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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Syracuse University

2001

Articles 31 - 35 of 35

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Private Philanthropy And The Economics Of Public Radio, Arthur C. Brooks Jan 2001

Private Philanthropy And The Economics Of Public Radio, Arthur C. Brooks

Center for Policy Research

Public radio in the United States receives both direct and indirect government funding. Direct subsidies come in the form of lump-sum and matching grants, while indirect subsidies proceed from tax revenues foregone on deductible private donations. Each of these sources of government money impacts charitable giving to public radio. This paper estimates both of these effects, using data on a national sample of public radio stations in the United States from 1990-96. I find that public funding to stations has a positive impact on private giving, but this impact rapidly decreases as the level of government subsidies increases, ultimately becoming …


Geography, Industrial Organization, And Agglomeration Heteroskedasticity Models With Estimates Of The Variances Of Foreign Exchange Rates, Chihwa Kao Jan 2001

Geography, Industrial Organization, And Agglomeration Heteroskedasticity Models With Estimates Of The Variances Of Foreign Exchange Rates, Chihwa Kao

Center for Policy Research

This paper proposes a robust estimation procedure, the bounded influence estimate (BIS), which is robust against departure from the conditional normality of the autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) models to describe the behavior of exchange rates. First, the BIE identifies the additive outliers (AO, e.g., Fox 1972) caused by abnormal information arrivals which may be triggered by changes in domestic policies and international shocks. Identification of outliers allows us to analyze the major economic and political factors that contribute directly to the dramatic changes in exchange rates. Second, the performance of the BIE is compared with the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) …


Does School District Consolidation Cut Costs?, William Duncombe, John Yinger Jan 2001

Does School District Consolidation Cut Costs?, William Duncombe, John Yinger

Center for Policy Research

Over the last 50 years, consolidation has dramatically reduced the number of school districts in the United States, and state governments still recommend consolidation, especially in rural school districts, as a way to improve school district efficiency. However, state policies encouraging consolidation are often challenged on the grounds that they do not lead to cost savings and instead foster learning environments that harm student performance. Existing evidence on this topic comes largely from educational cost functions, which indicate that instructional and administrative costs are far lower in a district with 3,000 pupils than in a district with 100 pupils. However, …


Can Policy Changes Be Treated As Natural Experiments? Evidence From State Excise Taxes, Jeffrey D. Kubik, John R. Moran Jan 2001

Can Policy Changes Be Treated As Natural Experiments? Evidence From State Excise Taxes, Jeffrey D. Kubik, John R. Moran

Center for Policy Research

An important issue in public policy analysis is the potential endogeneity of the policies under study. If policy changes constitute responses on the part of political decision-makers to changes in a variable of interest, then standard analyses that treat policy changes as natural experiments may yield biased estimates of the impact of the policy (Besley and Case 2000). We examine the extent to which such political endogeneity biases conventional fixed effects estimates of behavioral parameters by identifying the elasticities of demand for cigarettes and beer using the timing of state legislative elections as an instrument for changes in state excise …


Fixing New York's State Education Aid Dinosaur: A Proposal, John Yinger Jan 2001

Fixing New York's State Education Aid Dinosaur: A Proposal, John Yinger

Center for Policy Research

New York State provides aid to local schools through a confusing maze of aid programs that are, according to many commentators, unfair to the neediest school districts, often defined as those with many students who are poor or otherwise "at risk." For example, New York City, which, by any measure, is one of the neediest districts, currently receives less aid per pupil than the average district in the state. On January 9, 2001, in the case of Campaign for Fiscal Equity vs. State of New York (719 N.Y.S2d 475, 150 Ed. Law Rep. 834), the New York State Supreme Court …