Public Policy Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2803
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Item WHAT IS THE PRICE OF CRIME? NEW ESTIMATES OF THE COST OF CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION(2009) Roman, Jonathan Kilbourn; Reuter, Peter; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Robust estimates of the price of crime, measured as the costs of crime to victims, inform a wide range of policy analysis. The most commonly cited studies are constrained by limited data and rely on indirect methods to estimate prices. In these studies, health statistics are used to estimate direct losses from crime, jury award data are used to estimate indirect damages from crime, and self-reported crime data are used to weight injury prevalence within broad crime categories. While the relationship between injury and damages can be observed at the individual level in civil court records, individual level data have not previously been available that link crimes and injury. Since both individual and aggregate data are combined in these studies, prior research has not corrected sampling bias, and the estimates of victimization costs have been reported only as point estimates without confidence intervals. Estimates have been developed for only a few broad categories of crime and these estimates have not been robust to study design. This study analyzes individual-level data from two sources: jury award and injury data from the RAND Institute of Civil Justice and crime and injury data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System. Propensity score weights are developed to account for heterogeneity in jury awards. Data from the jury awards are interpolated onto the NIBRS data based on the combination of all attributes observable in both data sets. From the combined data, estimates are developed of the price of crime to victims for thirty-one crime categories. Until data become available linking information about criminal incidents to jury award data, the strategy used here is likely to yield the most robust estimates of the costs to crime victims that can be generated from the jury compensation method.Item Should Advertising Remain a Tax-Deductible Business Expense?(2009) Wengrover, Sally Ruth; Daly, Herman E.; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Advertising expenses have been deductible ever since the income tax was enacted in 1913. Over the years, however, a number of analysts have questioned advertising's tax status. According to some, advertising creates intangible capital and should, therefore, be capitalized and amortized like other capital assets. According to other analysts, advertising does more to reduce welfare than to augment it; therefore, the deduction should be completely denied. Advertisers and their supporters, on the other hand, maintain that the deduction is entirely reasonable. This dissertation addresses some of the legal controversies involving the deduction and examines some of advertising's economic psychological, sociological and ecological effects. In Part I, Chapter 1 introduces the research question and debates the welfare implications of ad-induced economic growth. Chapter 2 considers whether advertising is, in fact, an "ordinary and necessary business expense" that is entitled to a tax deduction. Although advocates for the deduction claim that it is both ordinary and necessary, some critics argue that the deduction is, in fact, a subsidy that shifts more of the tax burden to individual taxpayers. Part II is devoted to the economic effects of advertising. Chapter 3 discusses advertising's impact on demand for the output of an individual firm, a particular industry, and all industries combined. Chapter 4 examines the effect of advertising on the competitive model; Chapter 5 evaluates advertising's influence on innovation, employment, and savings; and Chapter 6 considers the economic impact of advertising on the media. The focus in Part III is on advertising's influence on well-being. Chapter 7 examines ways that advertising affects the well-being of individuals and society. Chapter 8 surveys the impact of ad-induced materialistic values on the environment. Chapter 9 looks at a number of costs and benefits that are associated with advertising, discusses potential obstacles to changing advertising's tax status, and offers recommendations for policymakers.Item An Institutional Analysis of the Chinese Land Conversion Process(2009) Ma, Jianbo; Nelson, Robert H; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Formally, China has a highly centralized system to control the conversion of farmland to non-farming uses. Its rigidity and other problems, however, have led to a large informal and decentralized market that serves to accommodate the demand for developable land. This dissertation, based on a case study in a county on China's eastern coast, finds that the informal land market has played an essential role in promoting local economic growth, improving the financial situations of local governments and villages, and benefiting some low-income people. As far as economic efficiency is concerned, the Chinese land system functions reasonably well given the existing institutional arrangements, though at high transaction costs. However, the land conversion process, governed largely by the law of the jungle, is highly unfair because it favors the powerful, the bold and the wealthy. The recent piecemeal policies by China's national government to fix the system have produced few positive or even negative effects. The dissertation concludes that the success of future attempts to improve the land conversion system hinges on the willingness and capability of the national government to change the rules of the game in a fundamental way.Item What Type of Fiscal Decentralization System Has Better Performance?(2007-12-07) Liu, Chih-hung; Reinhart, Carmen; Zinnes, Clifford; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The conventional wisdom of fiscal decentralization advocates is that fiscal decentralization can facilitate the economic development of a country. In addition, the World Bank and IMF have identified over sixty countries where decentralization is an important element of development strategy. However, with the proliferating implementation of fiscal decentralization, the actual outcome has varied from country to country. A major barrier to understanding is the lack of well-defined theoretical framework to empirically measure fiscal decentralization in a policy relevant way. The most widely used measurement is the ratio of sub-national government expenditure/revenue to total government expenditure/revenue. But this indicator is criticized too simple to capture the dimensions of fiscal decentralization. Specifically, it ignores key qualitative dimensions, such as taxing power, borrowing power and the independence of local officials, which are also very important to implementing fiscal decentralization. The primary contribution of this dissertation is a novel theoretical framework for empirical measurement of fiscal decentralization. The research question is: what types of fiscal decentralization system produce better economic performance? We go beyond the traditional way of measuring a country's fiscal decentralization, treating it instead as a system with its own institutional design. Adopting this method requires us investigate the institutional arrangement for fiscal decentralization in a country. The institutional arrangement we review in detail includes: supra-national government, federal or unitary state, numbers of tiers of governments, taxing power, borrowing power, and independent local official. These components have also been recognized by many economists and policy analysts. What is original to this work is that, after identifying these institutional arrangements, we can group different countries with similar institutionally similar fiscal decentralization systems together in broad categories by using cluster analysis. We are then in a position to measure the successes of each cluster according to several indicators, such as: economic performance, fiscal performance, and governance performance. An inter- and intra-cluster comparison and one empirical model thus give a snapshot of the relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic performance. The ultimate goal, for policy analysis, is to be able to distinguish the desirable institutional arrangements of fiscal decentralization from the less desirable ones.Item An evaluation of Active Labor Market Policies in Developing Economies: The Mexican Case(2007-08-03) Cruz Aguayo, Yyannú; Reuter, Peter; Smith, Jeffrey; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One of the major problems in developing countries is that of unemployment and underemployment. Thus the use of active labor market policies constitutes a very significant part of the policy debate. This dissertation analyzes the training component of one such policies in Mexico: PROBECAT-SICAT (P/S). First, we provide an overview of some of the institutional elements that are likely to have a bearing in the design, functioning and effects of P/S - in particular those related to the decentralized operation and funding of the program. We find that there is some room for a more explicit definition of the mechanisms that establish the checks and controls to reduce misuse of resources. We suggest the inclusion of indicators of job quality as a concrete objective of the program. In the second part of the dissertation, using semi-parametric techniques, we obtain the average treatment effect of the program on its participants. We use a set of variables that capture characteristics of job formality, and find evidence that male and female trainees do increase their probabilities of employment and of employment with health benefits. In addition, we find that, on average, female trainees tend to find employment in more informal jobs than their male counterparts. The last part of the dissertation consists of an impact evaluation of P/S by training type. We find evidence that participating in mixed training in medium increases the trainees' probability of employment per se and employment with desirable 'formal' characteristics, such as health and housing benefits, a written contract, etc., with respect to any other training type. Secondly, the mixed training in micro and small enterprises is superior to the training for self-employment and in-classroom training. Moreover, we find evidence that female participants increase their chances of obtaining jobs with informal characteristics if they choose to participate in training for self-employment with respect to participation in-classroom training. We conclude that even with institutional shortcomings, the program seems to have positive effects that justify its original creation and permanency.Item Towards Adequate Analysis and Modeling of Structural Adjustment Programs: An Analytical Framework with Application to Ghana(2004-11-22) Kraev, Egor; Daly, Herman; Public Affairs; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When a country experiences a balance of payments problem, the typical remedy mix proposed by the International Monetary Fund consists of fiscal austerity, tight monetary policies, devaluation, privatization, elimination of subsidies and trade liberalization, combined with low interest rate loans. Throughout the late 1980s, Ghana has been hailed as a success story for that policy mix. However, Ghana's performance has been increasingly disappointing during the 1990s. This thesis explores the reasons for that slowdown, its distributional implications, and the extent to which the behavior of the Ghanaian economy validates commonly used assumptions in economic models of developing countries. We compile a complete consistent yearly dataset of financial stocks, nominal money flows (arranged in Social Accounting Matrices) and real product flows for Ghana in 1990-2001. The real-side data, available yearly, are then examined using fit optimization with alternative functional forms, while nominal time series (Consumer Price Index, the broad money supply and the exchange rate), available on a monthly basis, are analyzed using ARIMA-X regressions. We find that industrial production, as well as investment, has been demand-constrained during our period, while agriculture has hit an aggregate supply constraint around year 1995. The relative price elasticity of substitution between imports and non-traded goods (in volume terms) is around minus one. The government was the only net source of demand during the period. Inflation could be predicted extremely well using only broad money supply, wholesale price of food crops and price of fuel, and formed a weak positive feedback loop with money supply growth. The main channel through which exchange rate depreciation impacted the price level was revaluation of the foreign currency-denominated money supply component. The response of broad money supply to interest rate increases was significant but small. We also formulate a novel matrix formalism for a more compact description and analysis of financial stock dynamics, cleanly separating structural and accounting constraints from behavioral descriptions. We conclude that the major reasons for the economic slowdown of the 1990s were excessive liberalization of commodity imports and strangulation of industry through lack of demand and volatile real interest rates, and of agriculture through withdrawal of government support programs.