School of Public Policy
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Municipal User Charges in the Era of Tax and Expenditure Limitations(2009) Sun, Rui; Reuter, Peter; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)User charges have emerged as one of the major revenue sources for municipal governments in the United States since the late 1970s. Meanwhile, a majority of states have adopted tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) in an attempt to constrain the revenue and spending levels of local governments including municipalities. In the era of TELs, how user charges perform their multiple roles in promoting local autonomy, political accountability, allocative efficiency, horizontal equity, and responsive government deserves considerable attention in the field of public finance. This dissertation explores the causes and consequences of the increased use of user charges by American municipalities. First, I provide an overview of fiscal trends in American municipalities. Chapter 1 discusses the context in which municipal revenue policy is made, the definitions of user charges, the salience of the issue, and the aims and organization of the dissertation. Chapter 2 investigates the effect of TELs on municipal reliance on user charges. The analysis is based on a sample of 724 cities for the period of 1970 to 2004. I employ fixed effects regression techniques to help control for the unobserved city-level characteristics that vary across cities but are time invariant. Results indicate that the implementation of TELs leads to a substantial increase in per capita user charges. The effect becomes even more pronounced when the endogoneity of TELs is taken into account using a two-stage least squares model. This finding implies that TELs may have unintended consequences and lead to a bigger government. Results also suggest that the restrictiveness and the number of TELs make a difference and different types of TELs generate varying effects on user charge reliance. Chapter 3 examines the impact of user charge financing on municipal expenditure levels. Using a panel of 686 cities for the sewer service and 715 cities for the parks and recreation service between 1972 and 2004, I find strong evidence that a greater reliance on user charges to finance government services leads to a reduction in municipal expenditures. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of policy implications in Chapter 4.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 Trade Openness and Well-Being: Do Complementary Conditions Matter?(2008-05-15) Guzman, Julio A; Graham, Carol; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the last three decades, most of the existing literature using regression analysis to explore the effects of trade on development has conferred the first one a leading role in directly determining cross-country differences on income. Indeed, this should come at surprise, since what trade theory predicts and what results from General Equilibrium Models (an econometric-alternative quantitative tool) recently display are not completely aligned with conventional empirical evidence at hand. According to these sources, the effects of trade liberalization on welfare are indirect, transmitted through several channels, and dependent on multiple initial conditions. Much of such discrepancy may be due to measurement error and omitted variable problems, data limitations, and methodological shortcomings presented in regression analysis. On one hand, there is agreement over the fact that conventional proxies of trade openness contain severe measurement errors. In addition, data on control variables affecting well-being and believed to be correlated with trade became available just recently. On the other hand, and more importantly, the search for a possible contingent or conditional relationship between free trade and well-being has not been a priority in the agenda of mainstream literature with the exception of sporadic and isolated studies, despite the fact that trade theory has long recognized that possibility. Using newly developed policy-oriented measures of trade integration built with information from tariff rates, non-tariff-barriers, and subsidies, and controlling by multidimensional policy areas beyond those found in conventional literature, this study finds evidence of a contingent relationship between trade openness and well-being. More specifically, this investigation arrives at two conclusions. First, unilateral or one-way-street trade liberalization is not associated with higher levels of well-being, showing neither a direct impact nor a conditional one in the presence of complementary conditions. Second, gains in international market access, or multilateral trade openness, do not alone guarantee the achievement of higher levels of well-being, but do demonstrate significant potential for development in the presence of favorable internal conditions, such as those linked to business competitiveness and market efficiency, the promotion and respect of political rights among the citizenry, and the less concentrated distribution of economic and social opportunities.Item THE COMMUNITY CAPACITY BUILDING IMPACT OF THE BALTIMORE EMPOWERMENT ZONE(2008-04-28) Clinch, Richard; Nelson, Robert H; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The federal Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community (EZ/EC) Initiative was the major urban initiative of the Clinton administration. It sought to replace the Reagan and the first Bush administrations' reductions in support for urban programs and passive focus on addressing urban issues through people-based policies and market and tax incentives. Baltimore was one of six cities selected for a full Empowerment Zone. One of the core goals of the federal EZ/EC Initiative was to create sustainable community capacity. Baltimore's implementation strategy was recognized as the most community driven of all of the Zones. This dissertation examines the experience of the Empowerment Zone in building sustainable community development capacity in the form of community organizations to implement programs and presents lessons learned to guide future community capacity building efforts. This dissertation used a detailed literature review, interview, focus group, records review and case study approach to answer the question - Can a federal policy create sustainable community capacity? The Baltimore Empowerment Zone was partially successful in creating or enhancing community development capacity in six urban neighborhoods in Baltimore. Five of the six community organizations - in the case of the Baltimore Empowerment Zone these were called village centers -- formed or participating in the Empowerment Zone effort operated throughout the ten year federal funding period and four remained in operation after the end of the program. This dissertation examined the internal (community) and external (economic, social, and political) factors that influenced each village centers' efforts to build sustainable development community capacity.Item Socio-Technical Transition as a Co-Evolutionary Process: Innovation and the Role of Niche Markets in the Transition to Motor Vehicles(2008-04-25) Birky, Alicia Kim; Ruth, Matthias; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Significant reductions in greenhouse emissions from personal transportation will require a transition to an alternative technology regime based on renewable energy sources. Two bodies of research, the quasi-evolutionary (QE) model and the multi-level perspective (MLP) assert that processes within niches play a fundamental role in such transitions. This research asks whether the description of transitions based on this niche hypothesis and its underlying assumptions is consistent with the historical U.S. transition to motor vehicles at the beginning of the 20th century. Unique to this dissertation is the combination of the perspective of the entrepreneur with co-evolutionary approaches to socio-technical transitions. This approach is augmented with concepts from the industry life-cycle model and with a taxonomy of mechanisms of learning. Using this analytic framework, I examine specifically the role of entrepreneurial behavior and processes within and among firms in the co-evolution of technologies and institutions during the transition to motor vehicles. I find that niche markets played an important role in the development of the technology, institutions, and the industry. However, I also find that the diffusion of the automobile is not consistent with the niche hypothesis in the following ways: 1) product improvements and cost reductions were not realized in niche markets, but were achieved simultaneously with diffusion into mass markets; 2) in addition to learning-by-doing and learning-by-interacting with users, knowledge spillovers and interacting with suppliers were critical in this process; 3) cost reductions were not automatic results of expanding markets, but rather arose from the strategies of entrepreneurs based on personal perspectives and values. This finding supports the use of a behavioral approach with a micro-focus in the analysis of socio-technical change I also find that the emergence and diffusion of the motor vehicle can only be understood by considering the combination of developments and processes in multiple regimes, within niches, and within the wider technical, institutional, and ecological complex (TIEC). For the automobile, the process of regime development was more consistent with a fit-stretch pattern of gradual unfolding and adaptation than one of niche proliferation and rapid regime renewal described in the literature.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 OSCE Principles in Practice: Testing Their Effect on Security Through the Work of the High Commissioner on National Minorities 1993-2001(2007-07-31) Yamamoto, Marianna Merrick; Steinbruner, John D.; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study extracted from official OSCE documents a set of basic principles designed to regulate the security relationships among the participating States, including their behavior toward their own populations. The study then assessed the practical effects on security of the implementation of the principles by tracing their detailed application to highly contentious situations in Ukraine, Estonia, and Macedonia by Max van der Stoel, the organization's first High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM). The study identified and articulated twenty Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) security principles that addressed international security through principles guiding the relations between participating States; security within States through principles guiding how governments would fulfill their responsibility to establish and maintain the conditions in which all members of the State could exercise their human rights and fundamental freedoms; and the processes by which the States would apply the principles to specific circumstances, review and measure their implementation, and develop them further. The principles addressed State sovereignty; a comprehensive, cooperative, and common security concept; conflict prevention and the peaceful resolution of issues; the State's responsibility to protect and promote the individual rights and freedoms of State members through the use of democracy, the rule of law, and the market economy; minority rights and responsibilities; the development of shared values; and processes. From 1993 to 2001, the HCNM directly applied the OSCE principles in fourteen intervention cases. In the three cases analyzed, the implementation of the principles had a significant effect on security by reducing national and international tensions involving minority issues. This effect was seen within each State, between States, and in the region, and reduced the potential for conflict within and between OSCE States. The results were particularly significant in view of the instability, conflicts, and tensions of the post-Cold War period; the OSCE's ongoing institutionalization; and the limited resources and tools available to the OSCE and HCNM. The OSCE principles, the Helsinki process, and the HCNM's methods merit further examination, development, and application to national security policy and practice.Item Health Care Disparities in Maryland in the "Contract with America" Era(2007-04-30) Siegel, Sari; Sprinkle, Robert; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the early 1990s, the Medicaid budget expanded dramatically. In response, federal and state policymakers implemented changes to curb patient demand. Taken together, these policies may have impeded low-income health care access in Maryland more effectively and less equitably than anticipated. Research question: Did access-affecting policy changes in the mid-1990s alter Maryland's low-income health care market differently for different racial and ethnic groups? Following extensive document and literature reviews, semi-structured interviews were conducted with stakeholders and experts in Maryland's low-income health care market. A content analysis of interview transcripts was performed. HCUP SID hospital discharge data from Maryland and New Jersey was then used to test for treatment delay. A quasi-temporal measure was devised using patient-level racial/ethnic differences in incidences of appendicitis, appendiceal perforation, and prolongation of hospital stay following appendicitis with and without perforation. Qualitative analysis indicated that implementation of policy changes initially widened gaps in Maryland's health care safety net. This continued to hamper access to care disproportionately for homeless persons and immigrants. HCUP data indicated that Maryland's black appendicitis patients in 1996 were more likely (by 6 percentage points, p<0.05) than their white counterparts to suffer appendiceal perforation. In 2003, black patients no longer showed higher incidence; similar trends emerged for Hispanics and other groups. However, hospitalizations for black appendicitis patients increased from 0.58 days longer than their white counterparts (p<0.01) in 1996 to 0.65 days longer (p<0.01) in 2003. Most notably, insurance status disparities revealed that, in 1996, Maryland's uninsured were more likely than the privately-insured to experience perforation (by 2.3 percentage points). By 2003, Maryland's uninsured were 6.7 percentage points (p<.01) more likely than the privately-insured to suffer perforation. Hospitalizations for uninsured appendicitis patients were accordingly longer than for privately-insured patients, although length of stay data failed to achieve statistical significance in both years. This research suggests demand was decreased largely by impeding access, disproportionately to the disadvantage of racial/ethnic minorities, the homeless, and immigrants. Data confirm that access declined for the uninsured. As this population continues to grow, insufficient access to care for the uninsured will remain an urgent problem.Item Leadership and Safety Climate in High-Risk Military Organizations(2007-04-25) Adamshick, Mark Henry; Gansler, Jacques S; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Preventable accidents and mishaps continue to degrade the readiness of U.S. military forces. In 2006, the National Safety Council reported an annual rate of over 30 accidental fatalities per 100,000 Department of Defense members and estimated that preventable injuries and illnesses cost the department approximately $21 billion per year. Reducing these occurrences was the policy mandate of the Secretary of Defense in 2003. He challenged the military service secretaries to reduce their mishap rates by 50 percent over a two-year period ending September 30, 2005. While each of the military services formulated its own compliance strategy, none of them met the reduction goal. In some cases, the mishap rate actually increased. The purpose of this dissertation is to evaluate the Department of the Navy's (DON) policy compliance strategy and to assess its shortcomings and areas for future improvements. The Navy focused their efforts on leadership-intervention best practices designed to elevate the safety climate in their high-risk units, primarily their aviation components. These units contribute almost 90 percent of the annual mishap cost due to preventable accidents. DON policy-makers theorized that certain leadership interventions would improve safety climate thereby reducing the likelihood that unit members would engage in unsafe behavior both on and off the job. This dissertation evaluates the validity of that general theory, and the appropriateness of the specific leadership interventions chosen, in two distinct data collection and analysis phases. In the first phase, statistical analysis is conducted on a safety-climate survey database maintained by the Naval Post-Graduate School containing 20,000 Navy and Marine Corps military survey respondents assigned to F/A-18 aircraft squadrons completed over the past 5 years. In Phase 2, Commander, Naval Air Forces Atlantic Fleet authorized climate research in four Navy F/A-18 squadrons located at Oceana Naval Air Station. Upon analysis, the intervention methods implemented in the Navy's mishap reduction strategy showed little correlation with safety climate improvement. Phase 2 analysis identified several organizational programs and specific leadership qualities that correlate with elevated safety climate and revealed a preliminary causal relationship between safety climate and safety performance.