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Local Labor Market Scale, Search Duration, And Re-Employment Match Quality For U.S. Displaced Workers, Kelly R. Wilkin

Economics Dissertations

Geographic space is an important friction preventing the instantaneous matching of unemployed workers to job vacancies. Cities reduce spatial frictions by decreasing the average distance between potential match partners. Owing to these search efficiencies, theories of agglomeration predict that unemployed workers in larger labor markets find employment faster than observationally similar workers in smaller markets.

Existing studies rely on cross-sectional variation in aggregate unemployment rates across spatially distinct labor markets to test for scale effects in job search. A major difficulty with these studies is that the unemployment rate is, at any given time, simultaneously the incidence and duration of …

Essays On Phd Output At U.S. Undergraduate Institutions, Erin Nicole Coffman

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the production of knowledge that contributes to economic growth through the accumulation of human capital and technological change. More specifically, I look at the proclivity and effectiveness of different types of universities and colleges to send individuals on to pursue a doctoral degree in science or engineering (S&E) and how PhD attainment relates to characteristics of students who attend these institutions and the faculty who teach at these institutions.

A tobit estimation is employed to test for institution effects, the effect of student and faculty characteristics, and also the impact of economic factors. To partially control …

A New Look At The ‘Old View’: Endogenous Discounting, Taxation, And Corporate Financial Decisions, Robert D. Buschman

Economics Dissertations

The theoretical debate over the effect of dividend taxation on corporate decisions is long-running and unsettled, and was central to the debate and passage of the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA). It is a critical issue again as the expiration of JGTRRA tax rates looms at the end of 2012.

This dissertation proposes an enhanced “old view” theoretical model of dividend taxation, using endogenous discounting methodology to relate dividend policy, taxes, and investment. In addition to the standard old view condition for optimal investment, an Euler equation for optimal dividend policy is derived. Optimal dividends …

Essays On Foreign Aid, Government Spending And Tax Effort, Leanora A. Brown

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation comprises two essays that attempt to determine, empirically, the fiscal response of governments’ to international assistance. The first essay examines whether an increasingly popular recommendation in international aid policy to switch from tied foreign assistance to untied foreign assistance affects investment in critical development expenditure sectors by developing countries. In the past, most international aid has been in the form of tied assistance as donors believed that tying aid will improve its effectiveness. It has been argued, that if tied aid is well designed and effectively managed then its overall effectiveness can be improved. On the contrary, it …

The Difficult Decision To Devalue A Currency, Menna Bizuneh

Economics Dissertations

The switch from a fixed exchange rate regime to a flexible exchange rate regime seldom goes smoothly. A major reason why devaluations are so disruptive is that countries are reluctant to abandon their fixed exchange rate regimes. This “reluctance to devalue” phenomenon is one of the puzzles in international finance. This dissertation makes towards understanding this “reluctance to devalue”. First, I investigate the factors that may influence the probability of a switch from a fixed to a flexible exchange rate regime using survival models. I find that pegs have non-monotonic duration dependence. Moreover, I find that GDP growth strongly influences …

Essays On Uncertainty In Public Economics And Cooperative Bargaining, Omer F. Baris

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two parts. The theme connecting the two parts is the role of uncertainty.

The first part focuses on the role of uncertainty in cooperative bargaining and public decision making. I provide an axiomatic characterization of the normalized utilitarian solution to bargaining problems involving uncertainty. In addition to three basic axioms that are common in the bargaining literature, I propose the axiom of weak linearity to characterize the solution.

In the second part I study uncertainty in non-cooperative games by designing a principal agent model of public bailouts. The first essay in this part sets up the …

Essays On Experimental And Quasi-Experimental Policy Design And Evaluation, Juan Jose Miranda Montero

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation comprises two essays. The unifying theme is the evaluation of non-pecuniary (information or norm based messages) conservation programs. These types of policies are widely applied in developing and developed countries to promote conservation, however, their empirical evidence and their effectiveness are not well documented. Each chapter examines some methodological facets of the heterogeneity of non-pecuniary conservation programs and the reliability of non-experimental methods (program evaluation and econometric techniques) to evaluate treatment effects in the context of non-pecuniary conservation programs.

Essays On Social Interaction And Urban Outcomes, Zackary B. Hawley

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays. The connecting theme for this body of work is social interaction. I define social interaction, for this dissertation, as non-market based face-to-face interaction between individuals where each is interested in a response. The first contribution investigates the relationship between social interaction and neighborhood population density. I use the exogenous variation in a set of geological instruments to predict the neighborhood population density. The results suggest that an increase in neighborhood population density increases some types of social interaction. The second contribution brings social interaction into a standard urban consumer theory model, the Alonso-Muth model.

Oil And Gas Production: An Empirical Investigation Of The Common Pool, Andrew T. Balthrop

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the spatial aspects of oil and natural gas production to investigate the extent and effects of inefficient and unnecessary spatial competition. Because oil and natural gas are migratory, operators can cause hydrocarbon resources to flow from a neighboring property onto his or her own through rapid extraction. This problem is compounded when productive leases are comparatively small, as is the case in Texas.

Following an introduction and literature review, the third chapter takes advantage of a natural experiment to demonstrate how spillovers in production limit total cumulative recovery, and how the assignment of secure property rights …

A New Approach To Estimate The Incidence Of The Corporate Income Tax, Harold A. Vasquez-Ruiz

Economics Dissertations

After Harberger published his influential paper in 1962, many authors have assessed empirically whether the incidence of the corporate income tax (CIT) falls on capital owners, consumers, or workers (Krzyzaniak and Musgrave, 1963; Gordon, 1967; Arulampalam et al., 2008). Today, there is little agreement among economists about who bears the incidence of the CIT (Gruber, 2007; Harberger, 2008a,b). The reason for the little convincing evidence is that the econometric models used in the literature ignore that the factors that motivate changes in corporate tax policy are sometimes correlated with other developments in the economy and disentangling those effects from exogenous …