Essays on Public Finance and Time Use.

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on regional economic policy and the utilization of time use data to explore economic behavior. I am interested in how regional economic policy frequently fails to account for unintended consequences, generating impacts at odds with intended goals and how time use data enriches our understanding of economic behavior. In my first paper, “The Effect of Enterprise Community Designation for Rural Areas,” I perform a program evaluation of a federal economic development program for rural areas. For controls, I utilize communities who failed at obtaining designation, census tracts that border designated communities and economically similar areas discovered through a propensity score approach. In the term of evaluation, I find evidence of capitalization of increased services and infrastructure in housing values but little difference between the selected communities and their controls. I conclude that the impact of developing an application for such a program may be more important than the program itself. The next essay, “Pump Pressure: Income, Public Transportation and the Time Use Response to Gas Prices,” investigates the responsiveness of time spent in forms of transportation and for different purposes to real gas price changes, the attractiveness of public transportation in a respondent’s metropolitan area and their interaction. I find the inclusion of an interaction term important in correctly controlling for the effect of gas prices themselves and conclude policy makers should account for dampening behavior impacts gasoline taxes and public transportation expansion can have on each other as well as how these policies differentially affect households of different income. My final essay, “Employment and Intra-household Time Allocation,” also utilizes time use data to examine the impact of spousal unemployment and time use on one’s own time use. My results are consistent with other studies in finding a very small, but statistically significant impact of about an hour per week added worker effect. I also construct estimates of partner spousal time use where data do not exist to calculate marginal impacts, finding strong leisure complementarity between partners and some substitutability of household production.PHDPublic Policy & EconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102335/1/nmontgom_1.pd