Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The purpose of this research is to help understand the key relationships in an evolving economic structure that are driving resource use and greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. The approach involves looking at the factors and relationships that underpin economic growth in Australia. This research seeks to understand the changes in these factors by taking a historical perspective to the determinants of environmental impact through an investigation of structural changes over a period of 30 years. A detailed model is developed using the macro-economic tool of input-output analysis. This model makes it possible to investigate inter-relationships and intra-relationships between sectors of the environment, the economy and the population at disparate scales.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(経済学) / 甲第22958号 / 経博第633号 / 新制||経||296(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院経済学研究科経済学専攻 / (主査)准教授 遊喜 一洋, 教授 柴田 章久, 准教授 安井 大真 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Economics / Kyoto University / DFAM

No / FP7

The social exchange research tradition has examined the effects of structural factors on behavioral and psychological outcomes. Emerson's power-dependence perspective has driven many of these projects, and I follow this line of work. In spite of Emerson's suggestion that changes in the structure of networks should be a focus of investigation, power-dependence research to date has focused exclusively on networks as static, unchanging entities. I extend social exchange theory to consider the effects of structural change on actors within social exchange networks. I predict that dynamic networks and static networks produce different effects on behavioral commitment and on the psychological variables of trust, pleasure and interest. I test these hypotheses using a factorial experimental design. Support for the hypotheses is mixed, and examination of empirical results uncovers some unexpected findings with respect to the exchange behavior of actors in equal-power versus unequal-power networks. Actors in equal-power networks show indifference between potential exchange partners, while actors in unequal-power networks demonstrate unexpectedly high levels of behavioral commitment. Drawing on power-dependence theory, I also generate and test positionally-specific predictions for the psychological variables.

Structural changes, including moving, renaming, merging and splitting are important design change decisions made by programmers. However, during the process of software evolution, this information often gets lost. Recovering instances of structural changes in the past, as well as understanding them, are essential for us to achieve a better understanding of how and why software changes. In this thesis, we propose an approach that helps to recover and understand the lost information of structural changes.

The implementation of a recently suggested class of structural change tests, which test for parameter instability in general parametric models, in the R language for statistical computing is described: Focus is given to the question how the conceptual tools can be translated into computational tools that reflect the properties and flexiblity of the underlying econometric metholody while being numerically reliable and easy to use. More precisely, the class of generalized M-fluctuation tests (Zeileis & Hornik, 2003) is implemented in the package strucchange providing easily extensible functions for computing empirical fluctuation processes and automatic tabulation of critical values for a functional capturing excessive fluctuations. Traditional significance tests are supplemented by graphical methods which do not only visualize the result of the testing procedure but also convey information about the nature and timing of the structural change and which component of the parametric model is affected by it. / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

This thesis investigates the effect that variation in employment between industries has had on the depth of recession faced by Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the United States. This analysis is limited to the previous two national recessions. I use regression analysis to find that increases in variation in employment has a significant effect on the maximum increase in unemployment rate in MSAs after controlling for relevant MSA characteristics. In this framework I also find that increases in education could mitigate the negative effects of this variation. I include several other measures of depth of recession including the fall in economic conditions and length for real GDP to recover to its pre-recession levels. I find that the measure of variation is significant in explaining falls in the economic conditions, but not so in explaining the length it takes for each MSA to recover its real GDP.

This dissertation research addresses how to detect structural changes in stochastic linear models. By introducing a special structure to the design matrix, we convert the structural change detection problem to a variable selection problem. There are many existing variable selection strategies, however, they do not fully cope with structural change detection. We design two penalized regression algorithms specifically for the structural change detection purpose. We also propose two methods involving these two algorithms to accomplish a bi-level structural change detection: they locate the change points and also recognize which predictors contribute to the variation of the model structure. Extensive simulation studies are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in a variety of settings. Furthermore, we establish asymptotic theoretical properties to justify the bi-level detection consistency for one of the proposed methods. In addition, we write an R package with computationally efficient algorithms for detecting structural changes. Comparing to traditional methods, the proposed algorithms showcase enhanced detection power and more estimation precision, with added capacity of specifying the model structures at all regimes.

The main thesis of this study is that migration is an integral component of the major processes of structural change in a country. As such, migration should not be studied in isolation from the historical and evolving patterns of development of the country. In their specific forms and magnitudes, migration processes are patterned movements of human populations within and between territorial units. The important point to stress here is that these movements are a response to, and at the same time, conditions the economic and social forces which affect significant sections of a community.

Economic growth and development is intimately related to the decline of agriculture’s share of output and employment. This process of structural change has important implications for income and productivity differences between regions within a country or between countries themselves. Agriculture typically has low productivity relative to other sectors and this is particularly true in poor areas. So, as labour switches to nonagricultural activities or as agricultural productivity increases, poor agriculturallyintensive areas will benefit the most. In this thesis, I contribute to a recent and growing line of research and incorporate a separate role for agriculture, both into modeling frameworks and data analysis, to examine income and productivity differences. I first demonstrate that restrictions on trade in agricultural goods, which support inefficient domestic producers, inhibit structural change and lower productivity in poor countries. To do this, I incorporate multiple sectors, non-homothetic preferences, and labour mobility costs into an Eaton-Kortum trade model. With the model, I estimate productivity from trade data (avoiding problematic data for poor countries that typical estimates require) and perform a variety of counterfactual exercises. I find import barriers and labour mobility costs account for one-third of the aggregate labour productivity gap between rich and poor countries and for nearly half the gap in agriculture. Second, moving away from international income differences, I use a general equilibrium model of structural transformation to show a large labour migration cost between regions of the US magnifies the impact improved labour markets have on regional convergence. Finally, I estimate the influence of structural change on convergence between Canadian regions. I construct a unique dataset of census-division level wage and employment levels in both agriculture and nonagriculture between 1901 and 1981. I find convergence is primarily due to region-specific factors with structural change playing little role.