Potential policy decisions regarding fly fishing in the Yellowstone National Park Area could severely impact the enjoyment possibilities of many of its users. In order to determine the magnitude of the impact, this paper applies a form of the basic travel cost model developed by Bell and Leeworthy [JEEM. 18,189-205 (1990)] to fishing sites in the Yellowstone National Park Area. Bell and Leeworthy have argued that consumer demand for the time spent at a recreation site is inversely related to on-site cost per day, and may be positively related to travel cost per trip. The paper discusses relevant literature on the method, presents background information on the site, and generates a demand curve for users of the resource. A consumer surplus measurement is then derived from the resulting demand data, which gives an estimate for the value of the resource; the consumer surplus is determined to be roughly $751.88 per day spent at the site. The assumptions of the model are then discussed, and an assessment is made of the potential policy implications. / Graduation date: 1998

This thesis consists of two essays on applied microeconomics issues. The first essay presents a hedonic price econometric model of vacant commercial land. The second essay presents cost frontier analysis on the industry and firm's performance of the U.S. Motor Carrier industry. Our hedonic price econometric model includes two new developments in estimating land values in a multicentric urban area First, two composite indexes of market accessibility and highway accessibility are developed to account for the impacts of different characteristics of different regional nodes on land value at a particular site. Second, we use nonlinear least squares to estimate the decay parameters of the accessibility indexes within the model. We found that market accessibility is the dominant land value determinant. The estimated market accessibility decay parameter is different in value from the ones that are commonly assumed in hedonic models. The effect of access to highway interchanges is insignificant. Corner lots are of higher value. Finally, under Seattle's zoning policy, zoning classification of neighborhood commercial and community commercial land does not have significant effect on land value. The second essay uses the stochastic cost frontiers to analyze the performance of the U.S. motor carrier industry in the pre- and post-MCA periods. The average industry inefficiencies were between 14 and 27 percent during studied period. Our results indicate that the deregulation has no impact on industry efficiency. After a short adjustment period, the average industry inefficiency in the post-MCA years falls back to its pre-MCA level of around 14 to 16 percent. We analyzed the firm-specific inefficiencies by tobit regression. Our result shows that union firms are 1.5 and 4 percent less efficient than non-union firms in the pre- and post-MCA years, respectively. Firms located in the southern region are relatively efficient and the ones in the northern regions are relatively inefficient. Our result supports Stigler's Survivor Principle that survivor firms are relatively efficient. / Graduation date: 1998

This paper uses general equilibrium static and dynamic models to examine the economic and environmental effect of capital liberalization policy based on the general equilibrium static and dynamic models. The first topic develops a static general equilibrium model of a small open economy in the presence of unemployment with three sectors: a nontradeable sector, a tradeable sector, and an environmental sector. In the second section, I use a dynamic general equilibrium model of a small open economy in the presence of unemployment with three sectors: an importable sector, an exportable sector, and an environmental sector. In the last section I analyze the environmental effect of a developing country's capital liberalization policy when the consumer values the environment. The dynamic model, based on intertemporal optimization, focuses on the role of how land development is affected by foreign capital investment. The time-varying dynamic policies, such as planned permanent and planned gradual capital liberalization, are investigated to analyze the dynamic path of land and foreign capital stock in the short-run. The major findings of this paper are described as follows. In the long-run dynamic analysis, the production of the environmental good in a developing country is reduced when the developing country has a positive net income effect due to further capital liberalization, if there is an initial shortage of capital investment. The reduction of the environmental good might have a significant welfare impacts on the welfare of a country if the consumer places high value on the environment. This result indicates that countries with less environmental awareness are likely to improve the welfare of their countries whereas countries with strong environmental awareness are likely to reduce the welfare of their countries with capital liberalization. The other important result is that inclusion of the environment in the consumer's utility function slows down the pace of land development in the short-run dynamic model if the developing country lowers its capital investment tax rate. / Graduation date: 1996

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

Not available / text

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