The dissertation comprises of two chapters that use applied econometric techniques to analyze policy related questions that have implications for educational outcomes and one chapter that assesses factors that influence foreign direct investment inflows. In the first chapter I study the impact of equity premiums on the completion numbers of minority students. In the second chapter I assess the impact that state funding cuts for higher education may have on completion numbers across racial and ethnic lines. For the last chapter I study the relationship between intellectual property rights and foreign direct investmentFor chapter one, I study the impact that equity premiums inclusion in performance-based funding models have on the completion numbers of minority students. Using a combination of administrative data over the period 2004 to 2018 with two-way fixed effects methods, I investigate the impact of the premiums on completion numbers of Black, Hispanic, and Native American students. My estimates show that in the short run (up to 2 years post-policy) there are no changes in the completion numbers of at-risk students in adopting and non-adopting states. Secondly, there is heterogeneity in policy effects across ethnicity, in particular Hispanic student completion numbers decrease in adopting states. Thirdly, public institutions become more selective in their admissions of at-risk students post-policy, which may lead to the overall null effects I establish. For chapter two, I investigate whether there exist variations in how state funding cuts for higher education may impact on completion numbers across racial and ethnic lines. Combining administrative data from 1997 to 2018 with two-stage least squares methodology, I test how institutional state funding instrumented by total state funding may influence completion numbers across racial categories. I find that changes in state funding have no significant impact on the completion numbers for each racial category of students. For chapter three, I extend Spatz and Nunnenkamp’s (2003) analysis by using a panel dataset to determine a causal relationship between intellectual property right (IPR) protections and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. Using a fixed-effects Poisson model my results shows that IPR is a causal determinant of FDI within the manufacturing industry. My study concludes that as a country improves their IPR protections, the positive impact on FDI within the manufacturing industry, increases at a decreasing rate. / Economics

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As Moore's law continues to progress, it is becoming increasingly difficult for hardware designers to fully utilize the increasing number of transistors available semiconductor devices including FPGAs. This design productivity gap must be addressed to allow designs to take full advantage of the increased logic density that results from rising transistor density. The reuse of previously developed and verified intellectual property (IP) is one approach that has claimed to narrow the design productivity gap. Reuse, however, has proved difficult to realize in practice because of the complexity of IP and the reluctance of designers to reuse IP that they do not understand. This thesis proposes to narrow the design productivity gap for FPGAs by simplifying the reuse problem by encapsulating IP with extra machine-readable information or meta-data. This meta-data simplifies reuse by providing a language independent format for composing complex systems, providing a parameter representation system, defining high-level data types for FPGA IP, and allowing arbitrary IP to be described as actors in the homogeneous synchronous dataflow model of computation.This work implements meta-data in XML and presents two XML schemas that enable reuse. A new XML schema known as CHREC XML is presented as well as extensions that enable IP-XACT to be used to describe FPGA dataflow IP. Two tools developed in this work are also presented that leverage meta-data to simplify reuse of arbitrary IP. These tools simplify structural composition of IP, allow designers to manipulate parameters, check and validate high-level data types, and automatically synthesize control circuitry for dataflow designs. Productivity improvements are also demonstrated by reusing IP to quickly compose software radio receivers.

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This paper examines the relationship between research and development (R&D) expenditures under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and firms’ innovation, proxied by future patent counts and patent citations. Accounting for R&D is a major difference between IFRS and generally accepted accounting principles in the United States (US GAAP). The difference is that certain development costs can be treated as assets under IFRS, but all R&D expenditures are expensed under US GAAP. This difference in the accounting treatment is grounded in the conceptual question of whether R&D expenditures provide future benefits, consistent with the definition of an asset, or whether the benefits are so uncertain that they are treated as the consumption of resources, consistent with the definition of an expense. If R&D expenditures provide future benefits, they are expected to be associated with future patents and citations. Capitalized development costs should exhibit a stronger association as they meet the criteria to be assets, expecting to provide future benefits. Expensed R&D can also be associated with patents and patent citations as these expenditures may also lead to patents and patent citations. As expensed R&D relates to expenditures in the research stage or those development costs that do not meet the criteria to be capitalized, the association should be weaker. Therefore, this paper examines the association between R&D expenditures that are expensed and those that are capitalized under IFRS with patents and patent citations as future benefits.Using a hand-collected sample of high-tech firms in European Union from 2012 to 2018, this paper finds economically and statistically significant different associations between capitalized development costs and expensed R&D and a firms’ innovation, as proxied by future patents and patent citations. Using median effects, the association between one million euros investment in firms’ capitalized development costs and patent counts (citations) is 200% or more than the association between one million euro’s expensed R&D and patent counts (citations). This paper is one of the first to examine the relationship between R&D capitalization under IFRS and firms’ innovation, as measured by future patent counts and patent citations. This paper contributes to the literature on R&D capitalization by identifying the fundamental difference in the association between capitalized development costs and expensed R&D and innovation. Further, this paper contributes to our understanding of the accounting for R&D, and the different treatment between US GAAP and IFRS by finding that capitalized development costs display a different association from expensed R&D. / Business Administration/Accounting

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