acase@tulane.edu

The study of the bankruptcy phenomenon has been a long-standing interest of both the academic and nonacademic world. The following four research categories---bankruptcy costs, bankruptcy causes, bankruptcy prediction, and aggregate macroeconomic influences on bankruptcy---constitute majority of the work that has been done. This dissertation falls into the fourth research category---research on aggregate macroeconomic influences on bankruptcy---and contains mainly three parts. Part one of the dissertation provides analysis on the bankruptcy trend and on the evolution of bankruptcy process in the United States, and a literature review on the bankruptcy topic and the major findings in this line of research. Part two studies the interaction between the bankruptcy variables and other important macro variables---national output, money supply, interest rate, and price level---in the United States from 1870 to 1994. The study is done in a time series framework, using time series techniques such as unit root, cointegration, and Granger-causality tests, as well as impulse response graphs. It is found that the state of the macroeconomy has profound impact on the bankruptcy phenomenon in the United States during the sample period under examination. It is also found that the bankruptcy variables have important impacts on various interest rates considered. Part three looks at the impact of 'uncertainty' on aggregate economic activity, and investigates the impact of interest rates uncertainty on the mean value of the bankruptcy variable and the impact of bankruptcy uncertainty on the prevailing interest rates with post World-War-II United States data. With empirical evidence from bivariate GARCH-M model, it is shown that higher interest rate uncertainty invariably leads to more bankruptcies. On the other hand, however, the impact of bankruptcy uncertainty on the prevailing interest rates is negligible / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

It is the primary purpose of this study to develop a theoretical framework that can be used to analyze Florida's resident recreational anglers' behavior toward fishing days per trip. This is accomplished by focusing on linkages between household budgeting and recreational fishermen's behavior. The flexibility is also introduced in the theoretical model to accommodate the influence of household income on the demand for fishing days per trip through the concept of allocated household income for fishing. In addition, extended within this theoretical framework is the Pearce-Gibbs travel cost model by introducing a non-linear budget constraint. / Empirical results indicate that household income does not explain Florida resident anglers' demand for fishing days per trip. This conclusion is based on the fact that the results of the household income variable are statistically insignificant. However, there is some evidence that allocated income (i.e., money currently available) is a more appropriate variable for explaining the demand for fishing days per trip. / The second and third objectives of the study were to estimate Hicksian and Marshallian user value for a day's fishing and the value of Florida's resident saltwater recreational fishery, respectively. It is found that the Hicksian compensating and equivalent variations did not diverge much in magnitude from the Marshallian consumer surplus. This is due to the fact that the income effect is generally very small. The annual 1980 value of the resident saltwater fishery ranges from $299.27 million to \$6.075 billion. The value of $1.6 billion obtained by Bell, {\it et al.} (1982) falls in the range of our estimates. / Lastly, empirical results are consistent with the current move toward a resident saltwater fishing license in the state of Florida. Selling an artificial property right, i.e., a saltwater fishing license, for common property fishery resources is an essential pre-condition in establishing more effective management policy to protect marine fishery resources. This policy prevents free-riders from exploiting marine fishery resources and reduces Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons." / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 48-10, Section: A, page: 2684. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1987.

This dissertation contains three essays on economic transition and institutional change in Central and Eastern Europe. The first paper analyzes patterns of economic coordination in Estonia and Slovenia, two post-socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, and argues that Estonia and Slovenia are good examples of liberal and coordinated market economies as defined in the Varieties of Capitalism literature. The main focus is on industrial relations and wage bargaining, but other areas studied by this literature are considered as well. The paper also explores the origins of these institutions by examining the interaction of inherited institutions and strategic policy choices, esp. the effects of privatization and monetary policy on formalizing coordination. The chapter also considers some general implications of this analysis for the study of post-socialist transition and comparative capitalism. / The second paper seeks to explain the diversity in economic governance and industrial relations across the eight transition countries that became members of the EU in 2004. It argues that three different models of economic governance emerged in the 1990s---a liberal market economy model (associated with pluralist interest representation), a coordinated model (associated with corporatist interest representation) and a mixed model, in which social pacts played a significant role. The paper accounts for this variation by developing a theory based on networks. It seeks to demonstrate that two factors---the degree to which the communist system fostered horizontal network ties and the degree to which ownership reform preserved and promoted network ties---can account for the type of economic governance prevalent in each country. The four case studies of Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Estonia are used to explore the causal mechanisms. / The third paper examines the development of trade policy in Poland and Estonia from the early 1990s until EU accession in 2004. The paper also develops a typology of historical sequences based on two dimensions---extraordinary politics and path breaking---to categorize the policy evolution and processes of change in these countries. It examines why both countries liberalized trade during a period of extraordinary politics at the outset of the transition process, but why this only led to a critical juncture and sustained liberalization in Estonia. The paper suggests that policy change during periods of extraordinary politics are best understood by examining the structure of executive politics and the process of preference formation, whereas the sustainability of trade policy reform is best understood by analyzing interests and institutions.

In this dissertation, we introduce a general interest rate modeling framework by looking at yield curves in a Hilbert space, and bridge the popular HJM factor models with more recent random field models. Then we study the problem of vanilla interest rate option (cap) pricing under the random field model. This will be a generalization of Kennedy (1994) paper in the sense that the volatility will also follow a random field process instead of being deterministic. In particular, we consider both cases in which the two random fields for forward rates and volatilities are independent or correlated. In the computation of option prices, we have proposed a log-normal approximation of the summary statistics---integrated volatility, for the independent case and have proposed a trivariate Gaussian approximation for the correlated case. The approximations will enable us to compute option prices much faster than the usual brute force Monte Carlo method which introduces certain discretization error. Finally, we perform simulation studies of a MCMC estimation procedure for a special random field model with one factor stochastic volatility.

This dissertation primarily studies reputation effects in internet auctions. It explores bidding fee auctions (BFAs) and the reputations within them, marketplace auctions and the reputations across them, and choice overload studies and the consistencies between them. The first chapter examines BFAs---an auction format in which bidders pay a fee every time they bid. In these auctions, the prize value diminishes as the auction progresses, and the person who pays the most does not necessarily win. BFA websites are an increasingly common way to shop online. In my sample of Swoopo.com auctions, there is heavy overbidding as revenues routinely double prize values. Even experienced users frequently earn negative returns. Despite this apparent violation of individual-rationality constraints, bidders generally respond to underlying economic incentives. I identify the aggressive strategies employed by savvy users and I interpret the causes of their (relative) success. In the second chapter, I consider the eBay feedback mechanism, which epitomizes trust-building systems in the anonymous world of online marketplaces. Despite many years of analysis, the feedback mechanism's efficacy is surprisingly poorly understood (Hasker and Sickles 2010). This paper helps fill the void. Using a dataset that is unique for its variety and longevity, this paper advances comprehension of the reputations process and, by extension, the nature of trust in anonymous settings. I find that recent rule changes---e.g., the barring of sellers from leaving neutral or negative feedback---have rekindled the importance of a good reputation for most products, although the record has been mixed. Finally, the third chapter conducts a meta-analysis of the choice overload phenomenon. Despite numerous studies investigating choice overload, recent meta-analytic research concluded that its main effect is non-significant and questioned the existence of reliable triggers. In contrast, my coauthors and I document a significant main effect and identity four key factors that reliably moderate overload. More importantly, we generalize these factors into a cohesive conceptual framework, quantify their impact, and compare their effect sizes to show that they can sufficiently predict choice overload.

In the first chapter, we examine the relation between efficiency and competition in a dynamic framework. For this purpose, we measure efficiencies and conduct of the U.S. airlines in two city-pairs. We model the conduct parameter as an unobservable state variable which is an AR(1) process and estimate it by the square-root Kalman filter technique. Our results accords with Hick's (1935) 'quiet life hypothesis.' In the second chapter, we propose using the Kalman filter estimator (KFE) to estimate the technical efficiency. We assume that the effects term is an AR(1) process or a random walk. We apply the KFE to estimate the average efficiencies of the U.S. airlines during the period 1971-1986. We found evidence of 'quiet life hypothesis.' In the third chapter, we estimate the time-varying efficiencies of the U.S. banks during 1984-1995 with four different efficiency estimators. Using these series of efficiency estimates, we make a multivariate Kalman filter analysis to examine the efficiency trend in the G.S. banks during this period. We observed that the regulations and innovations had a positive effect on the efficiency of G.S. banks as expected. However, this positive effect decayed through time. The fourth chapter generalizes the well-known Battese-Coelli (1992) (BC) estimator to allow endogenous regressors. The regressors are still assumed to be independent of the effects though they are correlated with the irregular term. The simulations show the superiority of our method to the BC estimator. Efficiency is a residual that is caused by managerial mistakes. In the final chapter, we propose some strategies to minimize such mistakes in the Stackelberg competition world with price discrimination. We suggest that the leader should use its preemptive advantage to attract the highest value customers and that the follower should price discriminate over the residual demand.