment" features of the major health care reform in Thailand in 2002 in order to estimate the price elasticity of health care demand among Thai citizens. We use the difference-in-difference technique to capture the pure effect of the reform on the health care utilization behavior of those who were directly affected by the reform. In order to capture any secular trend in health care utilization, we use data from a group of people who were not affected by the reform. We find that the reduction in health care price immediately induced those who lacked health insurance coverage to increase their visits to a public health care facility, although similar trends were not found a few years after the reform. The estimated change in visits is used to calculate the price elasticity of demand, which falls in the range of -1.36 to -0.58. The last study examines the relationship between risky behaviors among Americans aged 50-65 and their health insurance coverage. Despite the fact that moral hazard behaviors are predicted by economic theory, the study finds that health insurance has no significant effect on certain risky behaviors such as smoking. Surprisingly, we find a significantly positive relationship between health insurance coverage and healthy behaviors such as exercising regularly. This finding reflects the importance of health insurance companies in providing its customers with more health information that could encourage health-oriented attitudes. / text

This dissertation consists of three empirical essays of which contributions consist, first, in developing spatial weight matrices based on more than just pure geographical proximity for the modeling of interregional externalities. Second, my essays propose different approaches to discover spatial heterogeneity in the data generating processes, including the interregional externalities, under investigation. This dissertation provides Economic Geographers and Regional Scientists interested in the modeling and measurement of spatial externalities a set of practical examples based on new datasets and state-of-the-art spatial econometric techniques to consider for their own work. I hope my dissertation will provide them with some guidance on how various aspects of spatial externalities can be incorporated in traditional spatial weight matrices and of how much the impact of externalities can be spatially heterogeneous. The results of the dissertation should help spatial and regional policy makers to understand better various aspects of interregional dependence in regional economic systems and to devise locally effective and place-tailored spatial and regional policies. The first essay investigates the negative spatial externalities of irrigation on corn production. The spatial externalities of irrigation water are well known but have never been examined in a spatial econometric framework so far. We investigate their role in a theoretical model of profit-maximizing farming and verify our predictions empirically in a crop production function measured across US Corn Belt counties. The interregional groundwater and surface water externalities are modeled based on actual aquifer and river stream network characteristics. The second essay examines the positive spatial externalities of academic and private R&D spending in the frame of a regional knowledge production function measured across US counties. It distinguishes the role of local knowledge spillovers that are determined by geographical proximity from distant spillovers that we choose to capture through a matrix of patent creation-citation flows. The advantage of the latter matrix is its capacity to capture the technological proximity between counties as well as the direction of knowledge spillovers. These two elements have been missed in the literature so far. The last essay highlights and measures the presence of spatial heterogeneity in the marginal effect of the innovation inputs, more especially of the interregional knowledge spillovers. The literature of knowledge production function has adopted geographically aggregated units and controlled for region-specific conditions to highlight the presence of spatial heterogeneity in regional knowledge creation. However, most empirical studies have relied on a global modeling approach that measures spatially homogenous marginal effects of knowledge inputs. This essay explains the source of the heterogeneity in innovation and then measures the spatial heterogeneity in the marginal effects of knowledge spillovers as well as of other knowledge input factors across US counties. For this purpose, the nonparametric local modeling approaches of Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) and Mixed GWR are used.