Thesis (Ph. M.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1945. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-88).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [173]-186).

This thesis examines the relationship between Henry George and the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic and, detailing the ideological interaction between George’s republicanism and Irish nationalism, argues that his uneven appeal reveals the contours of the construction of Gilded Age Irish-America. The work assesses the functionality and operation, in both Ireland and the US, of Irish culture as a dynamic but discordant friction within the Anglophone world. Ireland’s unique geopolitical position and its religious constitution nurtured an agrarianism that shared its intellectual roots with American republicanism. This study details how the crisis of Irish land invigorated both traditions as an effective oppositional culture to the processes of modernity. The Land War placed Ireland at the centre of a briefly luminous political upheaval that extended far beyond its own shores and positioned the country as a site of ideological conflict at a critical juncture in the history of political thought. Irish nationalism helped to perpetuate a specific aggregation of moral and economic principles, and, in equating British imperial force with the worst depredations of capital, Irish-Americans tapped into a powerful seam in American political culture that universalised the struggle of the Irish tenant farmers. Just as many contemporaries framed Irish politics with the ideals of the American republic, this thesis argues that Irish politics during the Land War, ever more interdependent on its diaspora, is better understood in relation to American political discourse than British.

The evaluation of policy-relevant economic research requires an ethical foundation. Classical liberal theory provides the requisite foundation for this dissertation, which uses various econometric tools to estimate the effects of shifting some of the property tax from buildings to land in 15 cities in Pennsylvania. Economic theory predicts that such a shift will lead to higher building activity. However, this prediction has been supported little by empirical evidence so far. The first part of the dissertation examines the effect of the land-building tax differential on the number of building permits that were issued in 219 municipalities in Pennsylvania between 1972 and 1994. For such count data a conventional analysis based on a continuous distribution leads to incorrect results; a discrete maximum likelihood analysis with a negative binomial distribution is more appropriate. Two models, a non-linear and a fixed effects model, are developed to examine the influence of the tax differential. Both models suggest that this influence is positive, albeit not statistically significant. Application of maximum likelihood techniques is computationally cumbersome if the assumed distribution of the data cannot be written in closed form. The negative binomial distribution is the only discrete distribution with a variance that is larger than its mean that can easily be applied, although it might not be the best approximation of the true distribution of the data. The second part of the dissertation uses a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method to examine the influence of the tax differential on the number of building permits, under the assumption that building permits are generated by a Poisson process whose parameter varies lognormally. Contrary to the analysis in the first part, the tax is shown to have a strong and significantly positive impact on the number of permits. The third part of the dissertation uses a fixed-effects weighted least squares method to estimate the effect of the tax differential on the value per building permit. The tax coefficient is not significantly different from zero. Still, the overall impact of the tax differential on the total value of construction is shown to be positive and statistically significant. / Ph. D.