Essays on Entrepreneurship and Public Policy

This dissertation consists of three chapters empirically analyzing how public policy affects firm behavior, with a particular emphasis on small, entrepreneurial firms. The first chapter analyzes how occupational licensing affects firm entry and employment decisions. Occupational licensing is a government permission to work within a specific job classification. The costs to firms of paying to license employees can be a substantial consideration when firms are making location and hiring decisions. Using individual firm-level data I analyze how these costs affect firms by determining how differences in costs across state borders affect the likelihood of firms entering on a particular side of a state-pair. I find firms are less likely to enter in an expensive state if a substantially cheaper state is within a short distance. I also utilize a geographic regression discontinuity design and determine that firms on the more expensive side of a state border pair have approximately 2.3 employees fewer on average. Comparing similar licensed and unlicensed industries I find evidence of a persistent decrease in average employment for licensed firms in high cost states relative to unlicensed firms. The second chapter investigates potential gender related bias in equity, debt, and philanthropic contribution financing decisions for early-stage African entrepreneurial ventures. Utilizing a series of individual estimations and a two-stage Heckman Selection Model on questionnaire results from 2,812 early-stage entrepreneurs in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and South Africa, I find substantial evidence of a negative effect of having a female primary founder on the probability of being selected for equity funding but that this bias does not persist in the amount of equity funding the venture attracts. I find that in the case of debt and lending finance, female entrepreneurs are subject to a lower probability of being selected for funding and smaller total amounts of debt financing. Philanthropic contributions present an interesting alternative, and do not have any related gender bias in the initial selection or funding amount. This paper provides policy recommendations for encouraging female entrepreneurship, which has been shown to contribute to long-term sustainable economic growth. The third chapter explores the unintended consequences of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) on the entry and exit behaviors of small businesses. BAPCPA implemented significant changes to consumer bankruptcy law which had many unintended consequences for debtors, creditors, and consumers. Since small businesses are often unincorporated and therefore the financial assets and debts of the company cannot be separated from the owner, bankruptcy serves as a crucial form of partial wealth protection for self-employed and small business owners. This study focuses on how the implementation of BAPCPA affected small businesses entry and exit rates by utilizing a Difference-in-Difference methodology. A Triple-Differencing method is also incorporated to account for potential differences in small business entry and exit behaviors in low and high personal homestead exemption states. I find that BAPCPA decreased the entry rate of small businesses by approximately 4.91% and increased exit rates by 2.74%. These effects vary substantially across industries

Janice Holt Giles: A Bio-Bibliography with Evaluations of the Kentucky Frontier Books as Historical Fiction

The purpose of this study was (1) to present a biographical sketch of the novelist Janice Holt Giles in terms of the influences upon her writing, (2) to evaluate the Kentucky historical novels written by Mrs. Giles in light of the requirements for historical fiction, and (3) to present a survey of the reviews of those books. The life data on the author were obtained largely through two personal interviews with her and through her two autobiographical works: 40 Acres and No Mule and A Little Better Than Plumb. The Adair County Record Books on file at the Court House in Columbia, Kentucky, were consulted to determine the time the Giles ancestors made their first settlement in south-central Kentucky. For references to other biographical information, Biography Index, Reader\u27s Guide to Periodical Literature, Education Index, and Library Literature were searched. A scant amount of data on the author were found in Current Biography 1958, Wilson Library Bulletin, and Contemporary Authors 1962. Certain criteria for evaluating historical fiction were specified in order to appraise the Kentucky frontier books by Mrs. Giles. The requirements of sound historical fiction: truth, graphic power, consistent character portrayal, sustained dramatic and human interest, are those cited by Helen E. Haines in her work Living with Books. Each requirement was discussed in evaluating all the books covered in this paper. Included in the discussion were details from the life influences of the author as they were thought to bear upon the novels. In conclusion, each book met those requirements of sound historical fiction. Hannah Fowler and The Land Beyond the Mountains were the most highly praised in the survey of reviews

Non-convex optimization for 3D point source localization using a rotating point spread function

We consider the high-resolution imaging problem of 3D point source image recovery from 2D data using a method based on point spread function (PSF) engineering. The method involves a new technique, recently proposed by S.~Prasad, based on the use of a rotating PSF with a single lobe to obtain depth from defocus. The amount of rotation of the PSF encodes the depth position of the point source. Applications include high-resolution single molecule localization microscopy as well as the problem addressed in this paper on localization of space debris using a space-based telescope. The localization problem is discretized on a cubical lattice where the coordinates of nonzero entries represent the 3D locations and the values of these entries the fluxes of the point sources. Finding the locations and fluxes of the point sources is a large-scale sparse 3D inverse problem. A new nonconvex regularization method with a data-fitting term based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is proposed for 3D localization for the Poisson noise model. In addition, we propose a new scheme of estimation of the source fluxes from the KL data-fitting term. Numerical experiments illustrate the efficiency and stability of the algorithms that are trained on a random subset of image data before being applied to other images. Our 3D localization algorithms can be readily applied to other kinds of depth-encoding PSFs as well.Comment: 28 page

Native American Tourism in Montana

This professional project is composed of three magazine articles on the topic of Native American tourism in Montana. The first article is about Blackfeet artist Leonda Fast Buffalo Horse, a successful porcupine quill artist over the past 15 years, and the prospect of cultural tourism in Browning. The second article explores three Native American groups and how they are using tourism to create changes on the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations. The third article examines German tourists, the largest group of overseas visitors to Montana, and the irony as to why several groups are making a profit from the German tourists’ interests in the Indian culture except for the Montana tribes

The Relationship Between Clinical Teaching Models and Perceived Clinical Self-Efficacy and Attitude Toward Team Process

Nurse educators are called to transform the education of nursing students, a process that is paramount to meet the needs of an increasingly complex health care system. The complexity of health care requires graduate nurses who are self-efficacious, yet also function well as full members of a health care team. In response to this call, clinical instruction, an essential component of nursing education, is receiving increased attention. Clinical education is vital, not only to the development of clinical self-efficacy, but also to the integration of future nurses into a health care team. To further this education process, faculty members from academic institutions are forming clinical partnerships with clinical agencies to promote learning in the clinical setting. The dedicated education unit (DEU) clinical teaching model is emerging as an innovative clinical partnership, which promotes skill development, professional growth, clinical self-efficacy, and integration as a team member. In addition, clinical partnerships are forming which utilize some, but not all, of the features of the dedicated education unit clinical teaching model. These blended clinical teaching models are also promoting both clinical self-efficacy and integration as a team member for nursing students. This quasi-experimental study explored the relationship between three clinical teaching models (DEU, traditional, blended) and perceived clinical self-efficacy and attitude toward team process. The convenience sample of 272 entry-level baccalaureate nursing students included 122 students participating in a traditional clinical teaching model control group, 84 students participating in a DEU clinical teaching model treatment group, and 66 students participating in a blended clinical teaching model treatment group. The first dependent variable, perceived clinical self-efficacy, was evaluated by the pretest/posttest scores obtained on the General Self-Efficacy (GSE) scale. The second dependent variable, attitude toward team process, was evaluated by the pretest/posttest scores obtained on the TeamSTEPPS® Teamwork Attitude Questionnaire. All three clinical teaching models resulted in significant increases in perceived clinical self-efficacy (p = .04) and attitude toward team process (p = .003). Students participating in the DEU clinical teaching model (p = .016) and students participating in the blended clinical teaching model (p \u3c .001) had significantly larger increases in perceived clinical self-efficacy compared to students participating in the traditional clinical teaching model. These findings support the use of DEU and blended clinical partnerships as alternatives to the traditional clinical teaching model to promote both clinical self-efficacy and team process among entry-level baccalaureate nursing students

Generalized inverse-positivity and splittings of M-matrices

AbstractThe concepts of matrix monotonicity, generalized inverse-positivity and splittings are investigated and are used to characterize the class of all M-matrices A, extending the well-known property that A−1⩾0 whenever A is nonsingular. These conditions are grouped into classes in order to identify those that are equivalent for arbitrary real matrices A. It is shown how the nonnegativity of a generalized left inverse of A plays a fundamental role in such characterizations, thereby extending recent work by one of the authors, by Meyer and Stadelmaier and by Rothblum. In addition, new characterizations are provided for the class of M-matrices with “property c”; that is, matrices A having a representation A=sI−B, s>0, B⩾0, where the powers of (1s)B converge. Applications of these results to the study of iterative methods for solving arbitrary systems of linear equations are given elsewhere

Tobacco-Free Georgia State University: A Case Study

Introduction: According to the CDC (2008), tobacco-related deaths out number deaths from alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, murders, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and illegal drug use. One out of every five deaths in the United States can be attributed to tobacco, culminating in a staggering 443,000 deaths in the US every year. Smoking is also the leading preventable cause of death in America (CDC, 2008). In 2006, the Surgeon General’s Report speaks to not only the detrimental effects of smoking, but also the harmful effects second hand smoke can have on an individual’s health. Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control’s Office of Smoking and Health reported that 49,400 deaths every year in the US are the result of second hand smoke exposure, of which 46,000 will have died from heart disease attributable to second hand smoke in the environment in which they live, work, play, and learn (CDC, 2008). While the negative health outcomes with tobacco use have inundated mainstream media and literature, tobacco use has another large and devastating effect on communities around the world. That effect is the result of Tobacco Product Litter (TPL). Beyond the unsightliness of TPL, several other unwanted complications to society result from the disregarded refuse, such as harm to the environment and damages incurred by other businesses not associated at all with tobacco products. Rationale for Intervention: First and foremost the Tobacco-Free GSU Initiative was intended to promote the health of the Georgia State University community consisting of students, faculty, and staff. The American College Health Association (2009) recommends 100% tobacco-free campuses, indoors and outdoors. Studies have shown that non-smokers and smokers attending college are in favor of campus policies that control the use of tobacco on campus (Rigotti, Regan, Moran, et al., 2003; Thompson B, Coronado GD, Chen L, et al., 2006). Sawdey et al. (2011) cites the need for the implementation of smoke-free policies by campuses in order to utilize the opportunity to create an atmosphere conducive to tobacco cessation. Considering that one third of young Americans attend a college or university (Rigotti et al., 2003), exposing one third of the youth population of the United States to a tobacco-free environment could potentially change the socially acceptable norms of using tobacco, whist simultaneously creating an environment free of TPL. Intervention Strategy Analysis: Tobacco-Free GSU utilized a methodology similar to the strategies Glassman, Reindel and Whewell outlined in their 2011 study Strategies for Implementing a Tobacco-Free Campus. The Glassman et al. (2011) strategy included: Creating a Committee, Utilizing a Student Debate, Publicity, Drafting of a Potential Policy, Targeting the College or University Board of Trustees, Addressing Barriers to Becoming Tobacco-Free, Student Involvement, Administrative and Staff Support, Resources, and Enforcement Conclusion: In order to facilitate the best possible outcome, this author recommends those seeking to create a tobacco-free campus utilize the strategies outlined throughout this document, whilst creating strategies specific to their location, population, and situation