Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
12 results
Search Results
Item SPATIAL EFFECTS OF LOCAL GOVERNANCE INSTITUTIONS ON ILLEGAL DEFORESTATION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES(2019) Kraus Elsin, Yoanna; Lichtenberg, Erik; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Deforestation worldwide is a major concern. In developing countries, it is a merciless and devastating reality. My thesis addresses how local governance institutions' strength influences this phenomenon, focusing on the Colombian Andes. The theoretical analysis examines spatial patterns of illegal deforestation when enforcement is costly, and costs rise with distance from governmental centers. Those spatial patterns depend on the interaction between transportation costs incurred by farmers growing crops on deforested land and enforcement costs incurred by government officials conducting on-the-ground monitoring of deforestation. Areas closer to governmental centers can be monitored effectively and are thus less subject to illegal deforestation. Illegal deforestation is, therefore, more likely in areas where monitoring costs are high, but farmers' transportation costs are not. The calibration exercise then shows, that in this context, patches of deforestation might arise within the forest, causing unwanted forest fragmentation. Based on these results I study empirically, first, if the effect of access difficulty on deforestation may be non-monotonic in accessibility, causing forest fragmentation; and second, if this fragmentation is more likely to occur when enforcement is more costly. I approach this question in two manners: (1) using a cubic function of access difficulty interacted with measures of enforcement capacity and (2) non-parametrically using indicators for discrete ranges of access difficulty, again interacted with measures of enforcement capacity. I construct for this purpose a panel data set for the Colombian Andes from a variety of sources. Data on deforestation comes from satellite imaging at a 30mx30m resolution in two periods (2000-2005) and (2005-2010), this data was matched with biophysical variables such as, altitude, slope, precipitation, soil type, and roads using geographical information systems (GIS), as well as with socioeconomic variables which vary by municipality and time. The regressions show a significant non-monotonic effect of access difficulty on deforestation. The evidence shows that deforestation probability first decreases with access difficulty, and it then increases in remoter places. This evidences forest fragmentation as one moves away from roads. Moreover, this pattern is affected by the fiscal performance index (a proxy for enforcement capacity) of the municipalities, showing that municipalities with lower enforcement capacity have a higher probability to present illegal deforestation at remote places. This research adds to the deforestation literature, by studying the spatial reach of governance capacity and how it affects deforestation patterns. The findings highlight the importance of taking enforcement and monitoring costs as well as their spatial variation into account when designing land-use policies and defining the institutional arrangements, funding and monitoring processes to implement them.Item Institutions, Poverty, and Tropical Cyclone Mortality(2019) Tennant, Elizabeth; Patwardhan, Anand; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Tropical cyclones can result in thousands of deaths when the exposed population is unprepared or ill-equipped to cope with the hazard. Evaluating the importance of institutions and socioeconomic conditions for these deaths is challenging due to the extreme variability in hazard exposure. Studies of socioeconomic risk factors that do not account for exposure will be imprecise and possibly biased, as a storm’s path and intensity are important determinants of mortality and may be correlated with socioeconomic conditions. I therefore model and then control for hazard exposure by spatially interacting meteorological and socioeconomic data, allowing me to develop novel evidence of socioeconomic risk factors. In essay 1, I construct a global dataset of over one thousand tropical cyclone events occurring between 1979 and 2016. Controlling for population exposure to strong winds and rainfall, I find that higher levels of national government effectiveness are associated with lower tropical cyclone mortality. Further, deaths are higher when exposure is concentrated over a subset of the population that is already less well off. In essay 2, I investigate whether local government capacity and poverty alleviation can reduce tropical cyclone deaths, using panel data from 78 provinces and 1,426 municipalities in the Philippines. Tropical cyclone exposure is concentrated in wealthier regions of the Philippines, but once wind exposure and rainfall are controlled for I find robust evidence of a link between local poverty rates and cyclone deaths. In essay 3, I investigate the potential for leveraging policy experiments for causal inference about the effects of development interventions on disaster mortality using an existing randomized control trial in the Philippines. This empirical example illustrates how randomization overcomes issues of multicollinearity and omitted variable bias; however, the presence of outliers in exposure and vulnerability to natural hazards interact to make average treatment effect estimates highly imprecise. Strong evidence of an association between government effectiveness and cyclone deaths suggests that capacity constraints need to be addressed in tandem with risk-specific strategies and financial transfers. Further, evidence that local poverty rates and socioeconomic conditions matter highlights the need for equitable and inclusive approaches to mitigating the risk from tropical cyclones.Item The Nature of Governmental Authority(2019) Phillips, Cindy; Morris, Christopher W; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation puts forward a series of arguments and theoretical proposals concerning institutional authority—particularly, governmental authority. I attend to conceptual debates regarding the function of legal systems and the nature of authority. Moreover, I cover a normative debate regarding the permissible use of political power. The overall view that I build is that governmental institutions have a decision-making authority over the status of certain normative relations in society, and they were designed to have this decision-making authority to serve the need of making group decisions, despite persistent disagreements about policy outcomes, in order to solve practical problems. Chapter 1, “My Overall Perspective,” provides a guide to my overall view regarding the nature of governmental authority. This PhD dissertation takes the form of the three-paper model, and a reader may not see the conceptual links between these papers. In this chapter, I present the view on the nature of governmental authority that comes out of these papers. Chapter 2, “The Presumption of Liberty and the Coerciveness of the State,” presents a challenge to skeptics who think that nearly all uses of political power is impermissible. I argue that a state can engage in permissible uses of political power over a broad range of domains without possessing any entitlements. Chapter 3, “What Authority Is, What It Is Not,” argues against the orthodoxy that authority is a species of power over others. I then build and defend the view that authority is a status that authorizes a person or entity to change one’s normative status. Chapter 4, “Law’s Function as a Decision-Procedure” provides an analysis of how we can determine the law’s essential function. I use this analysis to argue that the law’s essential function is a decision-making one. Each of these chapters is a standalone paper. None of these papers presupposes another one, and they can be read in any order.Item The Promise of Access: Hope and Inequality in the Information Economy(2016) Greene, Daniel Marcus; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 2013, a series of posters began appearing in Washington, DC’s Metro system. Each declared “The internet: Your future depends on it” next to a photo of a middle-aged black Washingtonian, and an advertisement for the municipal government’s digital training resources. This hopeful discourse is familiar but where exactly does it come from? And how are our public institutions reorganized to approach the problem of poverty as a problem of technology? The Clinton administration’s ‘digital divide’ policy program popularized this hopeful discourse about personal computing powering social mobility, positioned internet startups as the ‘right’ side of the divide, and charged institutions of social reproduction such as schools and libraries with closing the gap and upgrading themselves in the image of internet startups. After introducing the development regime that builds this idea into the urban landscape through what I call the ‘political economy of hope’, and tracing the origin of the digital divide frame, this dissertation draws on three years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in startups, schools, and libraries to explore how this hope is reproduced in daily life, becoming the common sense that drives our understanding of and interaction with economic inequality and reproduces that inequality in turn. I show that the hope in personal computing to power social mobility becomes a method of securing legitimacy and resources for both white émigré technologists and institutions of social reproduction struggling to understand and manage the persistent poverty of the information economy. I track the movement of this common sense between institutions, showing how the political economy of hope transforms them as part of a larger development project. This dissertation models a new, relational direction for digital divide research that grounds the politics of economic inequality with an empirical focus on technologies of poverty management. It demands a conceptual shift that sees the digital divide not as a bug within the information economy, but a feature of it.Item LOW-CARBON TECHNOLOGIES AND CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION POLICY IN AN IMPERFECT WORLD(2015) Iyer, Gokul; Hultman, Nathan E; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)It is widely acknowledged that an important element of climate change mitigation policy will be the development and diffusion of low-carbon technologies. This dissertation uses the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM), a global integrated assessment model to study the relationships between technology and policy in the context of global climate change mitigation under three "imperfect" circumstances, namely, constraints on the rate of diffusion of low-carbon technologies, countries promoting the deployment of low-carbon technologies based on national priorities and preferences and variation in investment risks across technologies and regions. These conditions deviate from conventional idealized assumptions and thus represent an "imperfect" world. The first essay shows that factors including social, behavioral and institutional that might constrain the rate of diffusion of low-carbon technologies even in the presence of favorable climate policies have sizeable impacts on the costs and feasibility of achieving stringent climate targets. Such impacts are greatly amplified with major delays in serious climate policies. The second essay illustrates the divergence between domestic and global outcomes when countries promote the deployment of specific low-carbon technologies in the near-term. In this essay, I show that a globally cost-effective, near-term international technology investment strategy to achieve a long-term climate goal is a diversified international technology investment portfolio across countries. This essay also explores the degree to which independent national technology deployment policies align with collaboratively determined regimes. I show that conditions exist under which there are substantial gains to international cooperation in the development and deployment of diverse low-carbon technologies but also circumstances in which domestic outcomes align with the global outcome. The third essay focuses on the variation of investment risks across technologies and regions in the electricity generation sector. I find that by taking into account such variation, achieving an emissions mitigation goal is up to 40% higher than it would be in a world with uniform investment risks. Additionally, industrialized countries mitigate more and developing countries mitigate less. The three essays together underscore the importance of policies aimed at developing capabilities and fostering international cooperation in the development and diffusion of low-carbon technologies to achieve climate change mitigation cost-effectively.Item Essays on Intitutional Governance(2011) Hu, Bingjie; Murrell, Peter; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis consists of three chapters on the choice of institutional governance. The first chapter provides empirical evidence on the effect of local norms on the contractual choice, using a comprehensive dataset on US agricultural leasing contracts. We focus on the choice between cash-rent and share-rent contracts and examine whether the prevalence of share-rent contracts has an effect on contractual choice. We use a generalized spatial two-stage least squares approach to address endogeneity issues. Our results show that there is a strong tendency for agents to choose the contractual form that conforms to local norms. Our study also suggests that share-rent contracts are more likely to be chosen when there is a higher likelihood or more severe consequence of opportunistic behavior by agents. This suggests that share contracts reduce transaction costs by helping to foster a productive governance atmosphere for the contracting parties. The second chapter explores whether the choice of institutions depends on the historical experience and the stock of knowledge of economic agents. We provide firm-level evidence on the choice of between legal and relational governance, in the context of the transition economy of Romania. Our results show that previously state-owned businesses are more likely to rely on legal governance than other firms. We also find evidence that the legal knowledge held by firm managers affects the choice of governance, which is consistent with the path-dependence theory of institutional development. The third chapter is based on a cross-country study of the link between public spending on health care, quality of institutional governance and child health outcomes. We show that both public spending on health care and the quality of governance matter for the reduction of child and infant mortality rates.Item Power Sharing or Power Hoarding? Conflict and Democratic Breakdown in Nigeria and Lebanon(2010) Milligan, Margaret (Maren); Lichbach, Mark I; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Power-sharing institutions--organized around the principle of group representation--have re-emerged in recent decades throughout the world. From Iraq to Afghanistan, "power-sharing" has again become a preeminent solution to ethnic and/or electoral conflict. This approach--including the variant of "consociationalism"--has long been critiqued for either strengthening inter-elite ties at the expense of mass-level linkages or working only in societies already committed to inter-group cooperation or conciliation. What these critiques miss--and dangerously so for the countries now undergoing the power-sharing treatment--is that the organization of politics around group representation is inherently unstable. This dissertation traces the impact of institutionalized group representation in two very different staples of the power-sharing literature: Nigeria and Lebanon. Although these mixed Muslim-Christian countries differ in nearly every respect considered relevant in the institutional design literature (electoral system, de/centralized government, party law regulation, size, colonial power, and region) they experience strikingly similar cycles of conflict and democratic breakdown. The dissertation argues that, rather than being a conflict resolution technique of relatively recent provenance, power-sharing is rooted in the exigencies of imperial rule. In doing so, it examines the emergence of ethnic federalism and confessionalism in colonialism in Nigeria and Lebanon. The dissertation then models how institutionalized group representation leads to conflict and democratic breakdown. Drawing on sociology, the dissertation draws on Charles Tilly's model of "Democracy." He argues that democracy operates in a self-reinforcing virtuous circle through three interlocking mechanisms: integration of trust networks, reduction in categorical inequalities and removal or autonomous bases of power. This dissertation argues that, by definition, power sharing promotes the opposite mechanisms: "opportunity hoarding," "category formation," and "certification." The operation of these three mechanisms leads to vicious cycles of conflict and democratic breakdown. The dissertation traces the operation of these three mechanisms focusing on two nested clusters of "groups" since the early 1990s: North/Middle Belt/Jasawa in Nigeria and Muslim/Shi'a/Alawi in Lebanon. Based on this examination of Nigeria and Lebanon, the dissertation argues that "group representation" regimes will lead to cycles of conflict and democratic breakdown and should not be viewed as a conflict panacea.Item Essays in International Finance(2008-01-23) Daude, Christian; Mendoza, Enrique G.; Vegh, Carlos A.; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Access to private capital markets is the most salient difference between emerging market economies and other developing countries. However, in contrast to developed economies, emerging markets have had a troubled relationship with capital fows. In particular, balance of payments and debt crises have been a recurrent problem. The three chapters of this dissertation contribute to the literature on emerging markets and their relationship with capital markets. Chapter 1 analyzes the effects of volatility on sovereign default risk. Empirically, the paper establishes a concave relationship between spreads and volatility. While for low levels of volatility an increase in volatility is associated with an increase in the sovereign risk premium, the risk premium increases at a decreasing rate. This empirical relationship is robust to different estimation methods, sam- ples and control variables. Furthermore, the relationship between volatility and risk premia is non-monotonic: while at low levels of volatility an increase in volatility implies an increase also in spreads, for sufficiently high levels of volatility this relationship turns negative. The chapter also presents a quantitative model of sovereign debt with default risk consistent with this feature and other characteristics of EME debt. The intuition for this result is the existence of a trade-off between prudential behavior in order to avoid large consumption fluctuations under autarky and the increased likelihood of a default, given default provides some short-run relief under a very bad realization of shocks. Chapter 2 addresses the determinants of the composition of cross-border investment positions. Using a novel database of bilateral capital stocks for all types of investment - FDI, portfolio equity securities, debt securities as well as loans - for a broad set of 77 countries, we show the importance of two key determinants of the composition of cross-border asset positions: information frictions and the quality of host country institutions. Overall, we find that in particular FDI, and to some extent also loans, are substantially more sensitive to information frictions than investment in portfolio equity and debt securities. We also show that the share as well as the size of FDI that a country receives are largely insensitive to corruption in host countries, while portfolio investment is by far the most sensitive to the quality of institutions. Chapter 3 focuses on a related topic to chapter 2. Using bilateral FDI stocks around the world, we explore the importance of a wide range of institutional variables as determinants of the location of FDI. While we find that better institutions have overall a positive and economically significant effect on FDI, some institutional aspects matter more than others do. Especially, the unpredictability of laws, regulations and policies, excessive regulatory burden, government instability and lack of commitment play a major role in deterring FDI. For example, the effect of a one standard deviation improvement in the regulatory quality of the host country increases FDI by a factor of around 2. These results are robust to different specifications, estimation methods and institutional variables. We also present evidence on the significance of institutions as a determinant of FDI over time.Item Empirical Essays in Comparative Institutional Economics(2007-05-02) Mukashev, Yerzhan Bulatovich; Murrell, Peter; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Essay 1 investigates an empirical link between institutional variables and the performance of firms based on cross-country firm-level survey data. Current empirical evidence based on this type of data is unsatisfactory because employing survey responses as direct measures of institutional concepts and using those to analyze the effects of institutions at the firm level would limit the researcher to findings only within countries effects. This happens at the expense of losing inherent cross-country variation in institutions. Essay 1 offers a simple conceptual framework that decomposes survey responses for each firm into the average of their country and a residual firm-specific component. Importantly, the estimation results indicate that both variations have clearly different effects on growth of sales of firms. Essay 2 estimates the causal effects of economic shocks on the incidence of politically destabilizing events. The estimation is difficult due to the joint endogeneity between economic growth and events related to the political environment, which is addressed by the instrumental variable method. The variation in oil prices is used as an instrument for economic growth in the sample of small oil importing economies during 1960 - 1999. In contrast to a common belief and OLS estimates, the most striking finding of the IV estimation is that higher economic growth has a strong and robust positive effect on the incidence of relatively peaceful unrest such as demonstrations, strikes and riots. Essay 3 studies the question of differences in economic growth rates between Democratic and Republican governorships in the United States. The question is difficult to answer by simply comparing growth rates because the party affiliation is not randomly selected during elections. The empirical analysis employs the Regression Discontinuity Method to address the endogeneity in the party control variable. Focusing on very close elections permits the generation of quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of a "randomized" change in party control at the 50 percent threshold. When comparing Democratic with Republican governorships, the results are suggestive about the possibility of slightly worse performance of Democratic governors but the lack of statistical significance does not fully support this evidence.Item INEQUALITY, INSTITUTIONS AND REDISTRIBUTION(2005-07-29) Aysan, Ahmet Faruk; Betancourt, Roger; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the role of efficiency of redistributive institutions (ERI) on redistribution. The first substantive essay proposes a theoretical model to explain the lack of strong empirical evidence in favor of a positive relationship between income inequality and redistribution. This chapter first shows that even exogenously given ERI affects the relationship between income inequality and redistribution. Then, it introduces three specifications to endogenize ERI. In these various specifications, increasing inequality reduces the ERI when (1) ERI is an increasing function of average income or (2) political influence on ERI is positively associated with income or (3) the median voter has some prospect of upward mobility. There is one common element in these various specifications. While income inequality increases the pressure for redistribution it also increases the incentive to reduce the efficiency of redistribution in order to constrain aggregate redistribution. Hence, the main conclusion is that one needs consider these conflicting effects in order to account for the puzzling lack of strong empirical evidence for a positive relationship between income inequality and redistribution. The second substantive essay empirically analyzes the role of efficiency of redistributive institutions on redistribution in the form of social security and welfare spending. When measures of ERI are incorporated into the existing empirical specifications of income inequality and redistribution, cross-sectional and panel data regressions show that the ERI significantly increases redistribution. However, we find weaker evidence for the role of income inequality on redistribution. Income inequality does not appear to be strongly significant in various specifications of the redistribution equation. Based on this evidence, this chapter concludes that ERI plays an important role in redistribution but this effect does not resolve the fiscal policy puzzle that is emphasized in the theoretical chapter. Moreover, this chapter also explores the determinants of ERI. Our empirical results confirm the theoretical model that an increase in GDP per capita and democracy increases ERI. However, there is less convincing evidence for the negative role of income inequality on the ERI. Among the other determinants of ERI, freedom of the press and trade openness improve ERI considerably.