The justification of government support of rural transit on the basis of the presence of increasing returns to scale and the most efficient regional organization of transit is investigated. Returns to density, size, and scope at most levels of output were found. Cost subadditivity, where a monopoly firm can provide service at a lower cost than two firms, was found for many, but not all observations. The presence of natural monopoly in rural transit in a strict sense is rejected. The findings and implications are directly applicable to rural transit in North Dakota and should be helpful in informing future federal policy as well as rural transit policy, service design, and operation in other states.

This study represents an attempt to answer the question: How can educational administration contribute to the economic and social development plans in developing countries? Although major emphasis must be given to this question, some thought will be given to the educational problems and needs that face developing countries and the new techniques of educational administration which can be used to meet them. Moreover, in an attempt to apply the findings acquired the research will eventually focus on· Egypt, as one of the developing countries, to identify to what extent Egypt's educational administration addresses the needs of the economic and social development plans. Objectives of the Study The purpose of the study was fourfold as follows: 1. To investigate the role of educational administration in the economic and social development plans in developing countries. 2. To delineate the educational problems and needs of developing countries and to determine how educational administration can help to meet them. 3. To identify new trends and techniques in educational administration which may be helpful to the economic and social development plans in developing countries. 4. To develop a case study and some models which will provide direction to educational administrators who wish to contribute to Egypt's economic and social development plans.

This dissertation uses national policy experiments and original datasets from Japan to explore issues in macroeconomics and public finance. In the first chapter, I provide new evidence of the feedback loop between corporate borrowing and commercial real estate investment emphasized in macro-finance models with collateral constraints. Japan enacted a series of reforms in the early 1980s which relaxed national regulatory constraints on the height and size of buildings. Combining local non-residential land price indices for over 400 localities with geocoded firm balance sheets, I show that these land use deregulations generated a boom-bust cycle in corporate real estate values, borrowing, and real estate investment. Firms located in more ex ante land use constrained areas both issued more debt and invested more heavily in real estate, thus amplifying the initial positive shock to commercial real estate prices. I develop a multi-city spatial sorting model with production externalities and real estate collateral which uses the estimated reduced form effects of my local regulatory instruments on firm outcomes to assess aggregate effects of the reform. I find that the deregulatory shock to commercial real estate markets and corporate borrowing environment amplified the 1980s real estate cycle and led to an increased incidence of zombie lending in the 1990s. Governments often distribute payments through the income tax system to combat recessions. But how effective are such fiscal stimulus policies at targeting households who are likely to respond by increasing their spending? In the second chapter, we link geocoded household expenditure and financial transactions data to local housing price indices and document a U-shaped pattern with respect to housing price growth in the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of a large tax rebate. Recipients living in areas with the smallest housing price gains during the 1980s spent 44% of the 1994 Japanese rebate within three months of payment, compared to 23% among recipients in areas which experienced the largest housing price gains. While we find limited heterogeneity in MPCs among households in less-affected areas, MPCs are higher for younger, renter households with no debt residing in more-affected areas. These findings are consistent with near-rational households for which the pricing shock was small relative to permanent income spending a larger fraction of the tax rebate. Our analysis suggests fiscal stimulus payments primarily induce spending among “winner” households who face minimal exposure to housing price cycles. The question of how policymakers should choose the frequency of payments has received little attention in the literature on the optimal design of public benefits programs. The third chapter proposes a simple model in which the government chooses the length of the interval between payments, subject to a tradeoff between the administrative cost of providing more frequent benefits and the welfare gain from reducing deviations from full consumption smoothing. In our empirical application, we examine consumer and retailer responses to bimonthly payments from the Japanese National Pension System. We exploit variation in the duration of payment cycles using a unique retail dataset that links consumers to their purchase history. Our high frequency difference-in-differences approach shows a clear spike in spending on payment dates for customers who are of retirement age relative to those who are not. While within-store average prices increase by 1.6% on payday, this effect is almost entirely due to consumers substituting towards higher quality goods rather than a retailer response. We use these reduced form estimates to parameterize the model and conclude that the optimal frequency of Japanese public pension payments is less than one month, implying the government could improve welfare by increasing payment frequency.

This dissertation examines the attempts by the government of Kenya to develop and implement policies directed toward the problem of urban unemployment. Specifically, this study focuses upon two policy areas directly related to the problem of urban unemployment: education and economic growth. Central to the urban unemployment problem is a potential conflict arising out of a rapidly growing number of school graduates on the one hand, and on the other, the limited opportunities for a sufficient level of employment for this segment of the labor force. An additional element of this study is an examination of the possible consequences of Kenya's external dependency upon the linkages between education, economic growth, and employment opportunities. A consistent theme contained in the development literature is that accelerated development in Third World nations such as Kenya depends upon enlarging the supply of educated and trained manpower. Without such manpower, it is argued, development leadership would be woefully lacking and economic growth would be retarded. On the basis of these assumptions, Kenya, like many other developing countries, has focused its attention on the rapid quantitative expansion of school enrollments from primary school to the university. In recent years, however, the idea that conventional educational expansion is an unmitigated social good and an engine for development has been challenged by the emergence of graduate unemployment. The dynamic rate of economic growth and a forceful campaign of Kenyanization have proven impossible to create sufficient employment to meet the now growing numbers of Kenyan students who feel themselves qualified. In an attempt to resolve this problem, government policies have been directed toward improving the different components of the school system: examinations, curriculum reform, and vocational and technical education. However, the impact of these educational strategies in solving the unemployment problem has been extremely limited by the restricted market for technical and vocational skills in the country. The result of this study suggests that the roots of the unemployment problem are in the structure of the society, and particularly in the failure of the Kenyan economy to industrialize and modernize at a rate that absorbs the labor force. These economic problems are traded to Kenya's continued dependency on external economic assistance, which reduces its ability to determine the course of national development independently. This economic problem is of such a magnitude, it can only be solved by structural adjustments, both internally and externally. The findings of this study confirm the dependency argument.

This study reviews the competition and productivity of the U.S. freight transportation industry for the past 41 years. This study investigated the trends of HHI market concentration index values and labor productivity values of rail and truck sectors and tried to find any relationships between the two values in the separate periods before and after the abolishment of the ICC. This study also investigated how the existence of a regulatory body impacted productivity of the freight transportation industry by using a Cobb Douglas production function on annual financial statement data in the U.S. stock exchange market. This study found that: while the truck sector became more competitive after the abolishment of the ICC, the rail sector became less competitive, both sectors had a strong positive correlation between HHI and labor productivity, and the ICC’s abolishment resulted in positive changes of total factor productivity for the truck sector only.

This thesis examines whether the level of Swedish economic policy uncertainty (EPU) can predict excess returns on the Swedish stock market. We run out-of-sample forecasting using an EPU-based predictive model constructed with the official Swedish EPU index developed by Armelius et al. (2017). Forecasting errors for one-, two-, three-, six-, and twelve-month holding periods and four measures of central tendency are analysed and compared against a random walk benchmark. The findings suggest that EPU has limited forecasting ability for excess stock returns in Sweden, and the EPU-based model demonstrates superior forecasting accuracy only in two out of twenty instances, both for the one-month holding period. However, the forecast errors remain relatively large, casting doubt on the model's ability to outperform the market. Furthermore, the EPU-based model consistently underestimates excess returns, questioning its usefulness as a predictor. Notably, the random walk benchmark's forecast error improves with longer holding periods, raising doubts about the predictability of market movements in the long term.

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