UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Three essays on institutions and economic development(2006-08-23) Shepotylo, Oleksandr; Murrell, Peter; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Institutions are humanly devised constraints that shape interactions between people. Changing those constraints affects people's incentives and, therefore, affects economic, political, and social outcomes. Studying institutional arrangements helps to shed some light on why there is a high variation of the level of economic development across countries. These theses address the questions of how institutions are formed, how institutional changes affect incentives, and how they influence economic development. The first chapter studies the effect of change in the rule that assign points in soccer on optimal strategies of soccer teams playing in a tournament. It demonstrates that the change in the rule increases incentives of teams to collude in order to trade points. It also has heterogeneous effects on top and lesser teams. Second chapter looks at impact of good regional governance infrastructure on inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) in 24 transition countries from 1993 to 2003. The model takes into account spatial spillovers and spatially correlated error terms. It is estimated by a recently developed generalized method of moment (GMM) three-stage procedure. The results show that the regional quality of institutions is an important factor that explains variations in FDI inflows. The positive effect of good regional governance dominates the effect of better developed regional markets. The third chapter investigates determinants of the quality of governance inside a country. The main finding is the importance of relative geographical location: good governance in the neighboring countries has a positive impact on quality of governance inside a particular country. Spatial links work mostly through long-term determinants of governance that include culture, legal system, and colonial history. At the same time, the closest neighbors have the strongest impact on quality of governance, while cultural and colonial " neighbors" that are not close geographically, have smaller impact on the local institutional development. According to our results, cross-country regressions that do not take into account spatial interdependence of countries produce biased estimation of the coefficients and incorrect inference of variance-covariance matrix.Item Adaptive Agent Modeling in a Policy Context(2004-12-15) Gulden, Timothy R; Daly, Herman E; Public Affairs; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the utility of adaptive agent modeling (also referred to as agent-based modeling or individual based modeling) as a tool in public policy research. It uses the adaptive agent technique to produce useful results in three diverse areas. It demonstrates that the adaptive agent framework can be used to extend traditional models of comparative advantage in international trade, showing that the presence of increasing returns to scale in some industries shifts the basis of comparative advantage arguments, making room for industrial policy and the regulation of trade. Next, the dissertation demonstrates that the size distribution of cities within nations, generally thought to approximate the "Zipf" distribution, can be reproduced using a simple agent-based model. This model produces insights into the evolution of the distribution as well as departures from it especially in France and Russia. This understanding of urban dynamics has implications for easing the structural transition of the Russian economy and for designing policies to reduce the size of megacities in the developing world. The dissertation goes on to examine individual level data from the Guatemalan civil war from an adaptive agent modeling perspective. It finds several novel patterns in the data which may serve as benchmarks for adaptive agent modeling efforts and suggests avenues by which existing conflict models might be brought into closer accord with the data. The dissertation concludes that adaptive agent modeling is useful in a policy context because it allows quantitative work to be done while relaxing some of the unrealistic assumptions which are often required to gain analytical traction using traditional methods. The method is found to be particularly useful in situations where path dependence, heterogeneity of actors, bounded rationality, and imperfect information are significant features of the system under examination. The individual based nature of the method is also found to be well suited to assessing distributional impacts of changes in process or policy.