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"Integrated Science 3002a: Big Bike Giveaway: Changing London's Environment, Health, And Economy One Bike At A Time", Jermiah Joseph, Katelyn Melo, Devanshi Shukla, Tony Nguyen, Katherine Teeter
"Integrated Science 3002a: Big Bike Giveaway: Changing London's Environment, Health, And Economy One Bike At A Time", Jermiah Joseph, Katelyn Melo, Devanshi Shukla, Tony Nguyen, Katherine Teeter
Community Engaged Learning Final Projects
There are significant benefits that manifest when an individual chooses to ride a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation. To investigate these benefits, the environmental, health, economic, and social impacts of biking were evaluated through research and data analyses. This revealed that numerous advantages can be obtained at an individual and local scale through citizens choosing to adopt a biking lifestyle. However, it was found that many Londoners are deterred from biking due to poor biking infrastructure. This paper calls into question the current cycling framework in London and it’s limitations on achieving the numerous benefits that biking offers. …
Geryon’S Point: The Economics Of Anagogy In Medieval And Postmodern Plague Literature, Victoria A. Kushelnyk
Geryon’S Point: The Economics Of Anagogy In Medieval And Postmodern Plague Literature, Victoria A. Kushelnyk
Digitized Theses
Western authors have traditionally represented disease as a disorder of the body, but a disorderthatironicallyprovokesamoralexaminationofhumanbehaviourunderstress. The urgency of tropological and anagogic responses to illness intensifies in the case of epidemic diseases. Whether rapidly contagious like bubonic plague, or furtively infectious like leprosy, epidemic diseases tend to trigger profound teleological anxiety. Such epidemics figure in literature not only as the effects of divine wrath but also as the causes of immoral or antisocial behaviour at the human level. An inextricable connection between economics and disease is formed and allegorized, with particular emphasis on the anagogic possibilities such a connection proposes.
The Importance Of Beliefs In Monetary And Financial Settings, Toni R. Gravelle
The Importance Of Beliefs In Monetary And Financial Settings, Toni R. Gravelle
Digitized Theses
This thesis investigates the effects of beliefs in both a monetary and a financial setting. Specifically, the thesis studies the potential effects that price level fluctuations have on societal beliefs, the general medium of exchange, and economic welfare. In a finance setting, this thesis also studies how fluctuations in beliefs can explain the observed "hot issues" market phenomena in the initial public offering (IPO) equity market. The "hot issues" market phenomena refers to recurring periods in which the volume of IPOs and the magnitude of their first day returns are observed to be systematically larger than average.;Chapter 2 is a …
Job Matching And Unemployment Dynamics, John Robert Kennes
Job Matching And Unemployment Dynamics, John Robert Kennes
Digitized Theses
The first chapter of the thesis considers a job search model with entrepreneurial decisions by unemployed workers. A conventional job search model predicts a log-linear relationship between the vacancy: unemployment ratio and the job finding rates of unemployed workers. However, empirical evidence suggests that the relationship is concave. The model presented in this chapter exhibits concavity as a result of entrepreneurial specialization in the pool of unemployed workers.;The second chapter of the thesis develops a general equilibrium model of vacancies and unemployment with competition between on and off-the-job searchers. Under-employed workers at low productivity jobs make up the pool of …
Explaining Adoption Patterns Of Process Standards, Philip Paul Gunby
Explaining Adoption Patterns Of Process Standards, Philip Paul Gunby
Digitized Theses
This thesis investigates the adoption of process standards and consists of an introduction, a literature review, two theoretical chapters, a case study, and a conclusion.;The first theoretical chapter presents a model which examines equilibrium adoption patterns. The model incorporates heterogeneous agents who repeatedly choose which process standard to adopt. The agents' decisions are affected by economic processes within as well as outside, the market. In contrast to the usual results of the literature on competing standards, inefficient equilibria are far less prevalent in this model. Interestingly, small changes in parameter values can have a large impact on the characteristics of …
Impact On Asia Of China's Trade, Foreign Investment, And Factor Market Reforms: A General Equilibrium Approach, Winnie Lam
Digitized Theses
This thesis assesses the effects of China's trade, foreign investment, and factor market reforms on China and on its neighbouring Asian countries using a static, multi-country computational general equilibrium model. Existing literature concentrates on the analysis of the piecemeal abolition of distortions in the Chinese economy (Zhuang (1992)). One notable feature of this study is that special emphasis is placed on the interactive effects among individual reforms in China. This issue is particularly important for Chinese policy makers as they embark on the experimentation with major economic reforms. The results indicate that trade reform would not be nearly as successful …
An Imperfect Competition Suite, Brian Allen Rivard
An Imperfect Competition Suite, Brian Allen Rivard
Digitized Theses
This thesis consists of three essays on unrelated topics. The first essay examines the macroeconomic issue of sunspot equilibria, while the second and third essays examine issues in the field of industrial organization relating to exclusive contracts and advertising. Each essay is unified in that the role of imperfect competition is a central focus in the analysis of its respective topic.;Chapter 1 of the thesis constructs a simple overlapping generations model with money and production in an environment of monopolistically competitive firms and an increasing returns to scale production technology. Within this framework, symmetric stationary sunspot equilibria are generated without …
The Effects Of Government Policies On (Un)Employment In A Search Model, Mingwei Yuan
The Effects Of Government Policies On (Un)Employment In A Search Model, Mingwei Yuan
Digitized Theses
This thesis studies the effects of fiscal and labour market policies on the labour market activities. The study is based on a general equilibrium framework. The models considered in this thesis are built on the recent advances of growth models which incorporate labour market search/match activities. This study extends the previous models to address several important empirical issues.;In Chapter 1, an empirical study using multivariate vector autoregression (VAR) models shows that, in postwar U.S., employment and hours worked per worker respond differently to a temporary shock in government consumption. The shock raises hours worked per worker and reduces employment. The …
Nonparametric Estimation Of Ito Diffusions With Applications To The Pricing Of Derivative Securities, George J. Jiang
Nonparametric Estimation Of Ito Diffusions With Applications To The Pricing Of Derivative Securities, George J. Jiang
Digitized Theses
This thesis is concerned with the nonparametric estimation of continuous-time stochastic processes and its applications in financial economics. It consists of three closely related chapters, two on the nonparametric estimation and Monte Carlo simulation of diffusion processes, and one on the term structure of interest rates and nonparametric pricing of derivative securities.;Chapter 1 proposes a nonparametric identification and estimation procedure for an Ito diffusion process based on discrete sampling observations. The nonparametric kernel estimator for the diffusion function developed in this chapter deals with general Ito diffusion processes and avoids any functional form specification for either the drift function or …
Essays On R&D And Economic Growth, Jinli Zeng
Essays On R&D And Economic Growth, Jinli Zeng
Digitized Theses
This thesis consists of three essays on R&D and economic growth. The objective is to study the relationship between human capital accumulation, human capital allocation and R&D, on the one hand, and economic growth and welfare on the other.;The first essay, entitled "Capital Accumulation, R&D and Economic Growth", integrates two distinct categories of endogenous growth models (the capital-based models and the ideas-based models). A dynamic general equilibrium model is developed, in which both physical and human capital accumulation and investment in R&D are endogenously determined, and successful innovations not only discover new goods and destroy the old counterparts, but also …
Evolutionary Models Of Market Behavior, Guo Ying Luo
Evolutionary Models Of Market Behavior, Guo Ying Luo
Digitized Theses
This thesis consists of three evolutionary models examining market behavior.;Profit maximization is the usual prerequisite for achievement of competition. However, for a long time it has been thought that this principle of profit maximization can be replaced by natural selection. In an evolutionary model of an industry, where firms' outputs are chosen randomly, where entry occurs with no motivation and where exit occurs when a firm's wealth becomes negative, the first paper shows that the industry converges in probability to a perfectly competitive equilibrium as firms get infinitesimally small relative to the market, as the entry fixed costs get sufficiently …
Essays In Unemployment And Unemployment Insurance, Guang-Jia Zhang
Essays In Unemployment And Unemployment Insurance, Guang-Jia Zhang
Digitized Theses
This thesis examines several issues surrounding the causes of aggregate unemployment that relate to both individual work, rest, and search activities, and inter-industry labor reallocation process. On the other hand, this thesis also explores how heterogenous agents (employed and unemployed) react to a given unemployment insurance program as well as its welfare consequences within a general equilibrium search model.;The research in the first chapter is motivated by the three key features of the employment process in the U.S. economy: (1) job creation is procyclical, (2) job destruction is countercyclical, and (3) job creation is less volatile than job destruction. These …
Essays On The Theory Of Growth And Unemployment, David Andolfatto
Essays On The Theory Of Growth And Unemployment, David Andolfatto
Digitized Theses
The thesis comprises two essays that investigate the theoretical properties and empirical performance of dynamic equilibrium models designed to account for the phenomena of aggregate economic growth and unemployment.;The first essay, entitled Business Cycles and Labor Market Search, is primarily interested in providing a quantitative assessment of a particular brand of search/unemployment theory in the context of a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium business cycle model. In order to ascertain the likely quantitative importance of the propagation mechanism induced by the search environment, an artificial economy is parameterized, calibrated, and simulated. The statistical properties of the simulated business fluctuations are then …
Mixtures, Moments And Information: Three Essays In Econometrics, Kien C. Tran
Mixtures, Moments And Information: Three Essays In Econometrics, Kien C. Tran
Digitized Theses
This thesis is a collection of three independent essays in econometrics.;The first essay uses the empirical characteristic function (ECF) procedure to estimate the parameters of mixtures of normal distributions and switching regression models. The ECF procedure was formally proposed by Feuerverger and Mureika (1977), Heathcote (1977). Since the characteristic function is uniformly bounded, the procedure gives estimates that are numerically stable. Furthermore, it is also shown that the finite sample properties of the ECF estimator are very good, even in the case where the popular maximum likelihood fails to exist.;The second essay applies White's (1982) information matrix (IM) test to …
Essays On Information Economics, Cheng Wang
Essays On Information Economics, Cheng Wang
Digitized Theses
This thesis consists of three essays on information economics.;The first essay is "Dynamic Insurance between Two Risk Averse Agents with Bilateral Asymmetric Information." There are two infinitely lived agents in our model, both risk averse, and each has an i.i.d. random endowment stream which is unobservable to the other. Dynamic incentive compatibility in the Nash sense is studied. Feasible and incentive compatible coinsurance contracts are characterized. We give sufficient and necessary conditions for the existence of a constrained efficient contract. We show that a constrained efficient contract can be characterized in a Bellman equation. Algorithms for numerical solution to the …
Three Essays On Bargaining, Murali K. Agastya
Three Essays On Bargaining, Murali K. Agastya
Digitized Theses
In the first two chapters, a non-negative function defined on the class of subsets of a finite set of players (or factors) describes the technology for producing a single good. Given this aggregate data, the problem of allocation of surplus among individual players (or factors) is studied in two different models.;In Chapter 1, an axiomatic approach is adopted to construct an allocation rule that is immune to positive monotone transformations of the players' utilities. Under this rule, each player is paid a weighted average of his (or her) marginal contributions to various coalitions. In fact, these weights coincide with the …
Essays On Financial Economics, Masaru Konishi
Essays On Financial Economics, Masaru Konishi
Digitized Theses
This thesis is a collection of four essays in financial economics.;The first essay develops an information-based banking model to examine the choice by lenders between negotiated debt transactions and open-market transactions when the loan market is subject to adverse selection. Due to the borrowers' reputation generated through repeated financial transactions, the model exhibits dynamics of adverse selection, which, in turn, induces the movement towards securitization. The paper also studies how altering the information structure between banks and borrowers affects the dynamics of bank-loan relationships and lending rates.;The second essay applies a version of the information-based banking model developed in the …
Two Essays On Economic Theory, Wing-Yiu Chan
Two Essays On Economic Theory, Wing-Yiu Chan
Digitized Theses
My thesis consists of two separate essays on economic theory. The title of the first essay (chapter 1) is "Learning and Nash Equilibria in 3 x 3 Symmetric Games" and the title of the second essay (chapter 2) is "General Equilibrium Theory with Monopolistic Competition: An Introductory Analysis.";Chapter 1 explores the dynamic implications of learning models by studying fictitious play in 3 x 3 symmetric games. The basic model consists of two persons playing a symmetric normal form game with only three pure strategies repeatedly, and choosing their strategies in each period to maximize their expected payoffs in the stage …
Essays In International Finance And Macroeconomics, Wai-Ming Ho
Essays In International Finance And Macroeconomics, Wai-Ming Ho
Digitized Theses
This thesis consists of three essays in international finance and macroeconomics to study the link between money and economic activity.;The first essay, entitled "Liquidity, Exchange Rates, and Business Cycles," presents a two-country, two-good, two-currency model to study the role of liquidity effects in exchange rate determination and the international transmission of economic fluctuations. The monetary authority's injections of cash are funneled into the economy through financial markets. The asymmetry of economic agents' access to the newly injected cash induces liquidity effects. The model provides an exchange rate equation which is different from the simple purchasing-power-parity law of exchange rate determination. …
Fertility And Economic Growth, Jie Zhang
Fertility And Economic Growth, Jie Zhang
Digitized Theses
The thesis comprises three chapters which model fertility and economic growth simultaneously in overlapping generations frameworks.;Chapter 1 focuses on the relation between fertility and wage rates and examines the effects on fertility and growth of subsidies for education and for the cost of rearing children by assuming that agents care about the consumption and number of children. Without education, this model reconciles two conflicting results about the relationship between fertility and wage rates: while Malthus and others predict a positive relation, Barro and Becker find a negative relation. With education, the positive relation between fertility and wage rates can no …
Heteroscedasticity In Returns: Arch Effects Versus The Mixture Of Distributions Hypothesis, Richard Ronald Nason
Heteroscedasticity In Returns: Arch Effects Versus The Mixture Of Distributions Hypothesis, Richard Ronald Nason
Digitized Theses
The main purpose of this thesis is to examine and compare the Mixture of Distributions Hypothesis versus Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (ARCH) models as an explanation for the distribution of stock returns and the relationship of returns to measures of trading activity. The conjecture has been made by Lamoureux and Lastrapes, (1990a), that ARCH modelling of stock returns does not contribute any information if a variable representing the rate of flow of information is accounted for in the variance of the stock return. This thesis directly challenges this conjecture.;Three measures of trading activity, namely, the number of intraday changes in the …
Essays On Recursive Nonparametric Kernel Estimation Of Regression, Miang Hong Ngerng
Essays On Recursive Nonparametric Kernel Estimation Of Regression, Miang Hong Ngerng
Digitized Theses
In the practice of economics it is common that the data are observed not as a sample of fixed size, but rather as an ongoing sequence of a time series. It could be computationally advantageous if the estimate of the unknown function could be updated for each newly arriving data point. On some occasions, there is also a need to update the existing estimate with the newly realized observations. Kalman filter and Bayesian estimation are the commonly encountered techniques to handle these problems in the paradigm of linear parametric estimation. However, few procedures are available for nonlinear models, especially in …
The Small Firm Anomaly And The Bid-Ask Spread: Empirical Tests, Charles Edward Mossman
The Small Firm Anomaly And The Bid-Ask Spread: Empirical Tests, Charles Edward Mossman
Digitized Theses
The small firm or size anomaly is an observation that small firms, ranked by total equity value, earn abnormally large returns even after adjusting for systematic risk. The persistence of abnormal small firm returns appears inconsistent with efficient markets or traditional asset pricing models. Some explanations for the small firm anomaly relate to bid-ask spreads.;This thesis examines four areas in which the relative, or percentage, bid-ask spread influences small firm returns: bid-ask bias, transaction costs, year-end effects, and as a proxy for market liquidity.{dollar}\sp1{dollar} Tests use Canadian Toronto Stock Exchange data during 1977 to 1991. An advantage of this data …
Search Models Of Money, Scott Campbell Hendry
Search Models Of Money, Scott Campbell Hendry
Digitized Theses
This thesis contains three essays studying the emergence of money as a medium of exchange. The search framework used resumes it is difficult for agents to come together in order to trade. The result is a double coincidence of wants problem that can be alleviated through the use of money as a medium of exchange. Much of the recent work studying search models of money is based on papers by Kiyotaki and Wright. This thesis extends their work to make this area of monetary economics more applicable.;Chapter 1 of the thesis introduces a credit instrument into the search model to …
Essays On Money, Banking, And Contracts, Siu Cheong Fung
Essays On Money, Banking, And Contracts, Siu Cheong Fung
Digitized Theses
In the first chapter, a computable equilibrium business cycle model is constructed to study the effects of inflation and taxation on the allocation of capital and time between the market sector and the home sector. In the model, individuals derive utility from the consumption of market goods and services, which are produced by combining business capital and market time, and from the consumption of home goods and services, which are produced by using household capital and nonmarket time. Money is incorporated into the model using a cash-in-advance constraint which applies to the purchase of market consumption goods. The model economy …
Unemployment Cycles: Aggregate Disturbances And Sectoral Shifts, Jing Lu
Unemployment Cycles: Aggregate Disturbances And Sectoral Shifts, Jing Lu
Digitized Theses
This thesis consists of three essays, all of which examine the relative importance of aggregate disturbances and sectoral shifts in the explanation of unemployment cycles.;Chapter 1 of the thesis uses a search-theoretical framework to analyze a multi-sector economy in which labor productivity is subject to aggregate and sectoral shocks. After a critical review of the existing literature in this area and questioning the previous methods of shock decomposition into aggregate disturbance and sectoral shift components, this paper develops a new method for partitioning the effects of these two shocks on unemployment. It is argued that the mean and the dispersion …
Multi-Sector Labour Market Search: Interactions Between Unemployment Duration And Sectoral Shocks, Paul A. Storer
Multi-Sector Labour Market Search: Interactions Between Unemployment Duration And Sectoral Shocks, Paul A. Storer
Digitized Theses
This thesis comprises five chapters which are all concerned with the general theme of sectoral shocks and unemployment duration. The first chapter motivates the issues addressed in the thesis by establishing their relevance and originality. The chapter begins by showing that the interaction between sectoral shocks and unemployment duration has largely been ignored in the sectoral shocks debate. The importance of unemployment duration at the theoretical level is demonstrated and data are presented to establish the empirical relevance of the theory.;The second chapter constructs and analyses a two-sector model of labour market search in which unemployment duration is an endogenous …
Sonata In Contracting, Lutz-Alexander Busch
Sonata In Contracting, Lutz-Alexander Busch
Digitized Theses
This thesis comprises two essays linked by their focus on problems in contracting and by their usage of game theory as the vehicle of analysis.;The first essay addresses the issue of how and why incomplete contracts might arise endogenously. It provides a model of contract formation that focuses on the differential bargaining power that is bestowed upon agents by the procedures implied by different contract settings. The model employs a multi-issue bargaining approach, and distinguishes between issue-by-issue bargaining, where issues are dealt with separately, and single-issue bargaining, where they are combined. Agents are free to bargain over the form of …
Trilogy On Trade Policy: Safeguards; Mfn; Multiproduct Firms, Donald D. Mountain
Trilogy On Trade Policy: Safeguards; Mfn; Multiproduct Firms, Donald D. Mountain
Digitized Theses
This thesis examines the effects of the imposition of trade restriction and promotion policies in a variety of frameworks. The first chapter provides an introduction. The second chapter is theoretical in nature and uses a general equilibrium model to compare the welfare effects of global trade restrictive measures to those of selective measures applied against particular countries. It is the thesis of Chapter 2 that on the grounds of economic efficiency, there is no blanket theoretical support for the MFN application of safeguards. Whether or not a safeguard action undertaken on an MFN basis is better for the world as …
Finite Sample Properties Of Two-Stage Estimators, Benjamin Kwok
Finite Sample Properties Of Two-Stage Estimators, Benjamin Kwok
Digitized Theses
This thesis is concerned with the finite sample properties of some of the most widely used two-stage estimators in econometrics. Specifically we examined the use of two-stage estimation in linear regression models with AR(1) errors and in linear regression models with unobservable expectations variables. These are organized into three chapters. In chapter 1, we considered the linear regression model with AR(1) errors and proposed a jack-knifed estimator which reduces the over-rejection problem associated with conventional estimators. In chapter 2, we examined three of the most widely studied expectations models. For each model finite sample properties of two-stage estimators are derived. …