scholarly journals Trade Shocks and the Provision of Local Public Goods

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 101-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leo Feler ◽  
Mine Z. Senses

We analyze the impact of trade-induced income shocks on the size of local government and the provision of public services. Areas in the United States with declining labor demand and incomes due to increasing import competition from China experience relative declines in housing prices and business activity. Since local governments are disproportionately funded through property and sales taxation, declining property values and a decrease in economic activity translate into less revenue, which constrains the ability of local governments to provide public services. State and federal governments have limited ability to smooth local shocks, and the impact on the provision of public services is compounded when local income shocks are highly correlated with shocks in the rest of the state. The outcome is a relative decline not only in incomes but also in the quality of public services and amenities in trade exposed localities. (JEL F14, F16, H41, H71, R12, R31, R51)

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Billie Ann Brotman

PurposeFlood damage to uninsured single-family homes shifts the entire burden of costly repairs onto the homeowner. Homeowners in the United States and in much of Europe can purchase flood insurance. The Netherlands and Asian countries generally do not offer flood insurance protection to homeowners. Uninsured households incur the entire cost of repairing/replacing properties damaged due to flooding. Homeowners’ policies do not cover damage caused by flooding. The paper examines the link between personal bankruptcy and the severity of flooding events, property prices and financial condition levels.Design/methodology/approachA fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) regression model is developed which uses personal bankruptcy filings as its dependent variable during the years 2000 through 2018. This time-series model considers the association between personal bankruptcy court filings and costly, widespread flooding events. Independent variables were selected that potentially act as mitigating factors reducing bankruptcy filings.FindingsThe FMOLS regression results found a significant, positive association between flooding events and the total number of personal bankruptcy filings. Higher flooding costs were associated with higher bankruptcy filings. The Home Price Index is inversely related to the bankruptcy dependent variable. The R-squared results indicate that 0.65% of the movement in the dependent variable personal bankruptcy filings is explained by the severity of a flooding event and other independent variables.Research limitations/implicationsThe severity of the flooding event is measured using dollar losses incurred by the National Flood Insurance program. A macro-case study was undertaken, but the research results would have been enhanced by examining local areas and demographic factors that may have made bankruptcy filing following a flooding event more or less likely.Practical implicationsThe paper considers the impact of the natural disaster flooding on bankruptcy rates filings. The findings may have implications for multi-family properties as well as single-family housing. Purchasing flood insurance generally mitigates the likelihood of severe financial risk to the property owner.Social implicationsNatural flood insurance is underwritten by the federal government and/or by private insurers. The financial health of private property insurers that underwrite flooding and their ability to meet losses incurred needs to be carefully scrutinized by the insured.Originality/valuePrior studies analyzing the linkages existing between housing prices, natural disasters and bankruptcy used descriptive data, mostly percentages, when considering this association. The study herein posits the same questions as these prior studies but used regression analysis to analyze the linkages. The methodology enables additional independent variables to be added to the analysis.


Author(s):  
Ayman Halabya ◽  
Khaled El-Rayes

People with disabilities form 18.7% of the United States population, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2012. To avoid discrimination against this significant portion of the population, state and local governments are required by federal and state laws to provide and maintain accessibility for people with disabilities on their sidewalks and pedestrian facilities. To achieve compliance with these laws, state and local governments need to conduct self-evaluations to identify inaccessible pedestrian facilities and develop transition plans to schedule upgrade projects for these inaccessible pedestrian facilities. The federally-mandated transition plan requirements include the development of a schedule that displays, in detail, deadlines for all upgrade projects needed to achieve full compliance with accessibility requirements. To prepare this schedule, public entities are required to rank and prioritize pedestrian facilities upgrade projects. This paper presents the development of a novel methodology to quantify the impact of upgrading inaccessible pedestrian facilities on people with disabilities. The developed methodology considers several factors related to pedestrian facilities’ conditions and location to estimate the number of expected pedestrians with disabilities impacted by upgrading each inaccessible pedestrian facility. This methodology is designed to assist decision makers in state and local governments in the process of ranking and prioritizing inaccessible pedestrian facilities upgrade projects.


2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (18_suppl) ◽  
pp. 4138-4138
Author(s):  
A. B. Siegel ◽  
R. McBride ◽  
D. Hershman ◽  
R. S. Brown ◽  
J. Emond ◽  
...  

4138 Background: Multiple case series have described the use of current therapies for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but recent estimates of treatment utilization in the general population and the impact of various treatments on survival are not known. Methods: We first identified 2898 adults diagnosed with HCC with known tumor size and stage in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End-Results Program (SEER), from 1998–2002. Treatment was categorized as transplant, resection, ablation, or none of these. We created a second data set of 1856 HCC patients who were potentially operable, as defined by SEER. We used these patients to construct Kaplan-Meier survival curves and adjusted Cox proportional hazards models. Results: The median age of the larger cohort at HCC diagnosis was 62 (range:18–96). Approximately 42% were white, 32% Asian, 16% Hispanic, and 10% African American. Overall, 10% received a transplant, 18% resection, 8% ablation, and 65% none of these. Only 5% of African Americans with HCC received a transplant, versus 12% of whites, 10% of Hispanics, and 8% of Asians. Asians were most likely to receive resection (24%) and ablation (9%), and least likely to have non-surgical treatment (60%). Using the restricted cohort, improved survival in the multivariate analysis was seen with later year of diagnosis, younger age, female sex, Asian race, smaller tumor size, lower tumor grade, and localized disease. Treatment was highly correlated with survival. This was greatest in the transplanted group (1, 3, and 5-year survivals 93%, 79%, and 71%), followed by resection (70%, 45%, and 29%), and ablation (71%, 33%, and 18%). The non-surgical group had poor survival (33%, 9%, and 0%). Conclusions: Transplantation yields excellent survival on a population scale, similar to reported series, and resection gives relatively good outcomes as well. Asians are more likely to be resected and ablated than other groups. They also had better survival than other groups, perhaps due to underlying etiology of HCC (hepatitis B) and better preserved liver function. No significant financial relationships to disclose.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 4072 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reem S. Al-Mansoori ◽  
Muammer Koç

Learning institutes are unique places for innovation, technical transformations, and social changes, which are the main pillars for sustainable development. The purpose of this study was to examine the innovation capacity building through the impact of transformational leadership on followers’ satisfaction and output in two engineering colleges: one in a public university in the United States and the other in an International Branch Campus in Qatar. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire was used to assess leadership style, and three output indicators were chosen to represent innovative outputs. Innovation-driven systems and Intrinsic motivation were other innovation drivers assessed through the designed survey. The Statistical Package of Social Science was used to identify the correlated constructs of leadership styles and outcomes. The explanatory sequential mixed method helped explain the underlying reasons for the quantitative results through interviews with faculty. The study showed that leaders (deans) exhibited different ranges of transformational leadership styles, yet were lower than the norm. Moreover, transformational leadership traits, in addition to contingent rewards from transactional leadership, were highly correlated with followers’ satisfaction with the leader and the system. As this was a cross-cultural study, context affected the participation rate and response results, as hesitation to evaluate the dean was common in a high power–distance context.


1985 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-415
Author(s):  
Hiromitsu Ishi

The basic aim in this paper is to clarify intergovernmental fiscal relations in Japan. Particular attention is paid to the impact of various types of central government grants on the local government budgets. This is an important issue in a nation like Japan, where the fiscal system is strongly centralized. First, a model is constructed to express the local fiscal behavior under the present grant policies, following the past attempts developed in the United States of America. Then, the estimates of this model are attempted using available data, and some policy questions are examined. The main empirical conclusions that are drawn from the Japanese experience are much more plausible than those in the US case. This implies that the control of central government via various grant policies is more dominant in Japan.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahad Althobaiti ◽  
Saud Alghumayjan ◽  
Morgan R. Frank ◽  
Esteban Moro ◽  
Ahmad Alabdulkareem ◽  
...  

In the United States (US), low-income workers are being pushed away from city centers where the cost of living is high. The effects of such changes on labor mobility and housing price have been explored in the literature. However, few studies have focused on the occupations and specific skills that identify the most susceptible workers. For example, it has become increasingly challenging to fill the service sector jobs in the San Francisco (SF) Bay Area because appropriately skilled workers cannot afford the growing cost of living within commuting distance. With this example in mind, how does a neighborhood's skill composition change as a result of higher housing prices? Are there certain skill sets that are being pushed to the geographical periphery of a city despite their essentialness to the city's economy? Our study focuses on the impact of housing prices with a granular view of skills compositions to answer the following question: Has the density of cognitive skill workers been increasing in a gentrified area? We hypothesize that, over time, low-skilled workers are pushed away from downtown or areas where high-skill establishments thrive. Our preliminary results show that high-level cognitive skills are getting closer to the city center indicating adaptation to the increase of median housing prices as opposed to low-level physical skills that got further away. We examined tracts that the literature indicates as gentrified areas and found a pattern in which there is a temporal increase in median housing prices and the number of business establishments coupled with an increase in the percentage of skilled cognitive workers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-132
Author(s):  
Renato Manuel Berrino Malaccorto ◽  
Maricel Lonati

Through this reflection we propose to investigate and explore the possibilities offered by the implementation of open government policies in the local dimension, focusing particularly on: 1) the impact generated by open government initiatives in the improvement of processes, delivery of public services and quality of life of citizens; 2) the potential of these tools to advance in opening policies that involve the different branches of the State; 3) the possibilities offered by closeness in local governments to encourage and diversify citizen participation, and to empower the community as a driver of innovation; 4) the lessons and challenges that the implementation of these tools leave in subnational governments.


2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Sarah V. Ficenec

In the mid-1980s, homelessness increased in visibility across the United States, and interest rose as to the causes and possible solutions to the problem. Among others studying the issue, economists focused much of their attention on the central problem faced by the homeless – a lack of housing. Among the reasons economists cited for homelessness included a rise in housing prices, the filtering out of low-quality units in the housing market, increasing income inequality, and income shocks; these issues, combined with other factors that can make a person or family more susceptible to homelessness – such as substance abuse, mental illness, or social isolation – likely led to the increasing numbers of homeless in the 1980s. Looking at the causes of homelessness from an economic perspective also reinforces the reasons why many federal policies have been unable to solve or greatly decrease the problem in the past several decades. Since homelessness is still a concern across the country – especially in the wake of the recent recession – there continues to be a need to evaluate and find additional solutions to the problem.


Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 1517
Author(s):  
Alexandre B. Nassif ◽  
Ming Dong

The increased adoption of inverter-based distributed energy resources in the form of the mass deployment of renewable generation systems has been a focal goal of many jurisdictions worldwide. Actions taken by local governments have included adapted regulations, financial subsidies, and a variety of grants. This has spurred the proliferation of solar generation among residential customers in virtually all provinces of the United States and Canada. Needless to say, these small generators are interfaced with DC–AC inverters, which have evolved tremendously since the formation of working groups targeting the impact of inverter-based generation on the grid. Among the first rules and standards are California’s ISO Rule 21 and the UL1741 SA, which were published in September 2017. IEEE followed suit in 2018 with the revision of IEEE 1547, inspiring virtually all jurisdictions to either adopt these standards or adapt them as their own variants. Among many features, these standards mandate inverters to be fitted with autonomous performance functions, including the constant power factor, voltage-reactive power (Volt-VAR), voltage-active power (Volt-Watt), and grid support functions, as well as provisions for compatibility with control centers. These functions have been demonstrated to increase the nameplate hosting capacity. At the same time, grid modernization strategies have become more prevalent, one of which is the use of conservation voltage reduction. This grid modernization initiative has a great impact on the hosting capacity. Conversely, the increased penetration of distributed energy resources has a negative effect on the conservation voltage reduction, but surprisingly to only a limited extent. The characterization of these impacts is addressed in this paper, with a focus on a case with very high DER penetration and with very long daily sunlight hours.


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