This thesis consists of three different papers summarized as follows. In The political economy of environmental regulation, I study how enforcement of national environmental legislation differ across municipalities in Sweden depending on the local political situation. While the legislation is national, enforcement is decentralized. I find that municipalities where the Green Party joins the ruling political coalition issue more environmental fines than other municipalities. In pricing on the fish market I use Swedish data to study how size affects the price per kilo of fish for several species. In traditional fishery biomass models, fish stocks are treated as homogenous. New theoretical heterogeneous fishery models, where size is allowed to differ in a fish stock, have important implications for regulation, for example that it is optimal to regulate on numbers of fish instead of weight. However, prices in these models are assumed to be constant. My estimates can be used to shed some light on how prices change when the size composition of the catch changes. In my third and final chapter, Settlement under the threat of conflict - The cost of asymmetric information, I present a theoretical model where two players can divide a good peacefully or engage in a contest in order to obtain the entire good. I assume that one player's valuation of the good is private information and show how this affects the expected cost of the contest and thus the probability of peaceful settlement.

This dissertation contains three papers from two projects. The first two papers (Chapter Two and Chapter Three) are from a project entitled “Managing Flounder Openings for Maximum Revenue.” The objective of this project is to (1) estimate the monthly dockside price of summer flounder and identify seasonality in this price; and (2) set up a mathematical programming model to maximize the landing revenue by allocating the federal government quota on summer flounder across twelve months. In the first paper (Chapter Two), various forms of inverse demand equations are used to estimate the dockside price of summer flounder. These models are evaluated based on their out-of-sample forecasting performance. A structural functional form is selected. In the second paper (Chapter Three), the selected price equation for summer flounder is applied into a revenue maximization model with both the federal government quota constraint and biological constraints from twelve months. The model is solved using CONPOT Solver of GAMS 21.5. The results of the scenarios indicate that the industry should move the landing effort from the period of October – February to the period of March – August. Comparing with historical data, this method can increase $44.73 million for the industry of landing summer flounder from 1991 to 2005. The third paper (Chapter Four) investigates how China's soybean import prices and domestic prices of soybeans and soybean products affect China's soybean imports. Since 2000, soybeans have been the U.S. leading agricultural exports for bulk commodities. China is the largest importer of U.S. soybean exports. For China's soybean crushing industry, imported soybeans are inputs rather than final products and used to produce soybean meal and oil. A differential production model, which is derived from a two-stage profit maximization model in producer theory, is adopted in this research. Estimates are used to calculate conditional and unconditional price elasticities for China's soybean imports from its major source countries – the United States, Argentina, and Brazil. In addition, the Divisia index and unconditional output price elasticities are obtained for China's soybean imports. Estimation results support the hypothesis that China's soybean imports are determined by its domestic demand for soybean meal, rather than soybean oil. This implies that U.S. agribusinesses should pay attention to the dominant role of China's demand for soybean meal and animal feed. U.S. agribusinesses can also use results in this research to evaluate how China's soybean imports from different source countries will change when either international market prices or China's domestic market prices change. / Ph. D.