Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Assessment Of Watersheds For Sustainable Agriculture In Karnataka, India, Nicholas Adam Charles

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Modernization of traditional small-scale irrigation tanks in India is becoming increasingly popular. This is due to high costs of the alternative, of developing and constructing large-scale projects in rural areas. Examination of management strategies, resource allocation, and collective action has become paramount for promoting food security and livelihoods in water-stressed areas of Southeast Asia. Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing techniques are valuable to assessing the management of these irrigation systems, specifically small water storage reservoirs that capture runoff from the monsoon known as irrigation tanks. The primary goal of this study is to develop a stakeholder-informed approach to …

Three Essays In Health, Welfare, And International Economics, Amin Shoja

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Both economists and policy makers are interested in understanding the welfare effect of economic policies, especially in small open economies such as Turkey and Iran. This knowledge is crucial for priority setting in any informed policy discussion. This dissertation aims to study the impoverishing effect of high levels of out-of-pocket (OOP) payments in the health sector, referred to as catastrophic health expenditure (CHE), and investigates the impact of exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) on both the microeconomic and macroeconomic indicators of a country. For millions of people worldwide, health payments present a huge financial risk. A high rate of OOP health …

Essays On Retail And Regional Economics, David Christopher Vitt

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three essays at the intersection of regional economic analysis and industrial organization. In the first chapter, I derive an estimating equation for retail market structure in order to quantify the effects of e-commerce competition on brick and mortar retail establishment and employment counts. Using a multilevel regression specification, I find that (i) e-commerce establishment count exposure results show heterogeneity in the sign of the effects across the retail sectors represented in the data (ii) the magnitude of the e-commerce exposure effect is also heterogeneous across retail sectors (iii) the heterogeneity is not purely random and …

Essays On Intergovernmental Fiscal Relationship, Bimal Soti

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this dissertation is to explore a number of issues in intergovernmental fiscal relationships in the United States. Three independent essays in the dissertation focus on three different issues of interest in public finance: the response of school districts and county governments to changes in state government grant allocations; political determinants of presidential disaster declarations; and the crowding out of federal transfers to states by private charitable donations with special reference to the proportion of federal welfare grants to all 50 U.S. states over the period 2005 - 2013.

Results in the first essay show that decreases in …

Three Essays On The Economics Of Defense Contracting, Output And Income Inequality, Edward M. Decambra

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes both the economics of the defense contracting process and the impact of total dollar obligations on the economies of U.S. states. Using various econometric techniques, I will estimate relationships across individual contracts, state level output, and income inequality. I will achieve this primarily through the use of a dataset on individual contract obligations.

The first essay will catalog the distribution of contracts and isolate aspects of the process that contribute to contract dollar obligations. Accordingly, this study describes several characteristics about individual defense contracts, from 1966-2006: (i) the distribution of contract dollar obligations is extremely rightward skewed, …