Date of Graduation

2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

College of Business and Economics

Department

Economics

Committee Chair

Joshua C Hall

Committee Co-Chair

John Deskins

Committee Member

Donald J Lacombe

Committee Member

Bryan C McCannon

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays on state and federal regulations in the US. Each paragraph below refers to the three abstracts for the three chapters in this dissertation, respectively.;Given the growing importance of the wine industry in the US, wine special interests are on the rise. Data shows that campaign contributions from the wine industry to officials running for state offices have increased over time. Given this reality, one can expect wine excise tax to remain low in states that receive higher campaign contributions. In addition, there are theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that these tax rates are interdependent based on Tiebout competition and yardstick com- petition. Based on this reasoning, one can hypothesize wine excise tax rates to be spatially dependent. In this study, I test this hypothesis using state--level campaign contributions data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics and Distilled Spirits Council of the US, Inc. and find that there is strong statistical evidence of spatial dependence between state wine excise tax rates.;Previous studies showed that high stakes state exit exams have both positive and negative influence on educational outcomes. Its effect on high school graduation rates in particular was negative. However, these studies do not take into account the embedded nature of school districts within state education systems to explain these variations. Additionally, they also ignore possible spatial spillovers across school districts. In this paper, we account for both-- the hierarchical nature of the data and the possible spatial spillovers, to provide estimates. Using school--district-- and state-- level data for high school graduation rates for 46 states and 8,636 school districts in the US for the year 2013 from The Hechinger Report and the National Center for Education Statistics, using Bayesian Hierarchical SLX model, we find that state exit exams have no statistically significant influence on graduation rates.;Significant number of previous studies looked at the macro level impacts or the more specific narrow impacts of federal regulatory restrictions on economic outcomes. Using Regdata, a numerical quantification of federal regulatory restrictions across all North American Industry Classification System industries, this paper quantifies the number of federal restrictions on the wine value chain. The wine value chain comprises of "Wineries" (NAICS: 31213), "Wine and Distilled Alcoholic Beverage Merchant Wholesalers" (NAICS: 42482), and "Beer, Wine and Liquor Sales" (NAICS: 44531). This paper finds that the wine value chain faced an overwhelming estimated 100,000 federal regulatory restrictions in 2012. This paper also find that these restrictions are persistent.

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