Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

International Trade And Environmental Regulation, Qingru Tu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three chapters regarding international trade and environmental regulation. The first chapter focuses on the relationship between port ownership and the port R\&D investment. I investigate whether a larger degree of private involvement in the port sector makes for a higher level of welfare, as well as an improvement in port performance. I establish the stage games to analyze the reciprocal international trade. The theoretical findings indicate that the endowment of population plays an essential role in choosing the optimal port ownership. In the second chapter, I investigate the effect of port pollution regulation on port …

Three Essays On Growth, Housing Market And Inequality, Shahrzad Ghourchian

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation includes three essays on growth, the housing market, and inequality. In the first essay, I analyze the effects of government consumption and government debt on long-run economic growth by considering the economic characteristics of the countries investigated. Linear regressions reveal that government consumption has a much bigger negative impact on long-run growth compared with the negative (and sometimes insignificant) effects of government debt. Nonlinear analyses further show that such effects are highly impacted by the economic characteristics of the countries investigated.

In the second essay, I study time-series fluctuations in the United States housing market from 2010 to …

Resource Nationalism And Energy Integration In Latin America: The Paradox Of Populism, Brian Hollingsworth

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between resource nationalism and energy integration, and uses Bolivia and Brazil as a test case. Essentially, does resource nationalism affect energy integration? The findings nest within more expansive questions on international political economy and export-driven models of development. Why do populist regimes, historically operating under an economic nationalist cum protectionist paradigm, simultaneously pursue policies of economic integration? What is the relationship between resource nationalists and open markets, especially in the hydrocarbons sector? What is the relationship between populists, who are typically resource nationalists, and their decision to choose policies of energy integration?

The most common …

Three Essays On Managing Extreme Weather Events And Climatic Shocks In Developing And Developed Countries, Md Tanvir Pavel

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Climate change and extreme weather events are affecting the environment, and people’s livelihood in both developing and developed countries. Agriculture, forestry, fishing, livestock, water resources, human health, terrestrial ecosystems, biodiversity, and coastal zones are among the major sectors impacted by these shocks. The challenge of adaptation is particularly acute in the developing countries, as poverty and resource constraints limit their capacity to act. Bangladesh fits in this category, and thus I use data from Bangladesh to analyze the adaptation process in the first and second chapter of my dissertation.

In the first chapter, I investigate whether transient shocks (flood, cyclone) …

Essays On Trade And Growth, Yulin Hou

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three essays on international trade and economic growth. The first essay investigates whether the content of what economies export matters for human capital accumulation. I construct a small open economy model and find that expansion of primary exports can harm human capital accumulation if the economy is initially allocating significant resources to primary goods production. Then I test this prediction empirically using Latin American data over the period from 1965 to 2010 and find robust evidence in support of the hypothesis that a shift towards primary exports reduces human capital accumulation.

In the second essay, …

Three Essays In Health, Welfare, And International Economics, Amin Shoja

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Both economists and policy makers are interested in understanding the welfare effect of economic policies, especially in small open economies such as Turkey and Iran. This knowledge is crucial for priority setting in any informed policy discussion. This dissertation aims to study the impoverishing effect of high levels of out-of-pocket (OOP) payments in the health sector, referred to as catastrophic health expenditure (CHE), and investigates the impact of exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) on both the microeconomic and macroeconomic indicators of a country. For millions of people worldwide, health payments present a huge financial risk. A high rate of OOP health …

Three Essays On International Trade And Migration, Yun Wang

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation encompasses three different topics on empirical international trade and migration. The first chapter investigates the short run effects of regional trade agreements on trade costs. It is widely accepted that the reinforcement of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) aiming at trade costs reduction among trade partners requires time. This paper investigates the effects of RTAs on trade costs over time by using unique micro-price data. We confirm that having an RTA on average lowers trade costs significantly. Furthermore, data shows significant and negative effects of RTAs on trade costs over time. Specifically, besides the initial impact on trade costs, …

Election Administration Within The Sphere Of Politics: How Bureaucracy Can Facilitate Democracy With Policy Decisions, Nicholas S. Martinez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Public bureaucracy finds itself in a strange place at the intersection of political science and public administration. Political science finds that, within representative democracy, discretion granted to bureaucrats threatens the nature of democracy by subverting politicians who represent the will of the people – bureaucracy vs democracy. At the same time, public administration holds that, in the interest of promoting democracy, bureaucracy should be objective in its implementation of policy in a way that eliminates the influence of politics from decision-making – politics vs bureaucracy. Those positions are seemingly contradictory in nature. From one perspective, bureaucracy is undemocratic because it …

Three Essays On The Behavioral Responses To Coastal Hazards And Vulnerability, Fan Jiang

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three papers in environmental and natural resource economics. The first paper estimates the value of statistical lives (VSL) from hurricane evacuation behavior through an empirical analysis. I present empirical models that predict individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for avoiding hurricane risks revealed through their evacuation behavior. Using survey data from Texas residents (who were affected by Hurricane Ike), I analyze the individuals’ hurricane evacuation decisions and their corresponding WTP for evacuation. I also estimate the individuals' WTP for avoiding hurricane risks under both voluntary and mandatory evacuation orders and calculate the associated VSL. The findings can …

Daily Exchange Rate Pass-Through Into Micro Prices, Renzo Alvarez, Amin Shoja, Syed A. Uddin, Hakan Yillmazkuday

Economics Research Working Paper Series

This paper estimates the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) by using good-level daily data on wholesale prices of imported agricultural products, where the identifcation is achieved by using daily data on the domestic inflation rate. The results of standard empirical analyses are in line with existing studies that employ lower frequencies of data by showing evidence for incomplete daily ERPT of about 5 percent. The key innovation is achieved when nonlinearities in ERPT are considered, where ERPT is doubled to about 10 percent when daily nominal exchange rate changes are above 0.55 percent, daily frequencies of price change are above 3.12 …

Spatial Dispersion Of Retail Margins: Evidence From Turkish Agricultural Prices, Hakan Yilmazkuday

Economics Research Working Paper Series

The farmer share of retail prices is shown to be about 16 percent, corresponding to about 84 percent of a distribution share, on average across agricultural products and regions within Turkey. The share of transportation costs in retail prices is only about 7 percent, while the share of retail margins is about 77 percent of retail prices. The disper- sion of retail prices across regions is shown to be mostly due to local wages and variable markups, while the contribution of traded-input prices is relatively small. Accordingly, the high dispersion of farmer prices across locations is not reáected in the …

Financial Sector Development, Economic Growth And Stability, Wenjun Xue

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation investigates financial sector development, economic growth and stability through the analysis of Chinese and international evidence. My first chapter is the introduction. The second chapter investigates the effects of Chinese financial and fiscal policies on the Chinese economic recovery in the 2008 economic stimulus Plan, covering the period from the Great Recession to 2014. This chapter explores the effects of the increase in bank credit growth with significant strain of banking health on firm-level output, employment and investment. The results demonstrate that the increase in government expenditure due to the fiscal policies has the significant effects on the …

Illegal Immigration, Unemployment, And Multiple Destinations, Kaz Miyagiwa, Yasuhiro Sato

Economics Research Working Paper Series

We develop a multi-country model of illegal immigration with equilibrium unemployment. Two geographic cases are considered. One has two destinations adjacent to the source country while the other has just one destination country adjacent to it. In both cases, the equilibrium border control proves insufficient compared with the joint optimum, calling for enforcement by federal authorities. Absent such authorities, delegating border control to the country with a larger native labor force can improve each destination country’s welfare. In contrast, the equilibrium internal enforcement policy is efficient, obviating enforcement by supranational authorities.

The Patent-Issuing Rules And Economic Growth: Are We In A “Wrong” Patent Regime?, Tetsugen Haruyama, Kaz Miyagiwa

Economics Research Working Paper Series

No abstract provided.