Economics Commons^™

The Effects Of Outside Income On Household Behavior: The Case Of Remittances In Jamaica, Andrew V. Stephenson

Economics Dissertations

Remittances significantly affect recipient households’ behavior. Using data from the Jamaican Survey of Living Conditions and the Jamaican Labor Force Survey ( 2001-2007), this dissertation explores the effects of remittances on labor market participation and household expenditures. Jamaica’s proximity to the United States and its diaspora of educated individuals shapes an economy largely dependent on remittances, thus providing an interesting case study.

First, we investigate whether remittances alter labor market behavior of married women in remittance-receiving households located in Jamaica. Remittances, the wife’s education, and wages are all treated as endogenous when estimating labor market participation and hours worked. Unlike …

The Determinants Of Private Contributions And Government Grants To Nonprofit Organizations, Amanda Lori Wilsker

Economics Dissertations

The nonprofit sector is becoming increasingly important to the U.S. economy both as an employer and service provider. Although most of the sector’s revenues are earned, the ability of the nonprofit sector to generate significant levels of unearned income in the form of grants and contributions reinforces the sector’s uniqueness. This dissertation uses the NCCS-Guidestar data to address questions pertaining to the determinants of nonprofits’ contributions and government grants. Each of the essays’ findings is discussed briefly below.

The first chapter examines the relationship between an organization’s finances and the level of government grants received. Because organizations choose to apply …

Essays On Fiscal Policy And Economic Growth, Tamoya A. L. Christie

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation comprises two essays. The first essay explores how the size of government, as measured by the level of spending, affects growth. Theoretical models suggest a nonlinear relationship; however, testing this hypothesis empirically in cross-country studies is complicated by the endogeneity of government spending and the accurate identification of turning points. This paper examines the nonlinear hypothesis by incorporating threshold analysis in a cross-country growth regression. Using a broad panel of countries over the period 1971-2005, the results show evidence in favor of a nonlinear effect, but not of the form predicted by theory. When total government spending is …

Studies On The Effects Of Sympathy And Religious Education On Income Redistribution Preferences, Charitable Donations, And Law-Abiding Behavior, Roberta D. Calvet

Economics Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to identify the impact of moral emotions (sympathy and empathy) and religious education on individual behavior. This dissertation is divided into three main chapters. The first chapter examines the effect of sympathy and empathy on tax compliance. We run a series of experiments in which we employ methods such as priming, the Davis Empathic Concern scale, and questions about frequency of prosocial behaviors in the past year in order to promote and to identify empathy and sympathy in subjects. We observe the subjects’ decisions in a series of one-shot tax compliance game presented at …

Channels Of Adjustment In Labor Markets: The 2007-2009 Federal Minimum Wage Increase, Tetyana Zelenska

Economics Dissertations

In the debate on the economic effects of labor market regulation much work has focused on minimum wages. A legal minimum wage remains one of the most controversial policy issues. The controversy arises for two main reasons: first, there is no consensus over the economic impacts of the minimum wage mandate, especially its effect on employment, and, second, there is a disagreement over the empirical methods used to identify the minimum wage effects. Although the standard competitive model predicts that wage floors should have a negative impact on employment, empirical work shows mixed results.

This dissertation explores a number of …

Three Essays On The Search For Economic Efficiency, Jason J. Delaney

Economics Dissertations

The chapters of this dissertation examine efficiency failures in three areas of applied microeconomics: experimental economics, public finance, and game theory. In each case, we look at ways to resolve these failures to promote the public good. The first chapter, “An Experimental Test of the Pigovian Hypothesis,” looks at two different policies designed to reduce congestion in a common-pool resource (CPR). We present an experiment with training and a simplified decision task and find that subject behavior converges to the Nash prediction over a number of periods. A Pigovian subsidy effectively moves subject behavior to the pre-subsidy social optimum. Finally, …

Aspects Of Tax Spillovers: Is There A "Worldwide" Tax Burden?, Sandeep Bhattacharya

Economics Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation is to develop a model to examine the concept of a “worldwide” tax burden. The notion is that due to differential mobility of factors developed nations may be passing on a share of their tax burden to less developed countries while effectively indulging in a form of tax competition. This is important for many reasons especially since it may affect the distribution of income between countries, and influence the flow of capital. As globalization increases, “the race to the bottom” in taxation (which implies tax-cutting) suggests that these spillovers should be reduced over time. The …

Essays In Health Economics: A Focus On The Built Environment, Thomas James Christian

Economics Dissertations

The dissertation investigates how individual behaviors and health outcomes interplay with surrounding built environments, in three essays. We conceptually focus on travel behaviors and accessibility.

In the first essay, we hypothesize that urban sprawl increases requisite travel time which limits leisure time available as inputs to health production. We utilize the American Time Use Survey to quantify decreases in health-related activity participation due to commuting time. We identify significant evidence of trade-offs between commuting time and exercise, food preparation, and sleep behaviors, which exceed labor time trade-offs on a per-minute basis. Longer commutes are additionally associated with an increased likelihood …

Essays On Crime And Tax Evasion, Sean C. Turner

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays addressing two issues related to crime and tax evasion. The first essay investigates the relationship between property and violent crime with law enforcement expenditures. The second essay examines the market structure in transition economies and the effects on firm-level tax evasion. The third essay investigates the incidence of tax evasion in a general equilibrium framework. The topics in all three essays are linked by their focus on criminal or illegal behavior. The essays also answer questions related to developing sound governmental policy and decision-making.

Chapter one attempts to identify the impact on crime of …

Exploring Environmental Service Auctions, William B. Holmes

Economics Dissertations

The chapters of this dissertation explore related aspects of the procurement of conservation services from private landowners. In the first chapter, heuristic laboratory experiments reveal the impact of potential government regulation on strategic forces and efficiency properties in conservation procurement auctions. In the second chapter, data from past procurement auctions are analyzed to discover the existence and magnitude of premiums received by auction participants.

The first Chapter, “Procurement Auctions Under Regulatory Threat,” examines how strategic forces and efficiency properties are impacted in auctions for the procurement of environmental services when a threat of regulation is levied. Laboratory experiments examining different …

Essays On The Effects Of Early Childhood Malnutrition, Family Preferences And Personal Choices On Child Health And Schooling, Solomon T. Tesfu

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays investigating the role of early life events, family environment and personal choices in shaping a child’s chances for human capital accumulation. The first essay examines how physical stature of a child measured in terms of age standardized height influences his/her selection for family labor activities vs. schooling in rural Ethiopia using malnutrition caused by exposure to significant weather shocks in early childhood as sources of identification for the child’s physical stature. We find no evidence that better physical stature of the child leads to his/her positive selection for full-time child labor activities. On the …

Essays On Personal Income Taxation And Income Inequality, Denvil R. Duncan

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation comprises two essays that attempt to determine, empirically, the relationship between personal income taxation and income inequality. The first essay examines whether income inequality is affected by the structural progressivity of national income tax systems. Using detailed personal income tax schedules for a large panel of countries, we develop and estimate comprehensive, time-varying measures of structural progressivity of national income tax systems over the 1981–2005 period.

Our findings suggest that progressivity has a strong negative effect on inequality in reported gross and net income and that this negative effect is strongest in countries whose institutional framework supports pro-poor …

Essays On Agglomeration Trends In The U.S. Manufacturing Industries, 1988-2003, Abdullah Mahbuzzaman Khan

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays dealing with the trends in industrial agglomeration and changes in the influence of micro-determinants of agglomeration due to globalization in the U.S. manufacturing agglomeration and the second essay discusses the impact of globalization on the micro-determinants of agglomeration. The first essay explores recent agglomeration trends in the U.S. manufacturing industries between 1988 and 2003 using employment and employment-based agglomeration measures such as Ellison-Glaeser Index and Gini index, and using Herfindahl index as a measure of industrial concentration due to scale economies. Between 1988 and 2003, forty two states lost and eight states gained manufacturing …

Essays In Experimental And Environmental Economics, Sarah Jacobson

Economics Dissertations

The chapters of this dissertation explore complementary areas of applied microeconomics, within the fields of experimental and environmental economics. In each case, preferences and institutions interact in ways that enhance or subvert efficiency.

The first chapter, "The Girl Scout Cookie Phenomenon," uses a laboratory experiment to study favor trading in a public goods setting. The ability to practice targeted reciprocity increases contributions by 14%, which corresponds directly to increased efficiency. Subjects discriminate by rewarding group members who have been generous and withholding rewards from ungenerous group members. At least some reciprocal behavior is rooted in other-regarding preferences. When someone is …

Two Essays On Public Economics: The Consequences Of Fiscal Decentralization On Poverty And Inequality, And The Second Best Solution To The Public Expenditures’ Problem, Cristian F. Sepulveda

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two independent essays on public economics. The first essay studies the consequences of fiscal decentralization on poverty and income inequalities. This essay describes the possible channels through which fiscal decentralization might affect poverty and income inequalities, and carries out an empirical analysis with data of a large number of countries at different stages of development, for the period 1971-2000. Fiscal decentralization is found to have significant effects on poverty and income inequalities. These findings are important because they suggest, contrary to the traditional public finance theory, that sub-national governments can play an important role in the …

The Indirect Effects Of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: An Empirical Analysis Of Familias En Accion, Monica P. Ospina

Economics Dissertations

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become the most important social policy in Latin America, and their influence has spread to countries around the world. A number of studies provide strong evidence of the positive impacts of these programs on the main targeted outcomes, education and health, and have proved successful in other outcomes such as nutrition, household income, and child labor. As we expect CCT programs to remain a permanent aspect of social policy for the foreseeable future, demand for evidence of the indirect effects of CCT programs has grown beyond the initial emphasis of these programs. My research …

Evaluation Of Decentralization Outcomes In Indonesia: Analysis Of Health And Education Sectors, Rentanida Renata Simatupang

Economics Dissertations

This study examines the performance of decentralized health and education service delivery in Indonesia. Results show that education outcomes improved with decentralization, and that local governments are responding to local needs for education services. Decentralization also brings improvement to health services, as mortality rates and life expectancy are significantly improved with decentralization. However, results indicate that decentralization does not improve availability of health services, as only small percentage of municipalities in Indonesia have access to health facilities. The empirical study on the performance of proliferated municipalities provides similar conclusions to those obtained in the examination of general decentralization performance. Proliferated …

Electoral Manipulations, Economic Policies And Voting Behavior In India, Harini Letha Kannan

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes voting behavior and presence of political cycles in India. While such exercises have been carried out extensively in the context of developed countries and established democracies, there have been few studies on similar behavior in developing countries and new economies. The focus on India in this study may provide valuable insight into this literature in an area that has been largely ignored. Our findings suggest that political manipulation of taxes, grants and expenditures are prevalent at both the national and sub-national levels; though they are tempered by the nature of partisanship. However, while these manipulations may be …

A Comparative Study Of Fiscal Decentralization In China And India, Yinghua Jin

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation provides an empirical test of the effects of fiscal decentralization and horizontal fiscal equalization on economic growth and examines the potential trade-off between horizontal fiscal equalization and economic growth in both China and India. Chapter II examines the effects of both fiscal decentralization and horizontal fiscal equalization on economic growth in China, particularly the effect of the Tax Sharing System reform enacted in 1994. Compared with previous studies, using more complete data providing better measures and more econometrically sophisticated instrumental variable procedures, we find that there is no substantial evidence of a trade-off between horizontal fiscal equalization and …

Essays On Interarea Wage Determination, John V. Winters

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays concerning the determination of wages across areas. The first essay investigates the equilibrium relationship between wages and prices across labor markets. Of central interest is the extent to which workers receive higher wages to compensate for differences in the cost of living. According to the spatial equilibrium hypothesis, the utility of homogenous workers should be equal across labor markets. This implies that controlling for amenity differences across areas, the elasticity between wages and the general price level across areas should equal one, at least under certain conditions. We test this hypothesis and find that …

Federal And State Environmental Policy: Environmental Federalism, Strategic Interaction, And Constituent Interest, Benjamin Andrew Chupp

Economics Dissertations

Environmental policy in the U.S. is often enacted at both the federal level and the state level. This dissertation uses unique data derived from a combination of a detailed simulation model of the U.S. electricity sector and an integrated assessment model of air pollution dispersion and valuation to examine three problems in state and federal environmental policy. These data represent the “taxes” (or shadow cost of abatement) on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that are efficient for each state when considering only their own costs and benefits, and also the level of federal uniform tax on the same pollutants that …

Essays On The Aggregate Burden Of Alcohol Abuse, Resul Cesur

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to uncover the causal relationship between alcohol abuse and both income growth and crime. These two research questions are investigated in three essays: Essay I investigates the relationship between alcohol abuse and income growth in the United States; Essay II examines the impact of alcohol abuse on income growth at the international level; Essay III investigates the effect of alcohol abuse on crime in the united states. Essay I of this dissertation uses state level data from the United States for the period 1970-1998 to estimate the impact of alcohol abuse on income growth by utilizing per …

An Economic Analysis Of Prison Labor, Robynn Joyce Afi Cox

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation will focus on prison work programs and prisoner rehabilitation. In particular, a program evaluation of the federal inmate labor program, the Prison Industry Enhancement Certificate Program (PIE), will be conducted in order to investigate how this program affects recidivism and labor market outcomes of offenders. This dissertation will contribute to the literature in two ways. First, it develops a simple theoretical model that incorporates prison labor into its framework in order to analyze how prison labor affects crime participation. The model suggests that the criminal’s problem is recursive. Therefore, the criminal will first decide how much time to …

Amenity Effect Or Supply Effect? Metropolitan Amenities And Their Interaction With Housing Supply, Kwame N. Donaldson

Economics Dissertations

Standard models in urban economics assume that the boundary of an urban area will expand as long as the present value of land for urban uses is greater than the present value of land for rural uses. Under this assumption, the boundary of the urban area is endogenously determined by the rent paid to rural landowners. But this assumption is not realistic. The physical expansion of many major urban areas in the United States is impeded by an exogenous boundary. For example, geographic growth of the three most populated metropolitan areas in the country is limited by an ocean or …

Individual Income Tax In Indonesia: Behavioral Response, Incidence, And The Distribution Of Income Tax Burden, Thalyta Ernandya Yuwono

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation estimates the relationship between tax-reporting decision and the change in marginal tax rates, relying on taxpayer's responses (standard labor supply response) as well as reported behavioral responses (compliance). There are still limited studies on elasticity estimates for developing countries. We utilize an applicable theoretical model by using standard labor supply model and summarize a tax avoidance model as the base of our elasticity estimation. The labor supply theoretical model suggests ambiguity of the labor supply decision and the tax avoidance model suggests that the responsiveness of taxpayers in the reporting decision differs across income groups. As previously stated, …

The Effect Of Changes In Maternity Leave Policy On Labor Market Outcomes For Females In Brazil, Viviane Maria Bastos De Malafaia

Economics Dissertations

Maternity leave policy has changed a few times over the last 20 years in Brazil. This dissertation investigates how a ceiling imposed on the maternity leave benefit paid by Brazilian Social Security in Dec, 1998 and its temporary suspension in May, 1999 affected females' employment and earnings using difference-in-difference method. We apply the difference-in-difference method to examine whether the changes in maternity leave policy negatively affected females in the labor market. Our analysis uses four treatment groups: 1) young females, aged 20 to 40 years; 2) young females working in the private sector; 3) older females, aged 41 to 65 …

Consumer Adoption Of Bandwidth Intensive Applications And Its Impacts On Broadband Adoption, Peter Helekiah Oburu

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the capacity required by an internet application in tandem with the network connection type (dial-up or broadband). An internet user’s experience in accessing various types of applications with either high bandwidth or low bandwidth is examined in a consumer choice model of broadband adoption. A consumer implicitly values the time-saving benefits derived from a higher speed internet connection used to access a particular internet application, and compares those utility benefits to the higher price of high speed connection services in making the decision to shift to broadband or remain with a dial-up connection. We find that using …

Estimating The Firm’S Demand For Human Resource Management Practices, Benjamin Israel Miller

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation investigates two related aspects of firms’ choice of HRM practices. The first is why some firms expend a great deal of resources on HRM practices for each employee while others spend very little; the second is the extent to which firms’ bundles of HRM practices sort into general discrete employment systems. In order to empirically address these issues, this dissertation uses an economics-based theoretical approach. The key theoretical link to economics is to treat HRM as a separate factor input in the production process, which allows me to derive an HRM input demand function. This function expresses the …

Pension Reform And Retirement Incentives: Evidence From Austria, Roman Raab

Economics Dissertations

The scope of this dissertation is to investigate the impact of pension reform on the financial incentives to retire for private sector workers in Austria. How do financial incentives embedded in the Austrian pension system affect individual retirement behavior? Was pension reform effective in changing these financial incentives in order to affect retirement behavior? How would future reform scenarios impact retirement behavior? Micro-estimating the impact of financial incentive measures on the probability of retirement shows that the behavioral response to financial incentives in Austria is relatively large in international comparison. Simulations demonstrate that pension reform was ineffective in providing incentives …

Essays On Political And Fiscal Decentralization, Riatu M. Qibthiyyah

Economics Dissertations

We address the questions on what determines local government proliferation, specifically on the impact of intergovernmental transfers on proliferation. On exploring the determinants of proliferation, we provide a more elaborate empirical technique than exists in the literature by employing panel binary outcome, survival regression, as well as count analysis to capture the time varying effect from intergovernmental transfers. We also examine the impact of proliferation on service delivery outcomes and construct channels by which the policy may affect the outcomes in the education and health sectors. We apply panel difference-in-difference estimation and we uniquely identify the different treatment group and …