Econometrics Commons^™

Three Essays On International And Intranational Trade And Economic Growth, Rooholah Hadadi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation introduced a method to construct a new measure for trade flows within a region using nighttime lights. After analyzing the relation between lights data and other proxies of economic human activity, I employed light data and econometric techniques to estimate the bilateral trade between any two regions around the world. Using these estimations, I estimated the overall internal trade volume for all countries. Moreover, I estimated the effect of internal trade within a state of the United States on the state’s income. The first essay proposed nighttime lights as an alternative proxy for economic activity to be used …

Three Essays On The Economics Of Defense Contracting, Output And Income Inequality, Edward M. Decambra

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes both the economics of the defense contracting process and the impact of total dollar obligations on the economies of U.S. states. Using various econometric techniques, I will estimate relationships across individual contracts, state level output, and income inequality. I will achieve this primarily through the use of a dataset on individual contract obligations.

The first essay will catalog the distribution of contracts and isolate aspects of the process that contribute to contract dollar obligations. Accordingly, this study describes several characteristics about individual defense contracts, from 1966-2006: (i) the distribution of contract dollar obligations is extremely rightward skewed, …