Public Economics Commons^™

Growth Likely In A Time Of Uncertainty, Eric Thompson

Business in Nebraska

The U.S. economy continues to recover from the recession which occurred during March and April of 2020. Demand has been strong for both goods and services. At the same time, supply constraints are a concern in the economy, contributing to both higher prices and in some cases lost production within industries. Supply constraints are evident in both inputs (supplies) and labor. Labor force growth has been anemic in the last two years given slow population growth and a roughly 2 percent decline in the labor force participation rate. Looking forward, the baseline outlook is for the U.S. economic recovery to …

The Implications Of Covid-19 On Fear Of Financial Collapse, Alexis Reekie

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

By disrupting the general value paradigm, the typical hierarchy of values, individuals directly affected by the COVID-19 virus have realized an overall shift in perspective, indicating a need to understand the effects of the COVID-19 virus on one’s outlook regarding economic anxiety and fear of financial collapse. The possibility of a global health crisis reaching levels of devastation are certainly great and worth investigating. Throughout this research paper I worked to determine the correlation between fear of financial crises and individuals who have been affected by the COVID-19 virus. Utilizing the Chapman Survey of American Fears (FEAR survey) questions pertaining …

Examining And Evaluating The Multidimensional Energy Poverty Index (Mepi) In The Philippine Household Context, Anna Katrina R. Ignacio, Maria Sofia Lei P. Puncia, Arlene B. Inocencio, Marites M. Tiongco, Mitzie Irene P. Conchada, Alellie B. Sobrevinas, Rens Adrian T. Calub

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

Energy poverty refers to insufficient energy consumption to meet one’s basic needs. Measuring energy poverty is a vital calculation for a household assessment concerning accessibility of energy, affordability of energy prices, usage of energy resources, and sufficiency of energy consumption. Previous literature has extensively used the multidimensional energy poverty index (MEPI) to analyze the lack of access to modern energy services, including energy poverty intensity and incidence, and provide a framework for government policymaking. However, there is a variation between countries on how MEPI energy deprivation factors affect household welfare. This study aims to determine more accurate measures of household …

A Game Theoretic Study On Csr And Government Intervention For Sustainable Production, Katherine Ann J. Fernandez, Joshua Ryan C. Go, Jean Nicole L. Ng, Bianca Alanis Ysabel C. Redulla, Jason P. Alinsunurin, Dickson A. Lim, Mariel Monica R. Sauler

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

We use a game theoretic approach to assess how the government can influence firms’ CSR investment and production decisions to enhance social welfare, considering the negative externalities brought by unsustainable production and positive externalities brought by CSR investments. Using a Stackelberg duopoly as a base model and lump-sum tax as the government’s decision variable, we find that when the government chooses not to intervene, it results in greater environmental damage as firms will underinvest in CSR and overproduce in quantity to achieve profit maximization. As such, the model extends to the assumption that the government acts as a benevolent dictator …

Do Minimum Charity Care Provision Requirements Increase Provision Of Charity Care In Nonprofit Hospitals?, Michah W. Rothbart, Nara Yoon

Population Health Research Brief Series

Nonprofit hospitals receive significant federal, state, and local tax exemptions, partly based on the rationale that nonprofit hospitals provide public goods and services. Through Minimum Charity Care Provision (MCCP) requirements, nonprofit hospitals are required to spend a certain percentage of their revenues on charity care. However, it is not clear whether these requirements increase spending on charity care. This brief summarizes findings from research examining the differences in provisions of charity care across different hospital market sectors – non-profit, for-profit, and government. Findings suggest that MCCP requirements for nonprofit hospitals do not lead to more charity care. If anything, targeting …

The U.S. Child Care Subsidy Program Is Underused But Well-Positioned To Promote Racial Equity, Taryn Morrissey, Colleen Heflin, William Fannin

Population Health Research Brief Series

Child care is expensive and difficult to find, especially for infants and toddlers. Compared to their higher-income peers, children from lower-income families are less likely to attend out-of-home early childhood care – which tend to be more expensive but provides more stability and is higher quality than home-based care. This contributes to disparities in school readiness and later life outcomes. This brief summarizes findings from a recently published paper examining administrative data from the Commonwealth of Virginia. Findings suggest that children are least likely to receive subsides when they are infants and toddlers despite early childhood care being the most …

Biden Administration U.S. Space Force Policy Literature, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Provides details on U.S. Space Force policy literature produced by the Biden Administration during its first eight months. Includes announcements that the Biden Administration will continue this new armed services branch begun during the Trump Administration. Features congressional testimony of Biden Administration officials such as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Wilson and Air Force Space Command leader General James Dickinson, the text of Space Force's 2021 Digital Force Vision document, congressionally approved FY 2022 space force budget figures, congressional committee comments and report requirements contained in emerging defense spending legislation, the emergence of collaboration between Space Force and universities such as …

Providing Childcare, Christine Ho, Sunha Myong

Research Collection School Of Economics

Women’s economic empowerment has been hailed as one of the most remarkable revolutions in the past 50 years. Yet, women still face the lion’s share of the burden of childcare despite major progress in their education and earnings capacity. This is particularly salient in many Asian countries. This chapter proposes a synthesis of the state of knowledge on childcare and discusses policy-relevant issues applicable to the Singapore context. Selected policies are documented and lessons from the international landscape are discussed. Raising children incurs both direct costs in the form of childcare and opportunity costs in the form of career costs. …

The Importance Of Considering Debt And Young Children In Activation: A Survival Analysis Of Return To Welfare, Irene N. Y. Ng, Jian Qi Tan, Mathews Mathew, Kong Weng Ho, Yi Ting Ting

Research Collection School Of Economics

While there has been much research on welfare exit and entry into employment, less research has looked at return to government assistance. Applying survival analysis on data from a national government assistance programme in Singapore, we found two important factors of welfare return to which activation programmes need to pay greater attention. First, return was more likely if former beneficiaries accumulated a higher number of types of arrears rather than higher dollar values of arrears. This new finding contributes to the emerging literature on bandwidth tax, and suggests the importance of designing programmes that relieve mental accounting due to debt …

Measuring Palatability As A Linear Combination Of Nutrient Levels In Food Items, Jeffrey S. Young

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

It well known that palatability and nutritional quality of foods and/or diets are viewed as being in tension with one another. While there exist multiple measures of healthiness, there are no such measures for tastiness. This gap limits the degree to which researchers can investigate this tension and its implications for dietary behavior and hence public health and nutrition policy. The scope of future work concerning the dietary behavior of Americans would expand greatly if researchers better understood consumers’ willingness to eat certain foods, which matters as much as recommending those foods for them to eat in the first place. …

Jobs For Justice(S): Corruption In The Supreme Court Of India, Madhav S. Aney, Shubhankar Dam, Giovanni Ko

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate whether judicial decisions are affected by career concerns of judges by analyzing two questions: Do judges respond to incentives to pander by ruling in favor of the government in the hope of receiving jobs after retiring from the Supreme Court? Does the government reward judges who rule in its favor with prestigious jobs? We construct a data set of Supreme Court of India cases involving the government for 1999–2014. We find that incentives to pander have a causal effect on judicial decision-making, and they are jointly determined by the importance of the case and whether the judge retires …

Three Essays In Applied Economics, Mohammad Javad Mehregan

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Governments worldwide support their national economies to obtain growth, adequate employment, and price durability. Regulation is a unique approach through which governments control the economy. Governments attempt to maintain and regulate the economy in various ways to guarantee that business fosters the common good. The range of government regulations is enormous and touches all areas of the economy and all features of daily life. Understanding the effect of regulations on the economy is essential since its outcomes can improve government interventions’ efficiency. Applied economics can help measure the effectiveness of government intervention on economic outcomes.

This dissertation includes three essays …

Essays On Macroeconomics And Financial Economics, Maryam Aljahani

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation comprises of three Essays. The first essay classifies households as savers and borrowers based on their wealth during the credit cycle. It examines the wealth effects of the saving and housing decisions of heterogeneous households over a credit cycle. To do so, we employ the Difference-in-Difference estimator and find evidence of a significant difference between the wealth effect for savers and borrowers. In the second essay, we examine the extent to which credit-constrained households are able to accumulate wealth when the macro environment is characterized by the presence of a liquidity trap and borrowing constraints. Our evidence highlights …

Nebraska Recovers From The Pandemic Economy, Eric Thompson

Business in Nebraska

The Covid-19 Pandemic threw the U.S. economy into a severe and sharp recession during the first half of 2020. A combination of government “shutdown” restrictions and private actions led to a particularly severe decline in economic activity in late March and April. The lifting or reduction of government restrictions across the United States led to a fast recovery in subsequent months, especially as businesses and consumers learned to adapt to their new operating conditions. However, the rate of recovery has slowed recently as the spread of Covid-19 has accelerated and many businesses have curtailed travel, maintained “work from home” policies, …

Hegemonic Marriage: The Collision Of 'Transformative' Same-Sex Marriage With Reactionary Tax Law, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

Before there was a culture war in the United States over same-sex marriage, there was a battle between opponents and proponents of same-sex marriage within the LGBTQ+ community. Some opposed same-sex marriage because of the long patriarchal history of marriage and the more consequential need to bridge the economic and privilege gap between the married and the unmarried. Others, in contrast, saw marriage as a civil rights issue and lauded the transformative potential of same-sex marriage, contending that it could upset the patriarchal nature of marriage and help to refashion marriage into something new and better.

This Article looks back …

On Incentive Compatible, Individually Rational Public Good Provision Mechanisms, Takashi Kunimoto, Cuiling Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper characterizes mechanisms satisfying incentive compatibility and individual rationality in the classical public good provision problem. Many papers in the literature obtain the results in the so-called standard model of ex ante identical agents with a continuous, closed interval of types. The main contribution of this paper is the characterization of the budget-surplus maximizing mechanism satisfying incentive compatibility and individual rationality (Theorem 1 for Bayesian implementation and Theorem 3 for dominant strategy implementation) that applies to a finite discretization over the standard model. Making use of the proposed budget-surplus maximizing mechanisms, we show that some known results do not …

The Case For Public Investment In Higher Pay For New York State Home Care Workers: Estimated Costs And Savings, Isaac Jabola-Carolus, Stephanie Luce, Ruth Milkman

Publications and Research

This report explores one potential solution to the mounting home care labor shortage in New York State: substantially raising wages for the state's home care workers. The analysis presents detailed projections, based on the best available data, of the economic effects of such an intervention, estimating the costs and benefits that would result. We find that public funding to raise home care wages would require significant resources, but those costs would be surpassed by the resulting savings, tax revenues, and economic spillover effects. The net economic gain would total at least $3.7 billion. Lifting wages would also help fill nearly …

A Public Option For Employer Health Plans, Allison K. Hoffman, Howell E. Jackson, Amy Monahan

All Faculty Scholarship

Following the 2020 presidential election, health care reform discussions have centered on two competing proposals: Medicare for All and an individual public option (“Medicare for all who want it”). Interestingly, these two proposals take starkly different approaches to employer-provided health coverage, long the bedrock of the U.S. health care system and the stumbling block to many prior reform efforts. Medicare for All abolishes employer-provided coverage, while an individual public option leaves it untouched.

This Article proposes a novel solution that finds a middle ground between these two extremes: an employer public option. In contrast to the more familiar public option …

The Feasibility Of Renewable Natural Gas In New Jersey, Anneliese Dyer, Amelia Christine Miller, Brianna Chandra, Juan Galindo Maza, Carley Tran, Justin Bates, Vicky Olivier, Amy Tuininga

Publications

With traditional natural gas being one of the top options for heating in the United States and the present threat of climate change, there is a demand for an alternative clean fuel source. A Renewable Natural Gas Implementation Decision-Making Conceptual Model was created to provide a framework for considering the feasibility of renewable natural gas (RNG) projects and applied to New Jersey, specifically investigating landfills and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Data from the US EPA’s Landfill Methane Outreach Program and New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection Sewage Sludge databases were used to identify seven landfills and 22 WWTPs as possible …

The Effects Of States’ Economic Conditions On The Quality Of Public Education System, Huan Yang

Honors College Theses

Many previous researchers have looked at the effects of education on certain economic factors. However, this paper investigates the topic of education from a different perspective: using data of several economic factors for all 50 states in America from the year of 2017 and an education ranking system from U.S. News & World Report, this paper analyzes the effects of a state’s economic conditions on its quality of public education system through a cross-sectional model. Results from the analysis show that poverty rate, current expenditure per pupil, public high school graduation rate, and share of revenues for public elementary and …

2021 Arkansas Business Forecast, Catherine Mann, Mark Palim, Mervin Jebaraj

Publications and Presentations

“The annual Business Forecast is a chance for business and community leaders from Northwest Arkansas, the state and the region to get first-hand insight into the direction for the next year from top economists,” said Matt Waller, dean of the Walton College. “The insights provided by these three experts will inform and shape decisions that help to drive the business community in Arkansas in 2021.”

Waller said those valuable insights and networking opportunities are only possible through the continued strong support of event sponsors.

“Each year, the interest and level of participation in the Business Forecast event continues to grow …

Internet Connectivity Among Indigenous And Tribal Communities In North America - A Focus On Social And Educational Outcomes, Christopher S. Yoo, Leon Gwaka, Muge Haseki

All Faculty Scholarship

Broadband access is an important part of enhancing rural community development, improving the general quality of life. Recent telecommunications stimulus projects in the U.S. and Canada were intended to increase availability of broadband through funding infrastructure investments, largely in rural and remote regions. However, there are various small, remote, and rural communities, who remain unconnected. Connectivity is especially important for indigenous and tribal communities to access opportunities for various public services as they are generally located in remote areas. In 2016, the FCC reported that 41% of U.S. citizens living on tribal lands, and 68% of those in the rural …

A Perspective On Equity Implications Of Net Zero Energy Systems, Erin Baker, Inês Ml Azevedo

Publications

We present examples of energy inequity, in both the current system and in potential net zero systems, and lay out some research needs in order to center equity in the study of net zero energy systems.

•Our current energy systems are inequitable across several dimensions.

•We must recognize and address barriers to a just and equitable net zero energy system.

•We highlight inequities in energy burden and energy insecurity; health consequences of the energy system; and decision making power.

•There is a need to define, quantify, and explicitly model equity outcomes in net zero systems.

•There is a need to …

Investing In Entrepreneurship: The Sustainable Solution To Tunisia’S Youth Unemployment Crisis?, Hussein Noureldin

All Reports

Since the Jasmine Revolution of 2011, Tunisia’s youth unemployment crisis has worsened. As of 2020, it has the tenth highest youth unemployment rate in the world at 36.5%. Experts have long identified this as the main challenge to overcoming Tunisia’s economic woes, and reform – from the education and vocational training systems on the supply-side to the job market on the demand-side – must follow the democratic gains achieved since 2011. The failed approach in reducing regional inequality under Ben Ali had an adverse effect, creating unemployment disparities between Tunisia’s affluent coastal cities and its poorer interior regions. As such, …

Northwest Arkansas State Of The Region Report 2021, Mervin Jebaraj, David Sorto

State of the Northwest Arkansas Region Report

The State of the Northwest Arkansas Region Report is an annual publication, commissioned by the Northwest Arkansas Council, that serves as a tool for evaluating economic performance. In 2018, the Northwest Arkansas Council created a strategic action agenda for 2018-2021. In this plan, the performance of Northwest Arkansas is benchmarked with other contemporary, high-performing regions: Austin, Des Moines, Madison, Durham-Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Provo-Orem. The 2021 State of the Region Report compares Northwest Arkansas with these regions in the areas of gross domestic product, employment, unemployment, establishment growth, average annual wages, research and development, and average domestic airfares. The 2020 …

Profit Efficiency Analysis Of Cassava Production In Enugu State, Nigeria, Oguejiofor J. Okorie, Ubokudom E. Okon, Anselm A. Enete

Journal for the Advancement of Developing Economies

This study analyzed the profit efficiency of smallholder cassava farmers in Enugu state, Nigeria. The study employed a multi-stage random sampling technique in selecting 240 cassava farm households who are registered in the Enugu State Fadama III project during the 2019 farming season. Data were collected using copies of structured questionnaire and interview schedule. Collected data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (stochastic frontier profit function model). Results showed that the majority (73.3%) of the household heads were male, with a mean age of 52 years. Additionally, the majority (78.5%) of the respondents were married, mean farm size of …

The Effects Of Tax Policies On Entrepreneurship In Emerging Versus Mature Economies: Do Differences Exist Between Nascent And Established Firms?, Benjamin B. Boozer, Taleah H. Collum

Journal for the Advancement of Developing Economies

An extensive body of research defines various levels of entrepreneurship and considers emerging trends. This study uses data from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) in developing a model that measures the impact of taxes and bureaucracy on entrepreneurship. The analysis considers effects by type of firm – nascent and established – and type of economy – emerging and mature. The aim of the manuscript is to test directional impact of tax policies on entrepreneurial activity. The model utilizes counter and dichotomous variables to measure effects before, during, and after the 2008-2009 Financial Crisis. Tax policies adversely impact both nascent and established …

Export Promotion As A Development Strategy: Evidence From Selected Southeast Asian Countries And Lessons For Ghana, Ohenewaa B. Newman

Journal for the Advancement of Developing Economies

Developing countries have adopted various development strategies such as import substitution industrialization (ISI) and export promotion strategies. For Latin-American and developing countries, some level of economic growth was experienced using ISI after the Second World War. However, these countries could not attain the needed economic growth, technological advancement or guarantee food security with the adoption of ISI. It led to unequal income distribution, less internal competition, and distortions of their economy, among others. The rise of export promotion strategies in the 1970s was evidenced by an impressive economic growth and a decline in poverty in jurisdictions like Taiwan, Tanzania and …

Certain Effects Of Random Taxes, James R. Hines Jr., Michael J. Keen

Articles

This paper explores the implications of tax rate randomness, identifying circumstances in which revenue-neutral rate variability increases profitability, economic activity, and the efficiency of resource allocation. Furthermore, with heterogeneous taxpayers, tax rate variability is shown to perform an efficiency-enhancing screening function, imposing heavier expected tax burdens on less responsive taxpayers. And while efficient tax randomness enables governments to reduce average costs of taxation, it necessarily increases the marginal cost of taxation over some ranges of expected revenue, so may reduce efficient levels of government spending.

Developing An Institutional Arrangement For A Whole-Of-Government And Whole-Of-Community Approach To Regional Adaptation To Sea Level Rise: The Hampton Roads Pilot Project, Juita-Elena (Wie) Yusuf, J. Gail Nicula, Burton St. John Iii, Meagan M. Jordan, Michelle Covi, Carol Considine, Marina Saitgalina, Joshua Behr

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

Adaptation to sea level rise (SLR) requires coordination among local, state, and federal entities and collaboration across governments, nonprofits, businesses, and residents. This coordination and collaboration are reflected in institutional arrangements associated with a whole-of-government and whole-of-community approach to regional adaptation. This study analyzes the development of an interlocal agreement (ILA), the Hampton Roads Sea Level Rise Preparedness and Resilience Intergovernmental Planning Pilot Project (the Pilot Project), as an example of such an arrangement. This study assesses how factors throughout three phases of ILA development (initiation, implementation, and execution) influence outcomes and effectiveness. Drawing upon participant observation, document analysis, survey …