Three Essays in Environmental Economics

This dissertation consists of three essays in environmental economics. The first essay examines the effectiveness of air quality information designed to reduce the public health risks associated with air pollution exposure. Using daily bike-share trip data for the metro DC area, I estimate the causal effect of air quality alerts on avoidance behavior in a regression discontinuity analysis, assigning a cutoff for treatment that triggers air quality alerts. Air quality alerts cause less bike-share trip counts and duration. Results for heterogeneous treatment effects indicate that air quality alerts mainly reduce weekend trips in the central DC, which implies that bike share-reducing effects are driven by leisure trips rather than commuting trips. The second essay investigates whether a gasoline tax can be a useful policy tool to reduce air pollutants emitted from automobiles. Using a difference-in-differences and synthetic control method, I explore variation differences in air quality across New Jersey and the other states, before and after New Jersey’s gasoline tax increase in 2016. Althoughestimates suggest that New Jersey’s air pollution levels were lower than those of the other states with the gasoline tax increase, none of these differences are statistically significant. Moreover, the gasoline tax increase was not successful in reducing gasoline consumption and vehicle miles traveled. The third essay examines how the effect of temperature on crime varies across urban and rural areas. Using a 10-year panel of monthly crime and temperature data for California cities, I identify the impact of higher temperatures on violent and property crimes in urban and rural areas. Results show that higher temperatures are correlated with more violent crimes. Urban areas have a higher number of violent crimes than rural areas, holding temperature constant. The number of violent crimes tends to increase in proportion to temperature across both areas, but the marginal effects of temperature are smaller in urban than in rural areas

Fiscal sustainability in the light of aging trend : finding the patterns among aged OECD countries

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on November 9, 2010).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Dissertation advisor: Dr. Ronald Ratti.Vita.Ph. D. University of Missouri--Columbia 2008.This study is an investigation into the fiscal sustainability of countries in the light of the aging trend and finds that it runs downhill in the countries that are classified as high-level age and have experienced the trend of high-speed aging. This conclusion, and the others that follow, come from the empirical results of the 18 OECD countries, using the annual financial data from 1971 [about] 2005. First, this study finds that the reaction of the primary surplus against increasing the debt - GDP ratio, as the indicator of the fiscal sustainability, is negative or changing from positive to negative in seven countries. Included in this group is Japan, the highest age and aging speed country in the world. Second, it identifies the distinctive properties within groups that are classified by both the age level and the aging speed. In particular, high-age level countries with the high-speed aging trend show signs of financial difficulty with rapidly increasing debt-GDP ratios, whereas the relatively low-age level countries with slow-speed aging trend exhibit fiscal sustainability with decreasing debt-GDP ratios. Third, it concludes that the U.S. has a chance to prepare for future fiscal difficulty, whereas Korea has a high probability that it will suffer from fiscal sustainability problems over the next two decades or more. The debt-GDP ratios for the main OECD countries are expected to double when compared to 2005 levels.Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-143)

Conspiracy Beliefs, Misinformation, Social Media Platforms, and Protest Participation

Protest has long been associated with left-wing actors and left-wing causes. However, right-wing actors also engage in protest. Are right-wing actors mobilized by the same factors as those actors on the left? This article uses cross-national survey data (i.e., US, UK, France, and Canada) gathered in February 2021 to assess the role of misinformation, conspiracy beliefs, and the use of different social media platforms in explaining participation in marches or demonstrations. We find that those who use Twitch or TikTok are twice as likely to participate in marches or demonstrations, compared to non-users, but the uses of these platforms are more highly related to participation in right-wing protests than left-wing protests. Exposure to misinformation on social media and beliefs in conspiracy theories also increase the likelihood of participating in protests. Our research makes several important contributions. First, we separate right-wing protest participation from left-wing protest participation, whereas existing scholarship tends to lump these together. Second, we offer new insights into the effects of conspiracy beliefs and misinformation on participation using cross-national data. Third, we examine the roles of emerging social media platforms such as Twitch and TikTok (as well as legacy platforms such as YouTube and Facebook) to better understand the differential roles that social media platforms play in protest participation

Controlled Text Generation for Black-box Language Models via Score-based Progressive Editor

Despite recent progress in language models, generating constrained text for specific domains remains a challenge, particularly when utilizing black-box models that lack domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we introduce ScoPE (Score-based Progressive Editor) generation, a novel approach for controlled text generation for black-box language models. We employ ScoPE to facilitate text generation in the target domain by integrating it with language models through a cascading approach. Trained to enhance the target domain score of the edited text, ScoPE progressively edits intermediate output discrete tokens to align with the target attributes throughout the auto-regressive generation process of the language model. This iterative process guides subsequent steps to produce desired output texts for the target domain. Our experimental results on diverse controlled generations demonstrate that ScoPE effectively facilitates controlled text generation for black-box language models in both in-domain and out-of-domain conditions, which is challenging for existing methods

Two Essays On Product Design And Consumer Evaluations

This paper is about the central role of product design on consumer evaluations. While the design literature has articulated two different types of design, i.e. form-based design and function-based design (Khalid 2004), most extant marketing literature has mostly focused on the impact of functional design on performance (see Chitturi, Raghunathan, and Mahajan (2007) for a notable exception). In this paper, I examine the individual and joint effects of the two design dimensions: form design and functional design on consumer evaluations of new products. In the first essay, employing theoretical underpinnings from processing fluency theory, I investigate four major research questions. First, all else equal, does form design matter? Second, how does form design interact with functional design? Third, does the interaction between form and functionality change in an innovation context? Specifically, given a certain level of functionality, what type of form is more advantageous for a radically new product (RNP) or an incrementally new product (INP)? Fourth, is there an individual difference in consumer evaluations to innovative products with various form designs? Results from the four experiments conducted demonstrate that (1) more typical form design leads to more positive attitudes toward the product than less typical form design, (2) a more typical design compensates for the average functionality of the product and hence a product with average functionality is evaluated as well as highly functional products in the more typical design condition. In a less typical design condition, a product with high functionality leads to much lower consumer attitudes towards the product, (3) whereas the form design for incremental innovations must be closer to the incumbent products for favorable evaluations, less typical form is evaluated as good as more typical form for radical innovations. (4) Form design of an innovative product matters more to the technologically more sophisticated consumers (experts) than technologically less sophisticated consumers (novices). In the second essay, I examine the issues involved in using form design to nullify first mover advantage. Pioneers or first movers can be defined as the first firm to sell in a new product category. Despite the proliferation of the pioneering advantage research, there are few empirical studies which examined how the product design enables the later entrants to nullify the first mover advantage. Employing theoretical underpinnings from categorization theory, I investigate the following research questions. First, what type of form is more likely to enhance consumer evaluations and nullify first mover advantage when the follower\u27s product is featured with higher or lower functionality? Second, how does form design interact with functional design for the follower\u27s product? Results from the experimental study conducted demonstrate that (1) if the follower\u27s functionality is not superior to the pioneer\u27s, follower had better focus on design differentiation which can compensate for the lower functionality of the follower (2) if the follower\u27s functionality is superior to the pioneer\u27s, follower had better follow the pioneer\u27s design for the better product evaluation. The managerial implication is clear: Form design is a critical determinant of consumer evaluations. Form design helps create and appropriate value for firms