The Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) is a provincial land use planning and development appeal board. The powers of the board are vast in comparison to other land appeal boards in Canada. One of the most frequent appeals that the OMB adjudicates emerges from disputes between municipalities and landowners (or other members of the public) regarding the severance of land. In this thesis I empirically examine factors that influence OMB decisions. More specifically, I model the decision of an OMB adjudicator to affirm, or overturn, the decision of the municipality with regards to severance appeals. The explanatory variables include characterizations of the adjudicator – e.g., professional background, gender, experience, etc. – as well as characterizations of the OMB hearing – e.g., the number of participants (public and professional), etc. The empirical analysis allows for a better understanding of theoretical issues in the law-economic literature concerning judicial utility functions and the extent to which judges take into consideration their public and peer reputation (Posner, 1993).

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The thesis includes two essays on asset pricing. In the first essay, "Asset Pricing in a Monetary Economy with Heterogeneous Beliefs", we shed new light on the role of monetary policy in asset pricing by focusing on the case where investors have heterogeneous expectations about future monetary policy. Under heterogeneity in beliefs, investors place bets against each other on the evolution of money supply, and as a result, the sharing of wealth in the economy evolves stochastically over time, making money non-neutral. Employing a continuous-time, general equilibrium model, we establish these fluctuations to be rich in implications, in that they majorly affect the equilibrium prices of all assets, as well as inflation. In particular, we find that the stock market volatility may be significantly increased by the heterogeneity in beliefs, a conclusion supported by our empirical analysis. The second essay is titled with " Asset Pricing and Welfare Analysis with Bounded Rational Investors". Motivated by the fact that investors have limited ability and insufficient knowledge to process information, I model investors' bounded-rational behavior in processing information and study its implications on asset pricing. Bounded rational investors perceive "correlated" information (which consists of news that is correlated with fundamentals, but provides no information on them) as "fundamental" information. This generates "bounded rational risk". Asset prices and volatilities of asset returns are derived. Specially, the equity premium and the stock volatility are raised under some conditions. I also analyze the welfare impact of bounded rationality.

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This study analyzed the economic welfare implications of the 1990 intraregional trade liberalization scheme within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) on member country producers and consumers. Four countries were chosen as a point of focus: Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Mali, and two commodities: millet and sorghum. The supply and demand functions were estimated using time series data from 1970 to 1990 obtained at the level of administrative regions within each of the four countries. Optimal production, consumption, trade quantities and trade flows were determined using the REACTT model, a spatial price equilibrium solution algorithm. Two trade scenarios were simulated. The first examined trade flows under the 1990 tariff structures and the second examined trade flows under the proposed zero tariff rates. / The REACTT model results showed that removal of the tariffs would increase the crossborder trade flows between the four countries by about 12% for millet and 38% for sorghum. The welfare calculations showed that in the case of millet, all four countries would have net positive gains to the tune of $4.6 million in total. For sorghum, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Mali would have net positive gains, C ote d'Ivoire would have a net welfare loss, and the net impact on all four countries would be a positive gain of about $9.3 million. The results of the REACTT model and the welfare calculations suggest that intra-ECOWAS trade liberalization would increase total trade flows and total economic well being of the member countries.

This thesis deals with the appropriate handling of spatial data in general, and in particular in the framework of economic sciences. An overview of well known methods from the field of spatial statistics and spatial econometrics is given. Furthermore a special class of spatial objects is described, namely objects that are that far apart from all other observations in the dataset, that they are not connected to them anymore. Different treatments of such objects are suggested and their influence on the Moran's I test for spatial autocorrelation is analyzed in more detail. After this theoretical part some adequate spatial methods are applied to the well-known problem of R&D spillovers. The corresponding dataset is not obviously spatial, nevertheless spatial methods can be used. The spatial contiguity matrix is based on an economic distance measure instead of the commonly used geographic distances. Finally, optimal design theory and spatial analysis are combined via a new criterion. This criterion was developed to be able to take a potential spatial dependency of the data points into account. The aim is to find the best design points that show the same spatial dependence structure as the true population. (author's abstract)

This research presents the first North American route-choice model for cyclists developed from a large sample of GPS data. These findings should encourage all interested municipalities to implement cycling as part of their transportation planning by determining key designing and planning factors to encourage cycling. The analysis is based on processing revealed preference data obtained from 415 self-selected cyclists in Waterloo, Ontario, which corresponded to 2000 routes. Cyclists' route decisions were modeled using multinomial logit framework of discrete choice theory. The main finding involved in capturing two different behaviour groups, namely experienced and inexperienced cyclists. This was subsequently reflected in the two developed models. The key factors impacting route-choice were found to be trip length, speed, volume, bicycle lane presence and percent of uphill gradient that cyclists face. The predictive power of the best model was 65%. The outlier analysis found that the relative significance of uphill gradient coefficient in one circumstances and perhaps the exclusion of unobserved variables, in other circumstances could be the cause why probability of actual choice was not predicted by both models all the time. In addition, this research involved in the development of a transferability study involving route-choice modeling for cyclists. The analysis is based on the revealed preference data obtained from 255 self-selected cyclists in Peel Region, Ontario, which corresponded to 425 unique routes. The choice set contained actual routes and a combination of alternatives obtained by labeling and impedance rules. The transferability of Waterloo's model to Peel Region was 37%. This means that cyclists behaviour in the Peel Region can be predicted correctly by travel length, bicycle lane presence and percent of uphill gradient for every third cyclist.

Tourism - in particular its determinants and effects - is an issue presently attracting much attention worldwide. International tourism is considered to be the largest single item of the world's foreign trade and for some countries it is the most important export industry and earner of foreign exchange. In addition to its economic significance, tourism contributes to the quality of life. It produces intangible benefits which are directly related to the physical and psychological health of people, and the enjoyment of the right to rest and free time. This applies with equal validity to both domestic and international tourism; the latter establishing international economic, political and socio-cultural links, as well as strengthening the domestic character of a nation. At the individual level, tourism satisfies the need to travel in search for relief from the stress of work and the routine of daily life in the big urban centres. At macro (country) level, tourism is, therefore, a human and economic activity which concerns most of us in many parts of the world, directly or indirectly. One country for which foreign tourism is of considerable importance is Greece. In order to identify likely supply constraints (e. g. tourist accommodation and basic infrastructure) and to establish the major market segments of Greek tourism, the growth and structure of foreign tourism in Greece between 1960 and 1984 is examined. Special attention is given to the magnitude of tourism in Greece and its economic effects on the national economy. The non-economic effects of tourism are also considered. This is followed by the construction of a tourist profile so that the types of foreign visitors that go to Greece are identified. Subsequently, an econometric model is developed and empirical results provided to explain foreign tourist arrivals in Greece and to assess the impact of promotional expenditure by the Greek National Tourist Organisation in a number of foreign tourist generating markets. Finally, a tourism marketing planning model is devised which highlights the main variables affecting the international tourism marketing policies of the Greek National Tourist Organisation and, in particular, empirical results are used in conjunction with- a tourism market choice matrix for selecting market targeting strategies. The major conclusion emerging from the research is that as the tourist industry in Greece is of vital importance, the adoption of a strategic, interdisciplinary and integrated tourism planning process along with the establishment of a tactically orientated task unit could provide important improvements in the effectiveness and contribution of tourism in Greece. A few proposals regarding future policies by the Greek authorities are made, such as the establishment of a co-ordinating body orchestrating the efforts of the appropriate groups relevant to the multifaceted nature of tourism.

This thesis is a theoretical analysis of optimal pricing by firms when consumer demands are uncertain. The purpose is to extend the familiar literature on single-product nonlinear pricing in two directions: to cases where the firm is regulated and to the case where the firm produces several products. Chapter 1 embeds these problems into the general setting of models of asymmetric information and, as well as covering existing work on the pricing decisions of firms facing adverse selection, discusses other areas including repeated contracts, auctions, signalling and the uses of what is known as the 'first-order approach'. Chapter 2 analyzes nonlinear pricing by a regulated single-product firm. As an alternative to requiring the firm to offer a given linear tariff two different types of regulation which allow nonlinear pricing are considered, namely, average revenue regulation and optional tariff regulation. Chapter 3 introduces the topic of multiproduct pricing when consumers have differing tastes for the various goods. The important simplifying assumption is that consumers wish to buy either one unit of a good or none at all. There are three main results: if consumers' taste parameters are continuously distributed then the firm will not offer all goods to all consumers; in the symmetric two-good case it is shown that (subject to a kind of 'hazard rate' condition) the firm will offer the bundle of two goods at a discount compared with the charge for the two goods separately; and the pricing strategy when the number of goods becomes large is solved approximately. Chapter 4 relaxes the assumption of unit demands and uses differential methods to analyze the multiproduct nonlinear pricing problem. In the symmetric case when taste parameters are continuously distributed the firm will choose to exclude some low-demand consumers from the market. It is shown that when parameters are independently distributed the firm will wish to introduce a degree of cross-dependence into its tariff. Sufficient conditions for a tariff to be optimal are derived and any tariff which satisfies these conditions necessarily will induce 'pure bundling', so that once a consumer decides to participate in the market at all she will choose to buy all goods. A class of cases is solved explicitly using these sufficient conditions. Since other solutions may be hard to solve analytically, a procedure for numerically generating solutions for the two-good case is described and two more solutions are described.