Master of Arts in Economics, Youngstown State University, 2000, Lariccia School of Accounting and Finance

"European Monetary Union and an Analysis of Greece's Economic Efforts to Meet the Maastricht Criteria" is a thesis that mainly focuses on how an old European vision became a reality. More specifically the thesis is divided into two main axis. The first is the presentation of Europe's needs for coexistence and unification after WW2, and the illustration of the steps that different European countries took over the years towards the establishment of this unification under the formation of the European Union (EU). The second deals with the creation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and the attempts by Greece (an EU member) to join the union.

Committee: Donald Milley (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Master of Arts in Economics, Youngstown State University, 2000, Lariccia School of Accounting and Finance

In this paper, I investigate the determinants of the rate of national saving in the United States over the period from 1959 to 1999. My analysis focuses on the relationship between aggregate national income accounts data and demographic data. Specifically, I test whether or not current data supports the life-cycle hypothesis with respect to changes in the age structure of the population, measured by the dependency ratio, and find it to have a significant effect upon saving behavior. Additionally, income and the growth of income, wealth, the rate of interest, and life expectancy are also found to significantly influence saving behavior in the United States.

Committee: Dennis Petruska (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Master of Arts in Economics, Youngstown State University, 1999, Lariccia School of Accounting and Finance

General Motors' "acceptance" of its recent decline in market shares has prompted the company to make drastic changes in its production methods. These improvements will begin with a change from on-site assembly to modular assembly of certain car components. Along with a new production technique, General Motor's will also build new plants to accomodate modular assembly. These announced plans threaten existing plants, many of which desperately need capital improvements. Ultimately, those locations that are not selected for the new plants will probably witness the closing of their assembly plants. The General Motors plant in Lordstown, in particular, falls in this category. Built in 1966, the plant houses General Motors' small car operations, and, at that time, was the largest and most automated assembly plant. The plant has also become an important manufacturing firm for Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties. General Motors has not yet confirmed any plans to reinvest in Lordstown; therefore, if a shutdown occurs, the region may suffer serious economic consequences. This paper studies the possible ramifications of both a decision to build and a decision to shut down the plant on the Youngstown-Warren economy. Specifically, a regional econometric model is used in four different scenarios that reflect the two possible decisions. Scenario 1 and 2 focus on the selection of Lordstown for the new plant while scenario 3 and scenario 4 take the alternative view. Regional multipliers and time series graphs then are used to study these effects and draw conclusions for the scenarios.

Committee: Yih-Wu Liu (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Master of Arts in Economics, Youngstown State University, 2007, Lariccia School of Accounting and Finance

The United States federal government has a substantial budget every year for various programs in the public interest. The money for these programs must come from somewhere: usually, either taxes or deficit spending. The concern of this paper is the latter element. Specifically, it is the goal of this paper to uncover whether annual budget deficits are affected by the partisan makeup of the institutions that decide how to spend money and how to obtain it: namely, Congress and the presidency. Does a Democratic president tend to cause higher deficits than a Republican? Is the behavior of a party any different in Congress than it would be in the presidency? These questions will be explored. After an historical overview and a literature review, I formulate a simple theoretical model to provide a basis for what I am trying to find. Then, I frame the questions of the paper into hypotheses and test manifold empirical models. After establishing which I find to be most fitting and subsequently revising that model, I discuss its implications and suggest areas for future research.

Committee: Joseph Palardy PhD (Advisor); Tod Porter PhD (Other); Yogesh Uppal PhD (Other); Peter Kasvinsky (Other) Subjects: Economics, General

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : Economics

We survey the literature on mixed oligopolies and detected that it has ignored, among other things, the effects resulting from changes in assets ownership as well as the location resulting when firms compete to set up their facilities and then they compete in quantities in a linear market. The former is important because decisions to increase the industry's stock of capital, the sale of it among firms, or its joint ownership, lead to different behavior and performance of the industry. Therefore, we investigate how the change in asset ownership affects price, firms' profit, welfare and industry concentration. We also analyze if there is a negative correlation between industry concentration and welfare. We find out that the direction in price changes, firms' profit and industry concentration depend on how asset ownership changes. Further more, we find no correlation between industry concentration and welfare. It has been shown in a private oligopoly, that if firms compete first in location choice, and then in quantities, they will choose to agglomerate at the market center. We investigate if the presence of a public firm breaks down this agglomeration. In our analysis of mixed duopoly we show that whether or not firms agglomerate, depends on the cost differential between the private and the public firm. No agglomeration results if the cost differential is small, i.e. c < 1/2, but it will emerge at the market center otherwise. We also show that some consumers, and the private firm, may be better off under a private duopoly than in a mixed duopoly.

Committee: Debashis Pal (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2003, Arts and Sciences : Economics

Sub-Saharan Africa has been perceived as a very high-risk place for investment for diverse reasons, including incredible rules, systemic corruption, political instability and social unrest, lack of formal mechanism of contract enforcement and insecure property rights. Because of this perception, investors are reluctant to commit capital. Our case- studies in Mali and Burkina Faso, suggest that these beliefs are well - founded; the lack of contract discipline is real. Firms and businessmen prefer to rely on mechanisms of commercial enforcement based on personal recommendations, repeated interactions as they lack confidence in the legal system and the effectiveness of the judiciary. In the empirical cross- country analysis section, we attempt to build some link between this lack of formal mechanism of contract enforcement (or secure property rights) and investment and economic growth. The empirical section investigates the general proposition that insecure property rights lower growth by limiting capital accumulation. Variables that capture political violence and secure property right are introduced in the framework popularized by Barro and Sala-I-Martin for cross-country growth analysis to shed light on these relationships. Evidence from 48 Sub-Saharan African countries does not bring any support to our first claim that insecure property rights deter investment. However, the cross-country growth analysis shows a significant negative relationship between Gastil index and growth. In this study, Gastil index measures political freedom and civil liberties in a given country. The higher this index, the lower political freedom and civil liberties for the country. This negative relationship between Gastil index and growth confirms our hypothesis that insecure property rights reduce growth.

Committee: Dr. Mayer Wolfgang (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2002, Arts and Sciences : Economics

The goal of education is multi-faceted. In an effort to instill achievement, positive attitude formation, and edification, teachers lead students to the discovery of new ideas and implementation of learned material. This paper uses a multiple-output learning production model based on the information-processing approach to learning, using data from introductory economics courses a large research university. This paper makes a contribution by formulating a metric of usefulness or edification. In addition, extensive survey of student goals, aspirations, and attitudes provides a fruitful explanatory power. The results are encouraging in assessing the development of the affective domain as well as the cognitive domain of educational objectives. Application of experimental curriculum also appears to stimulate the development of both the cognitive and affective domain.

Committee: Dr. Gisela M. Escoe (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : Economics

This dissertation employs a political economy approach to study the joint determination of federal and state level policies in an economy with a federal form of governance. A formal framework is developed that captures strategic interactions between federal and state governments as well as strategic interactions between special interest groups and policymakers. This analytical framework is subsequently used to analyze the policy implications of multilateral lending under policy conditionality. In the first section of the dissertation, we consider a case in which the small economy government has access to a single instrument of policy for political redistribution. This case serves as a useful benchmark for subsequent analysis wherein each level of governance retains access to a redistributive policy tool. The results of the benchmark case illustrate that policy-making at the highest level of governance helps to reduce the extent of policy-induced distortions. Moreover, earmarking of multilateral lending for particular states of a federal economy results in the same policy outcome as the one when the multilateral loan is disbursed to the federal government. When each level of governance enjoys access to a redistributive instrument, results of the model are determined by the equilibrium relationship between the two policies. If, in equilibrium, the state-level policy behaves as a strategic complement to the policy set at the center, earmarking of the loan to the least protectionist state governments reinforces the decline in trade distortions in the economy. This leads to a higher level of social welfare in the economy as a whole. Alternatively, if the two policies are strategic substitutes in equilibrium, then although conditional lending to the federal government tends to reduce the extent of distortions caused by the federal policy, the state-level policy-induced distortions tend to rise as a consequence. In such situations, by additionally earmarking the loan to th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Wolfgang Mayer (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Family Resource Management

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of personal finance education mandates. Personal finance mandates in high school are classified into three categories based on curriculum requirements: (1) standard mandates provide guidelines for instruction; (2) course mandates require students to take a personal finance related course before graduation; and (3) test mandates require students to take a financial literacy test before graduation. To evaluate the impact of state level education mandates data from the 1997 to 2006 Jump$tart Financial Literacy Surveys was analyzed. The prior research using the Jump$tart data has shown that imposing a general mandate may have little impact on student financial literacy. In this study, mandating educational standards show partial positive impact on student financial knowledge test outcomes. Mandates that require taking a specific personal finance course upon completion of high school have a significant and positive impact on student financial literacy. Mandates that require testing of personal finance knowledge before graduating from high school were found to have a negative impact on student financial knowledge. The key findings of this study have important implications for policymakers, educators and researchers who are promoting the implementation of personal finance education. As more states are implementing personal finance education in current curriculum in recent years, the mandated educational standards start to show a positive relationship with student financial literacy. Development and implementation of a national educational standard for personal finance education should be guided under the leadership of federal government. Empirical results indicate that a positive relationship between a course mandate and student financial literacy enhances with the maturity of course mandates. More efforts on promoting mandatory personal finance course are encouraged. Policymakers should reevaluate the policy on ma (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jonathan Fox (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics

The first two chapters look at differences between individual and group decision-making in economic environments. Using laboratory experiments the first chapter shows that group preferences for self-interest differ from those of individuals, but the direction and magnitude depends on the procedure governing how groups make decisions. The second chapter looks at the dynamics of group decision-making, which leads to an argument for looking at group decisions through the lens of reciprocity. The third chapter focuses on country level trends in agriculture to empirically investigate whether countries that increase agricultural productivity increase or decrease land in agriculture.

Committee: Steven Wu (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Economics

In the last four decades, Indonesia has experienced rapid declines in infant and child mortality alongside active government interventions. Using the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), my dissertation studies the impact of two major government programs on mortality rates: (1) the national family planning program introduced in 1970 which was very successful in increasing contraceptive prevalence and (2) the village midwife program initiated in 1989 that trained and placed over 50,000 midwives in villages across the country. The first two chapters describe the nature of the family planning program in Indonesia and empirically examine the relationship between the program and the risk of infant and child mortality. First, using the difference in the timing of introduction of the family planning program in two sets of provinces, I use a difference-in-difference approach to show that mortality rates of children fell in provinces where the program was introduced. Second, I examine the relationship between contraceptive acceptance by the woman and the likelihood of survival of subsequent births. A bivariate probit framework is used to overcome the bias that would arise in a single equation framework due to correlation between contraceptive use and unobserved characteristics of the woman. The results show a 5 percent reduction in the risk of child mortality after a woman has used contraceptives, but there is no significant effect on infant mortality. The third chapter estimates the impact of the village midwife program on infant mortality. Trained midwives placed in villages through the program provided antenatal, intrapartum and postpartum assistance to village women who would otherwise have relied on traditional birth attendants. Prior studies have shown general improvements in women's health and birth-weights of newborns, but have not directly examined the impact of the program on the birth process, which was the primary objective of the program. I estimate the program (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Patricia Reagan (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics

The main objective of this research is to reveal the effects of water quality on housing values around Lake Erie. Both the first and the second stage of hedonic price analysis are conducted with identified housing submarkets by using Hierarchical Clustering with quantized similarity measures in the region including Erie, Lorain, Ottawa and Sandusky Counties located along Lake Erie. We use both individual houses and census block groups as the smallest building blocks of the clusters and compare the clustering and hedonic results for both cases. Fecal coliform counts and secchi disk depth readings measuring water clarity are used as water quality variables. In order to overcome the spatio-temporal aspects of secchi depth disk reading data, kriging is used for spatial prediction. Robust Lagrange Multiplier test indicates that spatial error models are appropriate for the estimation of hedonic price functions in each submarket. We found that secchi disk depth readings variables are positive significantly influencing housing prices in most of the clusters while mixed results are found for fecal coliform counts. Demand functions with different functional forms are estimated with two-stage least squares with submarket dummy variables. While computed welfare changes for fecal coliform by using non-linear demand functions are very small, the benefit of the improvement of water clarity by 25 centimeters to be estimated 230 dollars per household. We found that the welfare changes are larger for the degradation of water quality compared to the improvements of water quality in the same amount. We further analyzed the welfare changes by using demand functions derived specifically for each household. Welfare changes based on the individual demand functions were computed by integrating under each demand curve for multiple scenarios. If we consider our SIG Fecal data represents 33 percent of entire population in four counties, the total estimated net benefit was derived as 51,934,180 (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Timothy Haab (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Economics

This dissertation consists of three essays examining the macroeconomic implications of the delayed acquisition and processing of information on the part of private agents. In "Optimal Monetary Policy with Disparate Expectations and Endogenous Inattention" I study optimal monetary policy in a world with rationally inattentive agents holding disparate expectations. I solve for the welfare maximizing monetary policy response to markup shocks given that agents choose the precision of their information. When agents gather less precise information, the trade-off between price instability and output stability grows more favorable. However, when the monetary authority tries to exploit this trade-off through more active policy, it induces private agents to acquire more information. I show that a reduction in markup shock volatility leads the central bank to moderate their response to shocks, simultaneously lowering the volatility of prices and output by leading agents to expend less effort in acquiring information. In "Imperfectly Credible Disinflations with Sticky Information" I study the effects of a disinflationary policy when price setting behavior is characterized by a Sticky Information Phillips Curve. Contrary to the results obtained with a standard Phillips Curve derived from sticky prices, a disinflation may lead to large recession. I study the optimal speed of disinflation and find that under the Sticky Information Phillips Curve, short rapid disinflations are more costly in terms of the welfare than a gradualist approach. Finally however, when credibility is endogenous more aggressive and rapid disinflations are more likely to be successful. In "Disinflations with Imperfect Common Knowledge about Changing Inflation Targets" I study how an economy with rationally inattentive agents responds to a shift in monetary policy from a high inflation to low inflation regime and how this response depends upon the nominal anchor. Specifically I compare disinflations engineere (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: William Dupor (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Economics

My dissertation focuses on methodology and applications of interaction-based models. Such models are appealing in investigating group behavior evolving from individual interactions and explaining individual behavior under group influence. The first essay examines two methods of modeling binary choice with social interactions: model assuming homogenous rational expectations and model using subjective data on expectations. Exploiting a unique survey conducted during the 1996 U.S. presidential election that was designed to study voting behavior under social context, we find that in various model specifications, using subjective expectations consistently improves models' goodness-of-fit; and that expectations are not rational as formulated by Brock and Durlauf. Specifically, members' characteristics are individually important in forming expectations. We also include correlated effect into the rational expectation model and demonstrate that its identification is made possible by the nonlinearity introduced through rational expectation term. This extension provides a remedy to the selection issues that often arise in social interaction models. My second essay empirically investigates how political discussion among voters affects their voting choices, particularly how a voter's perception of his or her discussants' political sophistication influences the extent to which his or her choice conforms to those of his or her discussants. I find that positive evaluation of discussants' political sophistication reinforces the degree of conformity. The third essay develops an interaction-based binary choice model with heterogeneous rational expectations and applies it to the study of adolescents' smoking behavior under peer influence. We relax the homogeneous rational expectation assumptions in previous work and examine models in which members in a group hold different expectations toward the average choice of others (heterogeneous rational expectation). We propose an allocation me (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lung-fei Lee (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Economics

My dissertation studies statistical properties of the measure that Engel uses in his 1999 paper and presents new evidence in favor of the Balassa-Samuelson theory. The Balassa-Samuelson theory implies that the importance of the traded goods component in the real exchange rate movement decreases over time. Engel's empirical results,however, indicate that the importance is very high and even increasing for the long run for some countries. The tests based on Engel's measure show no statistical evidence for the decrease in the importance of the traded goods. My dissertation consists of three essays. The essay titled "Long-run Real Exchange Rate Changes and the Properties of the Variance of k-differences," examines the statistical properties of the measure Engel uses, the variance of k-differences. I show that the variance of k-differences tends to return to the initial value as k approaches the sample size whether the variable is stationary or unit root nonstationary. My results imply that the increasing variances for k-values close to the sample size cannot be interpreted as evidence of an increase in the importance. In my second essay, "A Monte Carlo Investigation on the Estimator of Ratio of Long Run Variances," I investigate whether the high level of importance Engel finds should be attributed to the high persistence of the traded goods component by means of a Monte Carlo simulation. My simulation results imply that the high ratio is more likely to be attributable to the volatility of errors of the traded goods component, not to its persistence. I also find that the power of the test based on Engel's measure is very low for given parameter values. In my third essay, "Higher Power Tests for the Failure of Long Run Purchasing Power Parity," I apply a covariate augmented point optimal test to three different real exchange rates, each of which is constructed with CPI, PPI, and Export/Import price index, respectively. The covariate test for the real exchange rates based (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Masao Ogaki (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Economics

My dissertation research emphasizes estimation methods in evaluating the extent of social, strategic and spatial interactions among economic agents. My first essay, based on my joint research with Lung-fei Lee and John Kagel, generalizes Heckman's (1981) dynamic discrete-choice panel data models by introducing time-lagged social interactions and proposes simulation based methods to implement the maximum likelihood estimation. We use this generalized model to investigate learning from peers in experimental signaling games. We find that subjects' decisions are significantly influenced by the past decisions of their peers in the experiment. Hence the imitation of peers' strategies is an important component of the learning process of strategic play. My second essay explores the robustness of Guerre, Perrigne and Vuong's (2000) two-step nonparametric estimation procedure in first-price sealed-bid auctions with a large number of risk-averse bidders. With an asymptotic approximation of the intractable equilibrium bidding function of risk-averse bidders, I demonstrate that Guerre et al.'s two-step nonparametric estimator based on the equilibrium bidding behavior of risk-neutral bidders is still uniformly consistent even if bidders are risk-averse as long as the number of players in an auction is sufficiently large and derive the uniform convergence rate of the estimator. Furthermore, I show in Monte Carlo experiments that the two-step nonparametric estimator performs reasonably well with a moderate number of risk-averse bidders like six. In my third essay, which is based on my joint research with Lung-fei Lee and Christopher Bollinger, we consider the GMM estimation of the regression model with spatial autoregressive disturbances and the mixed-regressive spatial autoregressive model. We derive the best GMM estimator within the class of GMM estimators that are based on linear and quadratic moment conditions. Our best GMM estimator has the merit of computational simplicity an (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lung-fei Lee (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics

This dissertation incorporates several estimation procedures and modeling techniques to investigate important issues in health economics. All of the essays are tied to the application of econometrics in health related topics, but the techniques used in this research can be applied to many issues in agricultural, environmental and development economics. The first essay, A Multilevel Approach to Model Obesity and Overweight in the United States, presents a multilevel multinomial econometric approach to model the categories of body mass index as functions of both lifestyle components and the external environment. Among state level variables, higher per-capita sales of restaurants and a higher Gini coefficient are associated with a higher likelihood of being classified as obese or overweight. At the individual level, a gain in income has gender-specific effects; it increases the likelihood of women being healthier and men being overweight. The second essay, Job Loss, Retirement and the Mental Health of Older Americans, examines the effects of involuntary job loss and retirement on the mental health of older Americans. Potential endogeneity may arise due to reverse causality or latent individual effects or both. Using several econometric techniques, consistent and efficient estimates of the explanatory variables are obtained, and it is shown that involuntary job loss impacts mental health negatively, whereas retirement has a positive effect on psychological well-being. Perhaps most importantly, the decline in mental health status due to involuntary job loss is fully reversed for those individuals who subsequently re-enter the job market. The third essay, Risk Tolerance and its Relation to Important Life Events, studies panel data on three birth-year cohorts to understand the changes in risk tolerance across different age groups. Interval regressions on the first differences in risk tolerance over time capture the reasons for changes in the risk tolerance of each cohort. (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian Roe (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Economics

This dissertation explores the impact of school quality in housing markets through two distinct lines of research. The first is a housing market equilibrium study of house prices and the second is a partial equilibrium model of household utility maximization as revealed through household location. The first essay uses the hedonic house price approach with a sample of houses that have school district boundaries that may differ from the boundaries of the city. The model includes school district fixed effects, controls for city services, and neighborhood attributes. The school quality measure is important in explaining higher house prices and the estimated value of higher test scores is unaffected by various formulations that provide good controls for spatial variations in city services and neighborhood characteristics. The second essay is a discrete choice conditional logit model of household location. The choice of school district appears to be less about the presence of children and more about the sorting of households based on race, education, and income. Households do not choose school districts based on their children's characteristics; households with higher income purchase higher levels of school quality.

Committee: Donald Haurin (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics

This dissertation studies the economic valuation of air-pollution-related health risks in China, by applying two different valuation methods: the compensating wage differential method and the contingent valuation method. By using the compensating wage differential (CWD) method, the tradeoff between workers' wage and the on-the-job fatality risk workers bear in the labor market is estimated, with consideration of the market opportunities faced by workers in different regions. The result shows that a positive compensating wage differential for on-the-job fatality risk exists in China; and this wage differential convexly decreases with the local unemployment rate. The value of a statistical life (VSL) computed from the estimate varies from US$12,000 to US$120,000. By using the contingent valuation (CV) method, an individual interview survey is conducted to elicit resident's willingness-to-pay (WTP) for health risk reductions of asthma and mortality. The questionnaire is designed to test the hypothesis that the private provision and the public/government provision mechanisms of the health risk reductions have no significantly different effect to people's WTP. The results of binary probit regressions show that the public/government provision mechanism has no significant effect to people's WTP for the asthma risk reduction, whereas it has a significantly negative effect to the WTP for the mortality risk reduction. Within-group analysis shows that perceived effectiveness and trust are the major reasons of the stated preference of respondents on the provision mechanisms. The scope/scale effects of WTP to the magnitude of risk reduction and to the description of the severity of disease symptoms are also tested. The estimated median value of a statistical case of asthma from the CV study is about US$2400, while the median VSL estimated is about US$24,000. Possible reasons of the discrepancy between the VSL generated by the CWD and CV methods are discussed. Comparing these res (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Timothy Haab (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics

Can the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek Theorem explain observed commodity trade? My conclusion is that it can. When factors and factor contents are measured correctly, we see a relationship between endowments and factor content flows. I describe the appropriate way to use OECD input-output tables, bilateral trade data, and national income data for nine member countries to calculate the measured and predicted factor contents of trade under both the traditional country-by-country approach and the new integrated method. A simple relationship between the observed national production techniques does not exist. Letting the production data speak for itself, the factor content of output matches well with the national factor endowments. Under the traditional method, I show that neither adjusting for not-traded goods nor allowing for quasi-homothetic preferences significantly improves the performance of the theory. I recognize that factor services are not homogeneous across countries. The Moore-Penrose inverse is used to construct a logical conversion matrix that translates foreign factors into their domestic equivalents. A new measured factor content of trade based on this aggregation method first calculates the factor content of goods where they were produced then converts those factors into domestic ones before aggregating across countries. With this translation, the performance of the theory in the trade test improves. Using the new integrated approach, I compare the assumption of perfect homogeneity with its opposite, complete heterogeneity of factor services. While the summary results for homogeneous factors look appealing, the case for country-specific factors is compelling. Identifying factors by country results in cases of both too much and too little factor content of trade. Among the EU members, factor content exchange is predicted well. This suggests that as barriers to trade are reduced and globalization homogenizes tastes, the importance of endowments in explaining trade (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ian Sheldon (Advisor) Subjects: Economics, General