This study provides an overview of the Neoclassical theory of production as well as topics on market structure. It analyzes transportation costs, pricing, and economies of scale that determine production concentration and emphasizes the need of studies that would analyze possible effects if a North American Free Trade Area is implemented among the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The Mexican cement industry is used as an example of a sector with diverse industrial organization schemes, where the production process results in a trade-off between energy-saving technologies and pollution wreckage. Labor, capital and materials inputs are considered in the case study where various policy simulations signal some distortions that controlled input markets have on output, efficiency, and productivity during the 1963-1983 period on the cement industry of Mexico.

We study incentive compatible profit-sharing rules when output (or profit) is obtained via the joint use of a technology exhibiting decreasing marginal returns. The incentives compatibility criterion we adopt is that of strategy-proofness (SP), arguably the most robust and the most demanding incentives requirement. We first show that no strategy-proof mechanism is efficient. We then characterize the class of strategy-proof mechanisms in the two-agent case, and show that it is the union of the serial and reverse serial families of sharing rules. Moreover, SP and the requirement that no individual benefits from the presence of others (the familiar stand-alone test) characterize the class of rules known as fixed path methods (FPMs), which is a subset of the serial family. FPMs share marginal increments of input, and the corresponding increments of output, along a predetermined path. Finally, we consider a situation where a number of individuals form a partnership and contribute capital and labor to the enterprise. We propose a strategy-proof mechanism which improves upon autarky: the inverse marginal product proportions (IMPP) mechanism. At the margin, capital that would be left idle in autarky, but not under the efficient use of the total capital, is assigned to the agents with relatively low disutility of effort in proportion to the relative productivity of their own capital. The IMPP mechanism is effectively an FPM whose path is uniquely determined by the capital contributions of the partners. Thus, we establish a correspondence between the class of FPMs to manage a common property technology and the family of partnership problems. We discuss the appeal of the IMPP mechanism as an alternative to existing profit-sharing schemes in professional partnerships.

Export-share requirements have emerged as one of the most contentious issues in recent international trade policy debate between industrial and developing countries. This dissertation attempts to shed light on this debate by examining whether export-share requirements facilitate technology diffusion and entry promotion in developing countries. To that end, I utilize two dynamic models of duopoly to capture the effects of the policy imposed at different stage of competition. The first model portrays the case when the host country government imposes an export-share requirement on the foreign multinational after the firm has already installed certain production technology at its subsidiary's plant. The second model describes the case in which the foreign multinational knows about export-share requirement before choosing its production technology. In both models, I find that the effectiveness of an export-share requirement varies with its intensity. Stringent export-share requirement is shown to promote technology diffusion while a rather weak one results in the opposite. On the contrary, for the purpose of entry facilitation, stringent export-share requirement cannot completely eliminate entry deterrence options of the foreign multinational whereas the weak one succeeds in doing so. Thus, export-share requirement is not effective in serving the purposes of facilitating technology diffusion and entry promotion for developing countries hosting foreign direct investment. Another interesting result that emerged from my analysis is that the foreign multinational may benefit from export-share requirement. This is rather counterintuitive since it contradicts the existing finding that the foreign firm is worse off as the policy shifts rent toward the local firm. For a country wishing to speed up the level of technology diffusion and encourage entry of a local firm, my study shows that an export-share requirement is inferior to giving R&D subsidy to a local firm. My result supports Wang and Blomstrom (European Economic Journal 36, 1992, 137--155) policy recommendation which recognizes the importance of measures that aim to increase the absorptive ability of host countries rather than using performance requirements to do the job of encouraging technology transfer.

This dissertation consists of three essays on time series and panel data econometrics. The first essay considers the bootstrap method for the covariates augmented Dickey-Fuller (CADF) unit root test suggested by Hansen (1995). It is known that the CADF test is very powerful. However, its limit distribution depends on the nuisance parameter, and thus inference is not possible. To solve this problem, we propose to use the bootstrap method, and establish the asymptotic validity of the bootstrap CADF test. Simulations show that the bootstrap method provides correct sizes, with drastic power gains over the conventional ADF test. Our testing procedures are applied to the Nelson-Plosser data set and annual real exchange rates. In the second essay, we extend Chang's (2001) IV methodology for panel unit root test in three important directions. First, we allow for dependencies across cross sections at both short-run and long-run levels. Second, our theory permits the use of covariates to increase power as well as to control idiosyncrasies of individual units. Third, we re-examine the formulation of the unit root hypothesis in panels, and propose to analyze the hypotheses that only a fraction of cross-sectional units have unit roots. The resulting test statistics are all Gaussian and easy to implement. Simulations are performed, and the new tests are applied to quarterly and monthly real exchange rates. The third essay introduces a new estimation method for time-varying individual effects in a panel data model. An important application is the estimation of time-varying technical inefficiencies of individual firms using the fixed effects model. Most previous models require rather strong distributional assumptions about inefficiency and random noise, and/or impose explicit restrictions on the temporal pattern of inefficiency. This essay drops such assumptions, and provides a semiparametric method for estimation of the time-varying effects. The methods are related to principal component analysis, and estimate the time-varying effects using a small number of common functions. Simulations are performed, and the methods are applied to the U.S. banks data.

This study is an empirical analysis of household expenditure behavior using the Linear and Quadratic Expenditure Systems. The expenditure systems are estimated using data collected in 1972 by the Departmento Administrativo Nacional de Estadisticas (DANE) of Bogota, Colombia. The Linear Expenditure System(LES) has been estimated frequently since the initial work of Stone(1954), while the Quadratic Expenditure System(QES) is a relatively new system first estimated by Howe(1974). The LES is derived from the maximization of a modified Cobb-Douglas utility function, and the QES is derived from an indirect utility function through the application of Roy's(1941) Identity. The LES is a special case of the QES, and by estimating the more general QES, the validity of the restrictive assumptions of the LES can be tested. In the cross-section, the most severe restriction is that the income-consumption functions must be linear. Using the more flexible QES, consumption is a nonlinear function of income, which means that the marginal budget shares may vary for households at different income levels. The empirical results of this study indicate that the marginal budget shares do vary across income levels, and that the income-consumption functions are, in fact, nonlinear. For the 5219 households in the DANE survey, hundreds of expenditure items have been aggregated into the seven categories of food, housing, clothing, medical care, education, durable goods, and miscellaneous goods and services. The expenditure systems are estimated for the entire sample, for the sample divided according to income, urban/rural status, number of household members, and the education level of the household head. The empirical results confirm the superiority of the QES in most cases as judged by likelihood ratio tests. These results reinforce the conclusions of Howe(1974) and Pollak and Wales(1978a, 1978b) that the QES provides a statistically significant improvement over the LES. The empirical results of this study are useful to development planners in Colombia in order to more accurately predict the ultimate effects of income redistribution. In addition, the results help to evaluate the possibility of a leading sector of growth in the Colombian economy. Finally, the empirical results are compared with those from the Colombian study of Howe(1974) to test the sensitivity of the parameters to the data base which is used.

This dissertation examines two separate issues concerning systems of demand equations. The first essay deals with the econometric implementation of demand systems and the second analyzes the demand for integer-ordered goods. In the first essay, we examine the consequences of adopting the random utility hypothesis as an approach for randomizing a system of demand equations. Random utility models are appealing since they allow the usual assumption of deterministic utility maximizing behavior by each consumer to co-exist with the apparent randomness across individuals which is exhibited by data. Our results show that the use of random utility models implies that the disturbances of the demand equations may not be homoscedastic but must be functions of prices and/or income. If the demand system is generated by random utility maximization, then empirical studies of demand which have assumed homoscedastic disturbances will suffer the usual inferential difficulties. A possible explanation for the prevalent finding of nonsymmetry, therefore, is provided by the fact that most previous demand studies have, in fact, assumed homoscedasticity. An appropriate structure for the disturbances is obtained for the specific case of the linear expenditure system. A system of demand equations for international travel is estimated and compared using both the typical homoscedastic disturbances and the alternative specification we derive. The second essay develops a model of consumer behavior when consumers are confronted with lumpy alternatives. Specifically, the case of a single discrete good which can be purchased only in integer quantities is modeled. The model uses a systems approach, incorporating demand for the discrete good with demand for continuous goods into a complete system of demand equations. After deriving a general form for the mixed integer/continuous model, a particular functional form for the model is derived by imposing linearity constraints on the demand equations. To obtain the stochastic specification, the framework of random utility maximization is adopted. Finally, the model is shown to be identified and an estimation procedure is developed using maximum likelihood methods.

The concept of period length in the empirical application of cash-in-advance (CIA) models is introduced. CIA models posit that individuals and firms hold cash to purchase goods over a period. However, there has been no research into how long a period is. Existing empirical studies use quarterly or annual data in simulations or estimations of CIA models. This is inappropriate if individuals or firms conduct financial transactions at intervals which are more frequent than 3 months or 12 months. The period length which is empirically consistent with the theoretical restrictions imposed by a CIA model for 9 two-digit (SIC based) industries is determined to be one to six weeks, depending on the industry examined and money variable used. Unlike other empirical work using CIA models, the introduction of the concept of period length allows this model to display variability in the velocity of money. It is also found that the CIA binds between 1% to 13% of the time instead of nearly 100% as in other papers. The effectiveness of CIA in modeling the effect of money on firms and the demand for money by firms is demonstrated in two applications. Each application incorporates the period length concept described above. In the first application, it is found that money is not an omitted variable in the production function of a firm. This result is based upon the fact that the inclusion of money through the use of a CIA constraint into a model of production does not significantly affect the estimated partial elasticies of input substitution. This paper is the first empirical work reporting this result, and it casts some doubt on the results of several earlier papers which conclude that money does indeed belong as an argument in the production function. In the second application, the Euler equations of a firm subject to a CIA constraint are used to derive the firm' s money demand function. The CIA framework yields parameter restrictions for the money demand function which can be tested econometrically to evaluate the performance of the CIA model of money demand.

This dissertation formulates and analyzes three original models dealing with aspects of optimal property rights protection, in varying contexts. Chaper 1 is a survey of the literature on the importance of property and property rights in economic thought beginning from the Physiocratic regime up to the recent literature which deals with implications of imperfect property rights. Chapter 2 considers an overlapping generations model where households accumulate wealth and inuence the political process of determing the optimal property rights regime through maximization of the household welfare function with respect to the tax rate which yields revenue to nance the cost of enforcement of property rights. Both the cases of homogeneous and heterogeneous households are considered. The long run equilibrium levels of income are calculated and stability properties analyzed. It is shown that the optimally determined levels of property rights enforcement evolves over time, and depends on a number of factors, such as the discount rate and the share of capital in output. Chapter 3 uses a principal-agent approach to model a joint venture, where a multinational rm transfers technological knowledge to a local rm during their partnership. The local firm may defect on acquiring adequate knowledge to operate as a monopolist. Anticipating this, the multinational chooses to transfer an amount of technology just sufficient to pre-empt defection, given the rate of compensation earned. The optimal level of enforcement of property rights, represented by the optimal rate of compensation, is determined by maximizing the social welfare of the home country. It is found that the optimal rate of compensation is higher when the goods are produced solely for the home market than in the case where the goods are produced only for the export market. Chapter 4 finds a basis for the determination of an optimal patent length in the pharmaceutical industry, in a North South model, where the Northundertakes R&D and the South carries out reverse engineering. In absence of a legal barrier, the Southern rms can produce replicated antibiotics that erode the monopoly power of the Northern rm. This works against the Norths R&D incentives. However, a ban on reverse engineering implies the prevalence of high Northern monopoly prices. An optimal patent length must balance the two opposing forces. It is demonstrated that, for plausible lengths of the Souths planning horizon, the optimal patent length varies positively with the R&D cost parameter and negatively with the parameter for production cost mark-up of the South. / Cette dissertation se compose de trois modèles originaux concernant des aspets variés du problème de détermination du niveau de l'application des droits de propriété dans des contextes différents. Le premier chapitre est un aperçu de la littérature sur l'importance de la propriété et des droits de propriété, depuis le régime physiocratique jusquà la littérature récente sur différents aspects des droits de propriété imparfaits. Le deuxième chapitre considère un modèle aux générations imbriquées dans lequel les ménages accumulent de la richesse and influencent le processus de détermination du régime optimal de droits de propriété, en maximisant leur bien-être par rapport au taux de taxation qui nance l'application des droits de propriété. On étudie le cas des ménages homogènes ainsi que le cas des ménages hétérogènes. On calcule le niveau de revenue à l'équilibre stationnaire, et détermine la stabilité de l'équilibre. On démontre que le niveau optimal de l'application des droits de propriété évolu au fil de temps et dépend des facteurs tels que le taux d'actualisation et le partage de capital dans le revenu. Le troisième chapitre utilise l'approache principal-agent pour modéliser un joint venture dans le quel une entreprise multinationale transfère la technologie à une entreprise locale. Celle-ci a l'intérêt d'annuler le contrat de joint venture quand elle a accumulé un savoir suffisant, pour devenir un monopole. L'entreprise multinationale, anticipant l'incitation à la defection de son partenaire, décide de transférer un niveau réduit de technologie dans l'objectif de préempter la défection, en tenant compte du taux de compensation dans le cas de défection. Le niveau optimal de la protection des droits de propriété, représenté par le taux optimal de compensation, est déterminé par la maximisation du bien-être du pays domestique. On montre que le taux optimal de compensation est plus élevé dans le cas où l'output est vendu au marché domestique que dans le cas où est destiné au marché étranger. Le quatrième chapitre cherche la fondation pour la détermination de la longueur optimale des brevets de l'industrie pharmaceutique. On étudie un modèle Nord-Sud, dans lequel une entreprise du Nord effectue de la recherche et les entreprises du Sud font la rétro-ingénierie. S'il n'y a pas d'obstacles juridiques, les entreprises du Sud produisent des antibiotiques répliqués, ce qui érode le pouvoir de monopole de l'entreprise du Nord. Cela n'encourage pas la recherche dans le pays Nord. Par contre, la prohibition de la rétro-ingénierie implique des prix élevés du monopole. La longeur optimale des brevets balances les deux forces opposantes. Pour les horizons de temps raisonables, on montre que la longeur optimale des brevets est une fonction croissante du paramètre de coût et une fonction décroissante du paramètre de mark-up des coûts de production dans le pays Sud.

<p> This dissertation comprise of two chapters on the macroeconomic effect of natural resource rents. Specifically, we focus on the effect of resource rents on human capital accumulation. In chapter one, we present a new mechanism for the curse of natural resources, i.e., "why natural resource rents if distributed as transfers to individuals' income might retard economic growth and development: their effect on incentives to invest in human capital". Extending an OLG model for this purpose, we show that the windfall rents from natural resources, when transferred directly to citizens distort their incentives away from accumulating the optimum level of human capital and thus from economic growth. This increases the chance of a low-level equilibrium trap and reduces the chance of converging to a higher income per capita in the long run.</p><p> In chapter two, we present a dynamic panel data model, and a cross section model to see the effect of transfers in countries with high natural resource rents per person on human capital accumulation. We use tertiary education as a human capital indicator, since at this educational level, people choose to accumulate professional skills and direct their talents to sectors with the highest expected return. Using a dynamic panel data model for five years averages of tertiary education, one can see that the combined effect of government transfers and natural resource rents per labor have a negative and significant effect on human capital. However, using a cross section analysis for the same purpose, one can see that not only the combined effect of resource rents per labor and government transfers have a negative and significant effect on tertiary education, but also resource rents per labor alone have a negative and significant effect on tertiary education. Our cross section results coincide with the natural resource curse literature as it shows that resource rents have a long-term negative effect on social capital investments such as tertiary education. </p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Harvard University, 2006. / (UnM)AAI3217759. Advisers: Oliver Hart; Philippe Aghion. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-05, Section: A, page: 1858.