The potential economic returns to the demographic transition are high. As countries move from a steady state with high mortality and high fertility to an equilibrium with low mortality and fewer children, lower dependency ratios, higher investment in human and physical capital as well as increased female labor force participation contribute to economic growth. In this paper, we analyze the demo...

We adopted an economic analysis to evaluate and discuss the management of conservation and commercial exploitation of whales. In particular, the paper starts from the recent proposal to create and implement a quota market for whale trading and attempts to address and develop selected economic issues, in order to move towards understanding the economics of whales. We can summarize our findings i...

Homeowners mitigate potential hurricane losses by purchasing insurance and structural improvements. We construct and parameterize a model of optimal homeowner choice for a representative property in Wilmington, N.C., a hurricane prone region. Given existing insurance policies, National Weather Service location-specific hurricane strike probabilities, structural improvement costs, and an existin...

To Eunjung ii Acknowledgements I extend my sincere thanks to the members of my dissertation committee. I am particularly grateful to my co-chairs, Uday Rajan and Stephen Salant. They have been great advisors in every stage of this dissertation. Their critical comments were greatly helpful for me to sharpen rudimentary ideas into implementable research topics and their insightful advice improves...