Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item THREE ESSAYS ON URBAN TRANSPORTATION STUDIES IN WASHINGTON D.C.: SAFETY EFFECT OF ALL-WAY STOP CONTROL, SAFETY EFFECT OF REVERSIBLE LANE AND LOADING ZONE ALLOCATION(2019) Deng, Zuxuan; Knaap, Gerrit-Jan; Urban and Regional Planning and Design; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Systematic data-driven and evidence-based urban transportation policy making and evaluation become increasingly important for public agencies to ensure transparent and efficient services. This dissertation, consisting of three essays on urban transportation studies, focuses on two issues (safety and asset management) that are broadly related with urban transportation policy making and evaluation in Washington D.C. In Chapter One, I evaluate the safety effect of All Way Stop Control (AWSC) conversion with an observational treatment group and a randomly selected control group from stratified samples. Selection bias and time trend are controlled using empirical strategies such as Multiway ANOVA and Difference-in-Differences analysis. The study reveals statistically significant reductions of right angle crashes upon AWSC conversions. However, for all the other collision types, including right turn, left turn, rear end, sideswipes and bicycle crashes, none of the estimated coefficients were statistically significant. In addition, the study quantified a statistically significant increase of straight hit pedestrian crashes upon AWSC conversion. In Chapter Two, I study the safety effect of removing reversible lane operations along urban arterials. Taking advantage of the termination of three reversible lane arterials in 2010, the evaluation is performed using the Before-After (BA) study with a control group and the Empirical Bayes (EB) method, respectively. I estimate Crash Modification Factors (CMF) for all crashes, fatal/injury crashes, property damage only (PDO) crashes, rear-end crashes, left turn crashes and sideswipe crashes. My findings suggest a clear tradeoff between safety and the gain of peak direction capacity by operating reversible lanes along urban arterials. In Chapter Three, I propose an innovative procedure for allocating scarce curbside space for loading zones in an equitable, quantifiable and repeatable manner. Freight Trip Generation (FTG) models are used to estimate the delivery needs for business establishments at a block face level. The current numbers of loading zones per block face are regressed against the Gross FTG (GFTG) per block face and other block face characteristic variables using zero-truncated Negative Binomial models to establish a baseline. Curbside spaces are then assigned as loading zones in an iterative process.Item EXAMINING HOW TENNESSEE STATE MERIT AID INFLUENCES INSTITUTIONAL GRANT AID: A DIFFERENCE-IN-DIFFERENCES APPROACH(2018) Burczek Dreier, John Paul; Titus, Marvin; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The creation of the Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship (TELS) program provides a natural experiment where a difference-in-differences estimation design is employed to isolate how state merit aid funding may lead institutions to change their institutional grant aid. Principal agent and resource dependence theories together establish state and institutional context as well as inform potential institutional responses to the TELS program. Data are primarily observed at the institution-level from 2000 to 2009 and come from the Integrated Postsecondary Data System (IPEDS). The difference-in-differences estimation strategy incorporates multiple comparison groups and separate specifications by Carnegie Classification. The results indicated that the nine Tennessee public four-year institutions reduced their recipient average institutional grant post-TELS. However, institutional responses differed across Carnegie Classification. Tennessee Doctoral Extensive public institutions increased the number of students receiving institutional grant aid post-TELS. Tennessee Doctoral Intensive public institutions reduced their total institutional grant and number of recipients post-TELS, and thereby decreased their average institutional grant aid post-TELS. Tennessee Master’s College and Universities, excluding Tennessee Technical University, also reduced their institutional grant aid post-TELS. The results from this study provide some informative commentary for theory, research and policy. First, the combination of principal agent and resource dependence theories provide a more comprehensive set of potential responses that move beyond the Bennett hypothesis to suggest that institutions might not just reduce institutional grant aid. Second, this study created a comparison group of institutions subject to a state governing or coordinating board with budget authority, which produce more efficient estimates. Future research on financial aid or institutional finances may benefit from moving beyond the tradition governing board classification to include state coordinating boards with budget authority. Third, state policy on financial aid should better align new initiatives with existing institutional financial aid to ensure state funding is used effectively. With better goal alignment between state governments and institutions, it could reduce the agency problem that develops and ensure state does not duplicated existing financial aid strategies.