Three essays on mineral economics and economic geography

Abstract

This dissertation presents three essays on resource economics. The first essay discusses economics of mineral supply as a by-product. Specifically, this essay estimates how much uranium might be recoverable from current phosphoric acid production in the United States and what the associated costs might be. The second and third essays deal with resource economics in the context of economic geography. The second essay studies locational determinants of manufacturing related to wind energy. Econometric technique is applied to investigate the location of wind equipment manufacturing facilities in the United States. To our knowledge, it is one of the first studies to analyze the topic in quantitative way due to sparseness of data. The third essay studies knowledge localization in innovative industry with a case study on additive manufacturing. Knowledge plays an important role in early stages of technology development. Unlike wind equipment manufacturing which has already been fully commercialized, additive manufacturing is a newly growing industry which is not fully mature yet. The empirical results improve our understanding on localization of knowledge in innovative industry. These three essays contribute to expanding our knowledge of resources economics by providing case studies.