This paper examines the financing of professional athletic venues and why certain franchises are able to obtain high percentages of overall stadium funding from the public. Existing literature shows the negligible effect of new athletic venues on the local economy and per capita income, and therefore the benefits from such a project are largely intangible. I use an ordinary least squares regression and show that the more successful a team is the less public funding they tend to receive. I also find that broad city statistics do not represent the specific areas that policy makers consider when making decisions about spending public money.

Diss. Uppsala : Uppsala universitet, 2008.

The first chapter provides an introduction to my investigation of the impact of state-level educational investments in public K-12 education on future labor markets, specifically earnings and employment. In Chapter 2, the current literature supporting this investigation is examined while I offer a hole in the literature that I intend to fill. Then, in Chapter 3 I present a two-period, balanced-budget theoretical model in which I relate educational investments, mobility, and future earnings. This theoretical model is then implemented in Chapter 4 using state-level data and again in Chapter 5 using individual-level data. Chapter 4 examines the impact of state-level educational investments in public education on aggregate state labor markets, specifically earnings and employment. Using data on K-12 educational spending, 8th grade cognitive test scores, and educational demographics of a state’s labor force, I observe the impact these state-level investments have on employment and earnings growth. Taking interstate migration into account, I separate the benefits from educational investment into benefits due to in-state investment and benefits due to out-of-state investment. By doing so I am able to identify whether or not educational investment spillovers exist between states. Results indicate that the earnings benefits associated with public K-12 educational spending spill over into other states, 8th grade NAEP test scores do not spill over into other states, and neither has a significant impact on other states’ employment growth. Chapter 5 examines the impact of educational investments in public education on earnings of individuals. I extend my analysis from Chapter 4 by employing micro-data (on individuals) from the American Community Survey (ACS) instead of using state-level data. Using micro-data allows me to more accurately measure the investments used in the education of an area and to incorporate where education was attained and where it was employed. Using individual-level data also allows me to narrow my focus to younger participants in the labor force, providing a stronger link between lagged educational spending and earnings. Results indicate that K-12 educational spending does spill over in the form of positive earnings benefits, which helps to support the results of Chapter 4.

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Conflict theory has in recent years found important applications and made contributions in fields such as economics, political sciences and evolutionary biology. Economists have examined various aspects and implications of appropriation, a typical example of conflicting economic interests, in rent-seeking models. Political scientists, focusing on political turmoil such as war, civil war and demonstration, have scrutinized the effects of conflictual outcomes on political transitions and political systems. More importantly, early human lethal conflict is being recognized as a key factor in explaining human cooperation in evolutionary biology. The first essay concerns the technical aspects of conflict theories. Two well-known forms of contest success functions predict contest outcomes from the difference between the resources of each side and from the ratio of resources. The analytical properties of a given conflict model, such as the existence of equilibrium, can be drastically changed simply by altering the form of the contest success function. Despite this problem, there is no consensus about which form is analytically better or empirically more plausible. In this essay we propose an integrated form of contest success functions which has the ratio form and the difference form as limiting cases and study the analytical properties of this function. We also estimate different contest success functions to see which form is more empirically probable, using data from battles fought in seventeenth-century Europe and during World War II. In the second essay we explore the application of conflict theory to the collective action problem in large groups. We examine critically the traditional understanding of the role of large groups in collective action using an idea initiated in evolutionary biology. Bingham uses Lanchester's square law to claim that the remote killing ability of humans and their precursors decreases the cost of punishment, when cheating behavior can be punished by other members. By modeling this technology and incorporating individual members' choice of behavior types, we show that as long as the defector is, even slightly, less collective than the punisher, the large group effect pervades. So we may conclude that the large group effect is quite robust, considering the fact that the defectors, because of their behavioral predisposition, would be reluctant to cooperate in any type of collective action. In the final essay we address conflict and cooperation from a slightly different perspective: conflict and cooperation associated with class alliances and conflict in a society. Economic and political problems have been examined primarily within the context of a dyadic relationship, i.e. between two actors. However, when two different categories of groups are considered, subgroups within these groups may have both common interests and conflicts. Appropriative activity by a ruling class of capitalists and landlords gives rise to class conflict between the ruling class and the ruled class. The struggle over the relative price between the goods of the urban manufacturing sector and the products of the agricultural sector can divide the ruling and ruled classes and unite the capitalists and the workers. Using coalitional game theory, we study the various conditions, such as the political strength of one class relative to that of other classes and the degree of economic conflict among classes, for coalition formation among these classes. We show that when the economic conflict over tariffs and the rate of appropriation escalates and one class is politically superior to others, the exclusion of that class might occur, so the originally strong class can end up being disadvantaged.

With the concentration of poverty increasing throughout the United States (Kneebone, 2014) there has been a recent emphasis on mixed-income housing as a means to alleviate this issue. By creating housing in one area with pricing for different income levels it is assumed that the burden imposed by concentrated poverty will be lowered. Many years and many dollars later however, the results of mixed-income housing projects on low-income residents seem to be mixed – while some projects have found success, others seem to suggest that it has little to no effect. The federal program HOPE VI is one example of efforts to increase the availability of mixed-income housing. It is the purpose of this study to decipher whether the administration of HOPE VI federal grant money has had an effect on certain economic outcomes within the selected metropolitan areas.

<p>This thesis empirically investigates two distinct themes in public economics: tax policy and the economics of the charitable sector. The first chapter of the thesis examines the first theme of tax policy and focuses on how a change in the income tax affects labour market behaviour in Russia. The second theme of the economics of the charitable sector is explored in the final two chapters of the thesis. These chapters analyze the role of Canadian foundations in the provision of charitable goods.</p> <p>The first chapter examines the effect of Russia's flat tax reform on two employment dimensions: primary vs. secondary and official vs. unofficial. The chapter shows that individuals respond to lower taxes by devoting less time to primary and secondary employment. Official and unofficial employment, however, remain unaffected by the flat tax reform.</p> <p>The next two chapters depart from tax policy and study the role of foundations in the Canadian charitable sector. The second chapter of the thesis provides new evidence on the size-based operation of foundations and their financial structure in Canada. A third of foundations operating in Canada are quite small, with assets of less than $25,000. The remaining foundations can be classified as medium (with assets more than $25,000 and never more than one million dollars in a given year) or large (with assets of one million dollars in at least one year). Over the last 20 years, there are only small differences in the growth and use of funding between public and private medium-size foundations. For the large-scale foundations, we observe distinct differences in the expenditures of private and public foundations. Private foundations distribute more of their expenditures to other charities whereas public foundations devote more of their expenditures to internal activities.</p> <p>The final chapter of the thesis explores the impact of foundation grants to charities on the private donations received by these charities. Theoretically, foundation grants have two competing effects on private donations: a negative crowd-out effect and a positive information effect. An overall positive effect prevails only if the positive effect of signaling information about charity quality outweighs the negative crowd-out effect. With data on Canadian social welfare and community charities matched to their specific foundation donors, this chapter empirically examines the overall effect and finds that an additional dollar of foundation grants to Canadian charities crowds-in private giving to these organizations on average by 3.70 dollars.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<div>The purpose of this dissertation is to study the effectiveness of public policies in generating fuel savings and emissions reductions. I focus on applying various empirical methods to analyze consumer responses to policy changes on both extensive and intensive margins. This dissertation consists of two chapters.</div><div><br></div><div>In the first chapter, I compare the effectiveness of fuel taxes and product taxes on reducing gasoline consumption of new car buyers. I employ a unified data source for vehicle choice and subsequent vehicle use to estimate a random effects logit demand model that explicitly accounts for vehicle use heterogeneity. My demand estimation suggests that new car buyers fully value the fuel-saving benefits from improved vehicle fuel efficiency when they initially purchase their cars. My policy simulations indicate that high-mileage drivers are more responsive to a change in fuel taxes than to a change in product taxes, even as low-mileage drivers are more responsive to product taxes. By capturing such heterogeneous consumer response to policies, I show that a counterfactual increase of the fuel tax is more effective than a revenue-equivalent product tax in reducing the total gasoline consumption of new car buyers. Further, when accounting for its effects on consumer response on both extensive and intensive margins, a change in fuel taxes has a clear advantage over a change in product taxes in reducing the consumption of gasoline even when the magnitude of tax increase is small. More importantly, a model not accounting for vehicle use heterogeneity understates the fuel saving effects of both policies and misleads us about the relative effectiveness when comparing different policies. </div><div><br></div><div>The second chapter explores how changes in the marginal cost of driving affect consumers decisions about passenger vehicle utilization, as measured by average daily miles traveled per vehicle. This intensive margin of consumer response has important implications for the effectiveness of usage-based policies, such as the fuel tax and the mileage tax, that designed to address externalities of driving. I estimate the elasticity of driving with respect to fuel cost per mile using a large panel data that covers 351 towns and cities in Massachusetts over 24 quarters. While most researchers in this literature apply fixed effects estimators to examine the elasticity of driving, I use a factor model econometric setup to account for unobserved common factors and regional heterogeneity. Residual diagnostics confirm that the factor model setup does a better job of removing the cross-section dependence than fixed effects estimators do. Given low consumer responsiveness to changes in the marginal cost of driving engendered by current usage-based policies, rights-based approaches like congestion charges might be better alternatives to influence vehicle utilization and vehicle ownership.</div>

In recent decades, revenue diversification has become a prevalent practice in state and local government finance. The trend of revenue diversification, according to the portfolio theory, has far-reaching implication for public financial management as it may change revenue stability, which has been an important policy objective for state and local government administrators. This study explores how revenue diversification affects revenue stability from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Drawing on portfolio theory and regional science literature, this study develops a theoretical framework to explain how the effect of revenue diversification on revenue volatility of sub-national governments varies in terms of its economic base instability. To empirically test the theoretical framework, an econometric model that explores a series of factors that could affect revenue stability is estimated using socioeconomic and fiscal data of 156 Georgia county governments and 47 state governments during the years 1986-2004. The findings indicate that revenue diversification affects revenue stability conditional on the instability of a jurisdiction’s economic base. The county level analysis suggests revenue diversification significantly increases the revenue instability of a county that has a stable economic base and the revenue stabilizing effect of diversification is enhanced as an economic base becomes more unstable. However, the state level analysis shows that revenue diversification significantly reduces revenue volatility for a state that has a stable economic base and the revenue stabilizing effect of diversification decreases when an economic base gets more unstable. An important policy implication of the dissertation is that the degree of revenue diversification should be gauged by the condition of its corresponding economic base in order to achieve the goal of revenue stability.