In this thesis I estimate a monetary value of the risk attached to living near a hazardous waste site in the town of Teckomatorp. This site is the result of hundreds of rusty leaking barrels of toxins being buried in the ground by the company BT Kemi in the 1970’s. Ever since then the site has been remediated in several steps and is still contaminated today. For estimating the perceived risk of living near this site I use a hedonic price model (HP) which is a form of a revealed preference approach. In a HP model the price of a market good is a function of different utility-bearing characteristics and the estimated parameters can be used to calculate the implicit prices of these characteristics. In this case I use a data set from the National Swedish Institute for Building Research (IBF) and regress property price on a number of housing characteristics. I compare an estimated town-effect for Teckomatorp with the estimates for two control towns: Billeberga and Anderslöv. I can confirm my hypothesis that, after controlling for housing characteristics, there is a negative effect on prices of property in Teckomatorp. I find that property prices are on average 46878 SEK lower in Teckomatorp than in the two control towns.

This thesis uses zonal travel cost method (ZTCM) to estimate consumer surplus of Peace & Love festival in Borlänge, Sweden. The study defines counties as zones of origin of the visitors. Visiting rates from each zone are estimated based on survey data. The study is novel due to the fact that mostly TCM has been applied in the environmental and recreational sector, not for short term events, like P&L festival. The analysis shows that travel cost has a significantly negative effect on visiting rate as expected. Even though income has previously shown to be significant in similar studies, it turns out to be insignificant in this study. A point estimate for the total consumer surplus of P&L festival is 35.6 million Swedish kronor. However, this point estimate is associated with high uncertainty since a 95 % confidence interval for it is (17.9, 53.2). It is also important to note that the estimated value only represents one part of the total economic value, the other values of the festival's totaleconomic value have not been estimated in this thesis.

Tyrimo objektas – Lietuvos pieno sektoriaus atskleistasis santykinis pranašumas prekyboje su ES šalimis. Tyrimo tikslas – RCA indekso pagalba ištirti Lietuvos pieno produktų eksporto pozicijas kitų atžvilgiu prekyboje su kitomis Europos Sąjungos šalimis. / Research object –Revealed comparative advantage of Lithuanian dairy sectors in trade with Euro-pean Union countries. Research aim – RCA index help investigate the export of milk products in other positions in re-spect of trade with other European Union countries.

Cox, Friedman, and Sadiraj (2008) develop a model of reciprocity, „Revealed Altruism‟, which posits that a „more generous than‟ (MGT) offer elicits a „more altruistic than‟ (MAT) response. A MGT ordering is defined by two conditions. Condition a) states that MGT is ordered by the maximum potential increase in income of the recipient, or that the more you stand to receive from an offer, the more generous it is to you. Condition b) states that the increase in maximum potential income of the recipient cannot be less than the maximum potential increase in income of the proposers. In other words, Condition b) states that an offer cannot be self-serving, but it is not specified in Cox, Friedman, and Sadiraj (2008) precisely how b) affects the MGT ordering. I propose that a violation of b) is considered self-serving and is less MGT than when b) is not violated. I then experimentally study the empirical relevance of b) using two designs that hold a) constant, comparing MGT differences implied by responses. The first design is a variant of the Lost Wallet Game (Dufwenberg & Gneezy, 2000) with a negative outside option, and the second design is a modified Investment Game (Berg, Dickhaut, & McCabe, 1995) with elements of the Dictator Game implemented by Andreoni and Miller (2002). I find no empirical support that b) affects the MGT ordering.

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.

The question of how to measure and classify people´s risk preferences is of substantial importance in the field of Economics. Inspired by the multitude of ways used to elicit risk preferences, we conduct a holistic investigation of the most prevalent method, the multiple price list (MPL) and its derivations. In accordance with previous literature, we find that revealed preferences differ under various and even the same versions of the MPL. Thus, an arbitrary selection of a particular risk assessment method can lead to biased results especially if researchers investigate its connection to other phenomena. In order to resolve this issue, we determine the most stable version of the MPL by using multiple measures of within-method consistency, and the version with the highest forecast accuracy by using behavior in two economically relevant games as benchmarks. A derivation of the well-known method by Holt and Laury (2002), where the highest payoff is varied instead of probabilities, emerges as the best MPL method in both dimensions. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

This thesis uses nonparametric revealed preference methods to derive new tests for consistency with models of consumer behaviour, and discuss the implications for welfare analysis. Chapter 1 demonstrates how to conduct revealed preference analysis when prices, and hence budget constraints, are only partially observed. This chapter extends the revealed preference results of Crawford and Polisson (2015), derived for the static case, to dynamic settings, allowing for storability of goods. Necessary and sufficient conditions for consistency with intertemporal models are derived, which do not require the researcher to distinguish between corner solutions and unavailability of the good, or to impute prices. Chapter 2 discusses the validity of using reported happiness measures as proxies of utility or social welfare, by testing for consistency between revealed and reported preference orderings in Japanese household survey data. Although the expenditure behaviour of most households is consistent with standard models of utility maximisation, it is generally inconsistent with the preference ordering given by their reported happiness. This inconsistency is likely due to reporting error in the happiness measure, and suggests that happiness and utility are empirically distinct and noninterchangeable. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of price inattention on inflation misperceptions and cost-of-living indices, by developing a behavioural model in which consumers only notice price changes above a certain threshold. A data application, using supermarket scanner data, demonstrates that this model generates plausible results; in particular, consumers have more accurate perceptions of inflation during periods of high or volatile inflation, but may substantially misperceive inflation when it is low. These results have important implications for conducting welfare analysis when consumers are not fully attentive to price changes.

Information Technology Technical Competency is critical for the optimal functioning of any organization. IT personnel need to be competent in their technical skills. Studying how IT personnel build their technical competencies is a critical but under-studied area of research. To date, very little research has been done on how to build IT Technical Competencies, and virtually none of this research begins with qualitative data or uses IT personnel as key respondents. Initially, we evoke a revealed causal map that shows four concepts in the IT Environment construct: the Technical Environment, the People Environment, the Business Environment, and the Job Environment. Our model first proposes a relationship between the IT Environment and IT Technical Competency. An original survey based on the qualitative data was developed for this study. Data was collected at four research sites: a manufacturing organization, a healthcare organization, a government organization, and an education organization. All together 101 respondent's survey answers were analyzed. We tested the proposed model of IT Technical Competency using the method of path analysis with linear regression. Our results indicated that the Technical and Business Environments are viewed as one, so we end up with a three environment concept model of IT Technical Competency. Our model achieved a R-squared value of above 0.5, meaning that the environment surrounding IT personnel, the IT Environment, is 50% related to IT Technical Competency. This is the first model to this author's knowledge that holistically looks at environment in relation to technical competency. Future research will continue look more in-depth at each of the concepts in this environment individually.

This dissertation uses a convenience sample of members of eBird, a large citizen science project maintained by the Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology, to explore the value of avian biodiversity to bird watchers. Panel data (i.e. longitudinal data) are highly desirable for preference estimation. Fortuitously, the diaries of birding excursions by eBird members provide a rich source of spatial data on trips taken, over time by the same individuals, to a variety of birding destinations. Origin and destination data can be combined with exogenous species prevalence information. These combined data sources permit estimation of utility-theoretic choice models that allow derivation of the marginal utilities of avian biodiversity measures as well as the marginal utility of net income (i.e. consumption of other goods and services). Ratios of these marginal utilities yield marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) estimates for numbers of bird species (or numbers of species of different types, in richer specifications). MWTP for levels of other attributes of birding destinations are also derived (e.g. ecosystem type, management regime, seasonal variations, a time trend).\\ The chapters are organized as follows: Chapter 2 is a stand-alone paper that demonstrates the feasibility of a travel-cost based random utility model with the eBird data. This chapter focuses on measuring the total number of bird species at each birding hotspot in Washington and Oregon states. This chapter does not differentiate among types of birders beyond using their recent birding activities in an analysis of habit formation or variety-seeking behavior. For this model, beyond past behavior, a representative consumer is postulated. Chapter 3 starts from the basic specifications identified in Chapter 2 and explores heterogeneous preferences among consumers as well as their preferences for species richness and for different categories of birds. This chapter explores whether different types of birds are relatively more attractive to different types of birders (for example, by gender or by age or by neighborhood characteristics and educational attainment). Chapter 4 is an extension of the work in Chapter 3 to explore how changing site attributes in the face of climate change effects birder welfare. This dissertation includes previously unpublished co-authored material. / 10000-01-01

We build a general Ricardian model of international trade, which extends Eaton and Kortum (2002), in order to analyze the sources of the gains from trade, the effects of trade openness on productivity, and the role of nominal exchange rates. For general distributions of industry efficiencies, welfare gains can always be de- composed into a selection and a reallocation effect. The former is the change in average efficiency due to the selection of industries that survive international competition. The latter is the rise in the weight of exporting industries in domestic production, due the reallocation of workers away from non-exporting industries. This decomposition, which is hard to calculate in the general case, simpli es dramatically with Fréchet- distributed efficiencies, providing easy-to-quantify model-based measures of these two effects. For an average of 46 countries in 2000 and 2005, the selection effect turns out to be somewhat more important than the reallocation effect. By analyzing the relationship between trade openness and total factor productivity (TFP), we propose a novel methodology to measure the latter. The logic of our approach is to use a structural model and measure TFP not from its "primitive" (the aggregate production function), but from its observed implications. We estimate TFP levels of the manufacturing sector of 19 OECD countries, relative to the United States, in 1985-2002, as the average productivity a proxy for aggregate TFP that best ts data on trade, production and wages. Our measures turn out to be easy to compute and are no longer mere residuals. To examine the role exchange rates in a model of real consumption and production decisions with no money, we follow an insight of Keynes (1931) and replicate a currency depreciation with an increase in import barriers and a symmetric decline in export barriers. By mimicking changes in exchange rates with changes in the model parameters, we can demonstrate a series of classical results and conjectures, in a very general framework with many countries, tradeable goods and non-tradeable goods. We show not only that a depreciation has no real effects with flexible wages, but, with sticky wages, we are able to prove that an undervalued currency causes involuntary unemployment abroad, while at home it determines inefficiently high employment in the export sector, raising real GDP but lowering welfare. If the currency is overvalued, we also show that there exists an appropriate depreciation that restores competitive prices, with welfare-enhancing effects, proving Friedman's conjecture (1953).