This paper analyzes—both empirically and theoretically—how fluctuations in uncertainty interact with financial market imperfections in determining economic outcomes. In a standard bond-contracting framework, an increase in uncertainty benefits equity holders at the expense of bondholders, and to the extent that firms face significant frictions in financial markets, increased uncertainty implies...

This paper examines the impact of the concentration of the property insurance industry on economic growth in China. We first compute the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for the Chinese property insurance industry and establish a two-step system of generalized methods of moments (Two-Step SYS-GMM) estimation to compute the economic effect using a unique data set from the years 1980 to 2014. The...

The concepts of “integrated control” and “integrated pest management” (IPM) were devised by entomologists, but they proved relevant to the monitoring and control of virtually any agricultural pest (i.e., weeds, fungi, vertebrates). Within IPM, economic threshold characterized pest densities that would have negative impacts and economic injury level characterized amounts of predicted crop injury...

This thesis consists of uncertainty and techno-economic studies of two different biofuels production pathways (catalytic pyrolysis and gasification). The objective of this paper is to obtain a side-by-side techno-economic comparison of in situ and ex situ catalytic pyrolysis, and gasification state-of-technology and target scenarios that addresses both sensitivity and uncertainty analysis in th...

The Correspondence Principle is the relation, which exists in certain economic models, between comparative statics of equilibria and the properties of out-of-equilibrium dynamics. The Correspondence Principle (CP) implies that one obtains unambiguous comparative statics by selecting equilibria with desirable dynamic properties. Generally, the CP determines comparative statics in models with a o...

The paper revisits the issue of necessary optimality conditions for infinite-horizon optimal control problems. It is proved that the normal form maximum principle holds with an explicitly specified adjoint variable if an appropriate relation between the discount rate, the growth rate of the solution and the growth rate of the objective function is satisfied. The main novelty is that the result ...