Essays in public economics
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation brings together three papers that consider different public and labor policies and their impact on decision-makers. Although they take place in different settings, all of these papers inform our understanding of the outcomes policies produce. This knowledge facilitates improved future decisions and policy implementations. The first paper examines the effect of tuition subsidies on student college choices. Public tuition subsidies enable students enrolled at public colleges to pay less for their education than it costs. The institution-specific nature of tuition subsidies makes them controversial as they may distort student choices or have distributional consequences. The cuts in higher education funding in California from 2001-2010 produce plausibly exogenous tuition subsidy shocks that provide identification for the impact of tuition subsidies on student enrollment choices. Using detailed individual level data on student college enrollment and the tuition subsidy decreases experienced in the California public college system, I estimate a conditional logit college choice model. I find that a $1000 decrease in tuition subsidies lowers the probability of enrollment by 3%. This effect varies by student characteristics with the reduction in tuition subsidies reducing the probability of enrollment most for low-income students. Despite the large decreases in subsidies, a counterfactual analysis indicates that 96% of students do not change their enrollment choice. The main effect of the tuition subsidy reductions is to redistribute billions of dollars from public college students to other Californians. The small subset of students whose choices are influenced by subsidies change the mix of students at public colleges on the margin and tend to make tuition subsidies more regressive. The second paper develops a new institutional concept, "the tragedy of the uncommons, " to describe the inefficient use of resources that are both non-substitutable and transitory. Comparing this institutional concept with the well-known tragedy of the commons and the tragedy of the anticommons demonstrates that this situation is not captured by either of those theoretical frameworks, and highlights the under-appreciated, yet critical, temporal characteristics of these models. The paper also introduces the concepts of "under-" and "over-ownership" to the bundle of rights theory of property to help clarify weaknesses in the current discussions of property rights. A more complete understanding of how property rights impact the use and preservation of resources will allow for the implementation of institutions more likely to prevent future "tragedies." The third paper studies an international law firm that moves from high-powered individual incentives towards incentives for "leadership" activities that contribute to the firm's long run profitability. The effect of this change on the task allocation of the firm's team leaders is large and robust; team leaders increase their non-billable hours and shift billable hours to team members. Although the motivation for the change in the compensation plan was the multitasking problem, this change also impacted the way tasks were allocated within each team, resulting in greater teamwork.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Hicks, Brianna Cardiff |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Business. |
| Primary advisor | Oyer, Paul E. (Paul Edward), 1963- |
| Thesis advisor | Oyer, Paul E. (Paul Edward), 1963- |
| Thesis advisor | Hoxby, Caroline Minter |
| Thesis advisor | Shaw, Kathryn |
| Advisor | Hoxby, Caroline Minter |
| Advisor | Shaw, Kathryn |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Brianna Cardiff Hicks. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Business. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2014. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by Brianna Cardiff Hicks
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).
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