Thesis advisor: Fabio Schiantarelli / Thesis advisor: James Anderson / The thesis is composed of the following three distinct papers. 1.Banks and Development: Jewish Communities in the Italian Renaissance and Current Economic Performance Do banks affect long-term economic performance? I answer this question by relying on an historical development that occurred in Italian cities during the 15th century. A sudden change in the Catholic doctrine had driven the Jews toward money lending. Cities that were hosting Jewish communities developed complex banking institutions for two reasons: first, the Jews were the only people in Italy allowed to lend for a profit; second the Franciscan reaction to Jewish usury led to the creation of charity lending institutions that evolved into many of the current Italian banks. Using Jewish demography in 1450 as an instrument, I estimate large effects of current banking development on the income-per-capita of Italian cities. Additional firm-level analyses suggest that well-functioning local banks exert large effects on aggregate productivity by reallocating resources toward more efficient firms. Controlling for province effects, using additional historical data on Jewish demography and exploiting the expulsion of the Jews from the Spanish territories in Italy in 1541, I argue that my results are not driven by omitted institutional, cultural and geographical characteristics. In particular, I show that the difference in current income between cities that hosted Jewish communities and cities that did not exists only in those regions that were not Spanish territories in the 16th century. These difference-in-difference estimates suggest that the Jewish Diaspora can explain at least 10% of the current income gap between Northern and Southern Italy. 2. Contract Incompleteness, Globalization and Vertical Structure: an Empirical Analysis This paper studies the effects of international openness and contracting institutions on vertical integration. It first derives a number of predictions regarding the interactions between trade barriers, contracting costs, technology intensity, and the extent of vertical integration from a simple model with incomplete contracts. Then it investigates these predictions using a new dataset of over 14000 firms from 45 developing countries. Consistent with theory, the effect of technology intensity of domestic producers on their likelihood to vertically integrate is decreasing in the quality of domestic contracting institutions and in international openness. Contract enforcing costs are particularly high in developing countries and their effects on the vertical structure of technological intensive firms may have significant welfare costs. If improving domestic contracting institutions is not feasible an equivalent solution is to increase openness to international trade. This would discipline domestic suppliers reducing the need for vertical integration. 3. Productivity, Welfare and Reallocation: Theory and Firm-Level Evidence (joint with Susanto Basu, Fabio Schiantarelli and Luis Serven) We prove that in a closed economy without distortionary taxation, the welfare of a representative consumer is summarized to a first order by the current and expected future values of the Solow productivity residual in level and by the initial endowment of capital. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies TFP as the right summary measure of welfare (even in situations where it does not properly measure technology) and makes it possible to calculate the contributions of disaggregated units (industries or firms) to aggregate welfare using readily available TFP data. We show how these results must be modified if the economy is open or if taxes are distortionary. We then compute firm and industry contributions to welfare for a set of European OECD countries (Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain), using industry-level (EU-KLEMS) and firm-level (Amadeus) data. After adding further assumptions about technology and market structure (firms minimize costs and face common factor prices), we show that welfare change can be decomposed into three components that reflect respectively technical change, aggregate distortions and allocative efficiency. Then, using the appropriate firm-level data, we assess the importance of each of these components as sources of welfare improvement in the same set of European countries. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Overreliance on energy from fossil fuels is unsustainable because of their regional depletion and associated environmental impacts. The British industrial sector accounts for around one fifth of final energy demand and one third of carbon emissions nationally. This thesis attempts to quantify the potential for industrial energy efficiency from the current baseline, by adopting thermodynamic and economic perspectives. The methodology involves a top-down analysis of energy trends within the manufacturing sector to determine the baseline against which changes are measured, leading to bottom-up case studies which explicitly consider the detailed mechanisms affecting energy demand. Top-down analysis highlights the diversity between industrial sectors, for which a sectoral classification based on process homogeneity is proposed. It also enables the long term, systemic potential for efficiency improvements to be estimated and identifies the barriers to uptake. Bottom-up case studies are better suited to identifying the sectoral potential in the short to medium term. Firstly, the technical potential for heat recovery from industrial sectors is quantified by recourse to thermodynamic quality and spatial considerations. Secondly, an energy and exergy analysis of a glass furnace enables a distinction between avoidable and unavoidable losses, leading to the identification of economic savings. Thirdly, a process integration study at a pulp and paper mill based on a pinch analysis and optimisation of a heat exchanger network highlights economic efficiency improvements. This thesis demonstrates that realising the full industrial energy efficiency potential requires improvements to public policy intended to overcome market-related barriers, especially the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and the Carbon Trust, with additional scope for a mandatory efficiency standard relating to motors. Energy efficiency has to part of a company’s overall strategy to be effective. Future work should focus on heterogeneous sectors and the broader effects on industrial energy efficiency of globalisation and the shift towards services.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Cette thèse contribue à la littérature théorique et empirique concernant l’hétérogénéité des entreprises et le commerce international. La partie théorique analyse les conséquences de la libéralisation du commerce lorsque les entreprises sont hétérogènes et les pays asymétriques. La partie empirique discute le sens de causalité de la relation entre la performance des entreprises et leur statut international. Les entreprises sont-elles plus performantes parce qu’elles exportent et/ou importent ? Ou sont-ce les entreprises les plus performantes qui s’auto-sélectionnent sur le marché international ? Les deux hypothèses ne s’excluent pas mutuellement et ce travail les accrédite toutes deux. / This thesis contributes to both theoretical and empirical aspects of the literature on firm heterogeneity in international trade. On the theoretical side, I provide insights of the consequences of trade liberalisation when firms are heterogeneous and countries are asymmetric. On the empirical side, I discuss the causality of the relationship between performances and trading status of firms. Do more productive firms self-select into international markets? Do firms become more productive because they enter international markets? These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive and my work provides support for both of them.

Tématem mé práce je offshoring v sektoru služeb ve Spojených státech amerických. Offshoring je proces, při kterém jsou rozděleny jednolivé části produkce a některé z nich jsou pak přesunuty do zahraničí. Většinou je motivací k offshoringu snižování nákladů. Offshoring může být spojen s outsourcingem, tj. zajištěním služby nebo výrobku externím dodavatelem. Ve své práci prezentuji teoretické přístupy k offshoringu a outsourcingu a platnost jejich závěrů zkoumám na datech ze sektoru služeb Spojených států amerických. Zaměřila jsem se na služby z kategorie informačních a komunikačních technologií, administrativních služeb poskytovaných firmám a výzkumu a vývoje. Analyzuji zejména data o produkci, produktivitě, zaměstnanosti a mezinárodním obchodě. Poslední část mé práce je analýzou americké vládní politiky zaměřené na negativní dopady offshoringu v sektoru zpracovatelského průmyslu. Zkoumám, je-li účelné takovou politiku zavádět také pro sektor služeb.

Owing to the diverse geological processes of genesis, metals occur in earth’s crust in a variety of minerals that form ore deposits across the globe. These deposits significantly differ in terms of their physical and chemical characteristics, and conditions of hosting. Productivity growth in any given metal industry is therefore governed by not only the advancements in technology, but also this unique variation in its natural input in course of cumulative extraction and depletion. Detailed analysis of the changes in process input intensities and sector productivity corresponding to a representative spectrum of geological transitions in copper ores reveals that the continuous and incremental technological developments had successfully offset the detrimental effects of depletion on sector productivity, often aided by the geological characteristics that changed to the miners’ advantage. However, the transition of ores below a threshold level of purity and then into the next prevalent chemical composition, was found to cause a steep rise in input intensities that would lead to a fall in productivity despite the introduction of a widely acclaimed innovative process of copper extraction. The study shows that the impacts of depletion are neither linear, nor uniform, and not always detrimental to productivity. It shows the usefulness of productivity studies in estimating the impacts depletion that may not proceed in strictly sequential manner in the short and medium term, as well as evaluating the benefits of technological change. Though the study is primarily based on copper industry, the findings hold relevance for other metal industries too.

Master of Science / Department of Agronomy / Michel D. Ransom / For many decades, researchers have created indices to rate soil on its ability to produce vegetative growth. The Soil Rating for Plant Growth (SRPG) model was developed by USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in 1992 to array soil mapping units relative to their potential to produce dryland commodity crops independent of management. A few years later, the Kansas Department of Revenue (KDR) Property Valuation Division (PVD) began using the SRPG model for land valuation. Since then, the SRPG was updated to a Kansas-specific model, KS-SRPG, later renamed and modified to PRGM-General Crop Production Index (GCPI), and stored in the National Soil Information System (NASIS). In 2003, modifications were made to the GCPI model to develop an irrigated index for Kansas and was termed the Kansas Irrigated Productivity Index (KIPI). KS-SRPG and KIPI are still used by the PVD, but are no longer updated, are not available to the public, and are difficult to understand. Therefore, it is necessary to construct a new model to predict dryland corn productivity for Kansas soil mapping units. This thesis calibrated and validated a new dryland corn index, which is termed the Kansas Commodity Crop Productivity Index (KCCPI) corn submodel. The KCCPI model was built in NASIS with the goal of being available to the public on Web Soil Survey. Corn yield data in NASIS were used to calibrate the model during development. Dryland corn yield data were obtained from Risk Management Agency (RMA) by Common Land Unit (CLU) and regressed against KCCPI for validation. Results during calibration were promising, but KCCPI was not as successful during validation. This suggests that more work needs to be done to the model with more sets of yield data.

La presente investigación trata sobre el impacto de la Gestión de Inventarios en los Objetivos Operacionales de la minería metálica, específicamente del oro, elemento básico para la fabricación de joyas, productos industriales y como refugio financiero de inversionistas. This research deals with the impact of Inventory Management on the Operational Objectives of metallic mining, specifically gold, a basic element for the manufacture of jewelry, industrial products and as a financial refuge for investors.

Thesis (M. Sc. (Biochemistry)) -- University of Limpopo, 2003 / Refer to document / National Research Foundation (NRF)