Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Factors Influencing Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Land Use, Land-Use Change, And Forest Activities, Pattarawan Watcharaanantapong

Doctoral Dissertations

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are a major global issue because of their effects on climate and the resulting environmental and human impacts. The primary greenhouse gases (GHGs), carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O), are emitted into the atmosphere from a myriad of human activities such as energy supply, manufacturing, transportation, commercial and residential buildings, and waste. Additionally, management activities on agricultural and forest lands can influence GHG emissions substantially. Even though GHGs can be released into the air via the sectors mentioned, GHGs, especially CO₂, can be removed from …

Three Essays On Sustainable Development In China: Social, Economic And Environmental Aspects, Ying Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

The first essay focuses on the role of the hukou (i.e. Household Registration System) with full awareness of the economic system it operates under, and the development model it assists. I find that hukou’s main role in the planned economy was to assist socialist industrialization while averting the Lewis development model, a development strategy based on unlimited supply of labors from the rural sector, largely adopted in developing countries. In the market reform period, hukou performed exactly the opposite function, which is to assist the Lewis model based on the unlimited supply of rural surplus labor “released” from the …

Elite Capture, Free Riding, And Project Design: A Case Study Of A Community-Driven Development Project In Ceará, Brazil, Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the successes and failures of a community-driven development project, São José Agrário (SJA), conducted in Northeastern Brazil. The project was co-funded by the World Bank and the State of Ceará and co-directed by a social movement (the Landless Workers Movement, MST) and the State of Ceará. The dissertation employs a mixed methods approach based on eight case studies, a census survey of six communities, and interviews with a wide variety of actors connected to the project. I address the problem of elite capture, either by non-targeted communities or by an elite within the targeted communities disproportionately benefiting …

Three Essays On The Social Determinants Of Early Childhood Health And Development, Andrew Barenberg

Doctoral Dissertations

This three-paper dissertation examines the social determinants of early childhood and in-utero health. The first chapter examines the impact of early childhood stunting on educational outcome in Tanzania. Using the extent of third-trimester overlap with the Tanzania hunger season to create an exogenous variation in stunting, I find that a one standard deviation stunting decreases educational achievement by .88 school years compared to a child's siblings. A placebo group not affected by the hunger season is used to confirm that in-utero nutrition deprivation is the cause of the education differences. The second paper utilizes the food price shocks and price …

The Political Economy Of Smallholder Incorporation And Land Acquisition, Alfredo R. Rosete

Doctoral Dissertations

Of late, development institutions and economists have argued that one way to accomplish the modernization, and thus, poverty alleviation in the rural sector is through smallholder incorporation- partnerships between agribusiness firms and smallholders in order to cultivate high valued export crops. Smallholders in developing countries often face numerous challenges that result in low incomes, and limited opportunities. As a result of these challenges, smallholders in developing countries continue to cultivate subsistence crops, or, use less technologically intensive techniques. Thus, many are unable to maximize the use of their holdings. Agribusiness firms may provide the material inputs, infrastructure, and transport needed …

Three Essays On Sustainability, Mark V. Paul

Doctoral Dissertations

Chapter 1 investigates the inverse relationship between farm size and agricultural yield. While there are a large number of studies internationally, there have been few conducted in African countries. Using household-level data from a national survey we explore the relationship between farm size and yield in Ethiopia's post land reform scenario. We find a robust inverse relationship between farm size and yield, and a positive association between yield and land fragmentation. These findings raise important questions for current agricultural development strategies that favor larger farms and less fragmentation in Africa Chapter 2 investigates the uptake of top-down flood mitigation policies …

Three Essays On Labor Market Friction And The Business Cycle, Jong-Seok Oh

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the macroeconomic impact of reduced labor market friction on the U.S. business cycle after the mid-1980s. The first two essays investigate the relationship between labor market flexibility and macroeconomic stability from a post-Keynesian perspective. In the third essay which reviews the relationship between labor market flexibility and patterns of U.S. business cycle, I test the argument that after 1985 Okun’s coefficient became larger due to the flexible labor market. In essay 1, considering two aspects of labor market flexibility, employment flexibility and real wage flexibility, I adopt the flex-output model (Skott, 2015) to first discuss employment flexibility …

Three Essays On The Macroeconomic Impacts Of Rent Seeking, Kurt Von Seekamm

Doctoral Dissertations

Chapter 1 of this dissertation focuses on the political economy of rent seeking. Using trading in financial markets, patent litigation and managerial privilege as descriptive examples from the modern economy, it identifies situations where rent seeking opportunities occur. The challenge of correctly distinguishing between productive activities and rent seeking activities demonstrate the empirical challenges of examining rent seeking. This chapter also suggests that in addition to the opportunity cost of physical capital, modern rent seeking has a significant opportunity cost in the form of the misallocation of human capital. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between increased rent seeking, aggregate demand, …

Colonial And Post-Colonial Origins Of Agrarian Development: The Case Of Two Punjabs, Shahram Azhar

Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores the colonial and post-colonial origins of agrarian development by looking at the role of historical institutions, class formations and the state (ICS) in shaping the process. It contributes to the “divergence debates” in economics, which make an attempt to explain the ‘fundamental causes’ of divergence between countries. While one strand of the divergence literature presents the process as being functional to ‘geography’, a second strand focuses on the institutional legacies of colonialism; what is common to both sets of explanations, however, is the view that future outcomes are completely pre-determined by one or another time-invariant factor, leading …

Three Essays On U.S. Household Debt And The Sources Of Systemic Financial Fragility, Thomas Herndon

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays which analyze the role of household debt in the financial crisis of 2007-2009, and weak recovery that followed. In these essays, I pursue the following research topics: 1) Estimation of the effects of mortgage fraud on losses to foreclosure, 2) Estimation of whether loan modifications increased or decreased debt, and 3) Analyzing the historical evolution of housing finance regulation to advance a proposal for reform. While formally independent, these essays share a common theoretical perspective located at the intersection of financial macroeconomics and political economy. These essays analyze how conflicts of interest and inside …

Essays On Environmental Policy Instruments, Emissions Leakage And Public Policy, Shreekar Pradhan

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays related to my research on environmental policy, emissions leakage, and public policy. In the first essay, I address how open economies respond to environmental policy instruments under uncertainty. I develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for a small open economy (SOE) and evaluate the macroeconomic fluctuations in response to cap-and-trade, pollution tax, and emissions intensity standard under two shocks: productivity and terms of trade. My findings suggest that cap-and-trade policies are most effective in dampening the macroeconomic volatility from productivity shock. However, under the terms-of-trade shock, pollution tax, and intensity target policies are …

Essays In Policy Analysis, Michael Philip Craig

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation consists of three essays related to policy analysis. In the first essay we ask, how can developing nations who face revenue mobilization issues and large informal sectors use taxation as a means of nation building? To answer this, we design a dynamic general equilibrium model that accounts for a large informal sector. Contrary to previous studies that model the informal economy, we focus on the importance of the government maintaining its social fiscal contract with its constituents by including the provision of productive public goods in the model. By doing so, we show that increasing taxes can be …

The Environmental Effects Of Trade And Environmental Policy Within And Across Sectors, Lawrence Dale Laplue Iii

Doctoral Dissertations

In the first chapter of this dissertation I analyze how establishment-level choices and dynamics affect aggregate emissions outcomes. To do this I first decompose aggregate emissions into three channels: scale or country size, composition or sector market share, and aggregate technique or emissions intensity. I then extend the decomposition to show how the aggregate technique channel is driven by four establishment-level channels: entry, exit, reallocation of resources between survivors, and within-establishment adjustment of production techniques and emissions intensity. Using establishment-level emissions data and a unique empirical exercise I first show, empirically, how the relative importance of the composition and aggregate …

Essays In Applied Economics: Applications Of Transformed Ordinal Quantile Regression, Okila R. Elboeva

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays on the application of Transformed Ordinal Quantile Regression (TORQUE) developed by Hong and He (2010). TORQUE is based on jittered response, a nonparametric link function, a semiparametric quantile estimation. When the response variable is categorical an application of the standard quantile regression is not optimal. TORQUE technique generalizes ordinary quantile regression, and as a semiparametric method it is more robust than Maximum Likelihood Estimators.

In the first essay I estimate conditional quantiles of happiness using the data from British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for 2006. I find the continuity assumption of happiness ranking does …

Does Political Giving Impact Shareholder Wealth? Evidence From State Campaign Finance Reforms, Douglas Brian Blank Ii

Doctoral Dissertations

Does corporate political giving actually affect shareholder wealth? While firms value political participation, some lawmakers oppose corporate involvement in politics. Yet, the existing literature has established a correlation between campaign finance and corporate outcomes without fully documenting a causal relation. I use an innovative database of political giving to exploit changes in state campaign finance laws as an exogenous shock to political giving. Specifically, I use the staggered adoption of externally imposed legal limits to political giving across U.S. states to expose how shareholder wealth responds. I find shareholder wealth declines following legally imposed reductions in political giving. The causal …

Microfinance, Household Indebtedness And Gender Inequality, Theresa Mannah-Blankson

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation explores the implications of access to microfinance for gender equity and household welfare in Ghana. The study draws on the quantitative and qualitative evidence from a unique dataset generated from a survey of 499 households, with and without access to microfinance, during my field research work in Ghana from May to July 2013. The motivation for the dissertation derives from evidence suggesting that access to finance is an important tool for fighting poverty and reducing inequality. However, for most developing countries access to finance for the poor is mainly through the informal or the semi-formal sector, including microfinance …

Managing The Agricultural Biotechnology Revolution: Responses To Transgenic Seeds In Developing Countries, Alper Yagci

Doctoral Dissertations

There has been heated debate over transgenic or genetically modified (GM) crops in agriculture. Advocates and critics argue over possible economic, environmental, public health implications of this technology. This study examines varying policy approaches to regulating GM crop cultivation in four developing countries where the technology has large potential application. Why have some countries banned GM crop cultivation in their territory while others encouraged it? In countries where GM crops were allowed, why have varying systems of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection been constructed? To investigate these questions I comparatively examine the policy experience (1995-2015) of Argentina, Brazil, Turkey relying …

Endogenous Capacity, Multiple Equilibria And Thirlwall's Law: Theory And An Empirical Application To Mexico: 1950 - 2012., Juan Alberto Vázquez Muñoz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation incorporates the investment variable in two alternative post-Keynesian theories, Thirlwall’s Law and The Endogeneity of the Natural Rate of Growth, and then uses them in order to explain the performance of the rate of growth of the Mexican economy during the 1950 – 2012 period. In chapter two we elaborate an extension of the Thirlwall’s Law model in which exports are not the only source of growth but so is investment. The demand for imports is affected in a negative way when capital accumulation alters the internal structure of economic production to substitute for imports. Then, the rate …

Employment And Family Leave Mandates: Three Essays On Labor Supply And Demand, Nontraditional Families, And Family Policy, Samantha Schenck

Doctoral Dissertations

Many American families have a difficult time balancing their obligations at work with their responsibilities at home. This is especially the case when a member of the family needs an increased level of care giving, for instance after the birth of a child or when a family member is seriously ill. Governments around the world have passed legislation to make these difficult times easier for workers by mandating that employers provide paid family leave to their employees. However the US federal government mandates only 12 weeks of job-protected leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which only …

Modeling Choice Problems With Heterogeneous User Preferences In The Transportation Network, Mahyar Amirgholy

Doctoral Dissertations

Users of transportation systems need to make a variety of different decisions for their trips in the network, while their objective is to keep the generalized costs of their own trips minimized. In the transportation network, there is a diversity of different factors that can influence the decisions of the users, while the relative importance of these factors varies among the heterogeneous users with different trip purposes. Nonetheless, the cumulative result of the individual decisions of the users seeking to minimize their costs according to their own preferences leads to the user equilibrium condition in which no one can reduce …

Essays On Household Health Expenditures, National Health Insurance And Universal Access To Health Care In Ghana, Evelyn Kwakye

Doctoral Dissertations

Access to quality health services is essential for maintaining a healthy population and economic development hence the growing global consensus that universal health coverage is necessary. Ghana attempts to expand access by making basic health services free at the point of delivery through its National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). Prior studies indicate NHIS increases demand for health services, but questions remain about its impact on out of pocket payments, quality of services, and the financial viability of the program. Hence, this dissertation analyzes the financial risk in health care seeking, the effect of NHIS on out of pocket payments and …

Three Essays On Economic Stages And Transition, Ricardo R. Fuentes-Ramírez

Doctoral Dissertations

Cuba and Venezuela have been argued to be examples of state capitalism, populist capitalism, socialism, or simply the ambiguous “mixed economy.” By focusing on these countries as social formations in movement, or in transition, a more adequate understanding is presented. The first essay develops a theory of socialist transition, with focus on the dynamic, rather than static character of socialism. Furthermore, worker cooperatives are analyzed with a focus on the roles they play in the different stages of the transition to socialism. Finally, this framework is utilized to analyze the experience of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. The second essay …

Three Essays On Women's Land Rights In Rural Peru, Rosa L. Duran

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the relationship between female land rights and cultural, policy, and regional variables, and asks to what degree, and in what ways, the highly contextual nature of the relationships between these variables have determined local-specific causes and effects of female land rights in Peru. This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay provides the socioeconomic and institutional context for the entire dissertation, introducing a brief historical account of the evolution of female land rights in Peru. This essay pays particular attention to the relationship between property rights and geographical context in the Peruvian countryside, examining the region-specific …