Browsing by Author "Boylan, Richard T."

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Are the geographic disparities in U.S. violent crime rising?
    (Public Library of Science, 2024) Boylan, Richard T.
    Inequality in economic and social outcomes across U.S. regions has grown in recent decades. The economic theory of crime predicts that this increased variability would raise geographic disparities in violent crime. Instead, I find that geographic disparities in homicide rates decreased. Moreover, these same decades saw decreases in the geographic disparities in policing, incarceration, and the share of the population that is African American. Thus, changes in policing, incarcerations, and racial composition could have led to a decrease in inequality in homicide rates. Moreover, the joint provision of law enforcement by local, state, and federal authorities may have reduced the impact of economic distress on violent crime.
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    The Effect of Punishment Severity on Plea Bargaining
    (The University of Chicago Press, 2012-08) Boylan, Richard T.
    This study examines whether criminal suspects facing more severe punishments are more likely to go to trial. Sample selection makes it difficult to obtain valid proxies for severity; for instance, I expect severity to be positively related to the prosecutorﾒs decision to indict, to indict in federal court (versus state court), and to try the suspect. Theoretical and empirical findings indicate that in samples containing only indicted, convicted, or tried suspects, reasonable proxies for severity may be negatively related to actual severity. The assignment of defendants to judges randomizes the severity of punishment in a manner that is unrelated to sample selection. Thus, by examining the effect of these assignments, I find that a 10-month increase in prison sentences raises trial rates by 1 percentage point.
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    Essays on Durations of War and Postwar Peace
    (2012-09-05) Chiba, Daina; Leeds, Brett Ashley; Reed, William L.; Fang, Songying; Morgan, T. Clifton; Boylan, Richard T.
    This dissertation consists of three self-contained essays that investigate the duration of war and the duration of postwar peace. The first essay studies both durations jointly, with a particular focus on the interdependence between the two processes. It demonstrates that membership in security organizations can prolong the durability of peace after conflict, but that the expected longer peace after conflict can also prolong the duration of conflict. The second essay analyzes the duration of war in a greater detail, exploring how third-party actors influence the process. It shows that balanced intervention can shorten the duration until a negotiated settlement is reached between the disputants. The third essay looks at the stability of postwar peace by focusing on the strength of cease-fire agreements. It argues that stronger agreements can maintain longer peace after wars by helping the disputants resolve the bargaining problems. The statistical analysis that corrects for the endogeneity of agreement strength provides support for the argument.
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    Essays on Healthcare Access, Use, and Cost Containment
    (2012-09-05) Dugan, Jerome; Ho, Vivian; Boylan, Richard T.; Scott, David W.
    This dissertation is composed of two essays that examine the role of public and private health insurance on healthcare access, use, and cost containment. In Chapter 1, Dugan, Virani, and Ho examine the impact of Medicare eligibility on healthcare utilization and access. Although Medicare eligibility has been shown to generally increase health care utilization, few studies have examined these relationships among the chronically ill. We use a regression-discontinuity framework to compare physician utilization and financial access to care among people before and after the Medicare eligibility threshold at age 65. Specifically, we focus on coronary heart disease and stroke (CHDS) patients. We find that Medicare eligibility improves health care access and physician utilization for many adults with CHDS, but it may not promote appropriate levels of physician use among blacks with CHDS. My second chapter examines the extent to which the managed care backlash affected managed care's ability to contain hospital costs among short-term, non-federal hospitals between 1998 and 2008. My analysis focuses on health maintenance organizations (HMOs), the most aggressive managed care model. Unlike previous studies that use cross-sectional or fixed effects estimators to address the endogeneity of HMO penetration with respect to hospital costs, this study uses a fixed effects instrumental variable approach. The results suggest two conclusions. First, I find the impact of increased HMO penetration on costs declined over the study period, suggesting regulation adversely impacted managed care's ability to contain hospital costs. Second, when costs are decomposed into unit costs by hospital service, I find the impact of increased HMO penetration on inpatient costs reversed over the study period, but HMOs were still effective at containing outpatient costs.
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    Essays on Labor Supply Dynamics, Home Production, and Case-based Preferences
    (2013-07-24) Naaman, Michael; Sickles, Robin C.; Boylan, Richard T.; Weston, James
    In this paper we examine models that incorporate CBDT. In the first chapter, we will examine CBDT more thoroughly including a reinterpretation of the standard labor supply problem under a wage tax in a partial equilibrium model where preferences exhibit characteristics of CBDT. In the second chapter, we extend the labor supply decision under a wage tax by incorporating a household production function. Utility maximization by repeated substitution is applied as a novel approach to solving dynamic optimization problems. This approach allows us to find labor supply elasticities that evolve over the life cycle. In the third chapter, CBDT will be explored in more depth focusing on its applicability in representing people's preferences over movie rentals in the Netflix competition. This chapter builds on the theoretical model introduced in chapter 1, among other things, expressing the rating of any customer movie pair using the ratings of similar movies that the customer rated and the ratings of the movie in question by similar customers. We will also explore in detail the econometric model used in the Netflix competition which utilizes machine learning and spatial regression to estimate customer's preferences.
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    Intended and Unintended Consequences of Prison Reform
    (Oxford University Press, 2013) Boylan, Richard T.; Mocan, Naci
    The United States Supreme Court ruled in May 2011 that prison overcrowding in California constituted cruel and unusual punishment. This decision revived a long-standing debate among scholars and policy makers as to whether courts should intervene to protect the well-being of the disfranchised, by forcing states to improve schools, prisons, and mental institutions. We use data that span 1951-2006 to examine the impact of federal court orders condemning prison crowding, and the impact of statesﾒ releases from these court orders. We find that these interventions are associated with lower inmate mortality rates and fewer prisoners per capita. Correctional expenditures increase and welfare cash expenditures decrease while states are under court order, suggesting that the burden of improved prison conditions is borne by welfare recipients. Furthermore, states do not alter correctional spending and welfare cash payments spending after their release from court order, making the original changes in spending permanent. (JEL H7, I38, K4)
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    Power to the People: Does Ownership Type Influence Electricity Service?
    (University of Chicago Press, 2016) Boylan, Richard T.
    After storm-related power outages, many have recommended municipalizing investor-owned utilities, claiming that profit-making utilities have insufficient incentive to prepare for storms. I provide empirical evidence that municipal utilities spend more on maintenance of their distribution network than investor-owned utilities. Nonetheless, I find that storms significantly disrupt electricity consumption in areas served by municipal utilities but do not disrupt areas served by investor-owned utilities. These results are based on a stratified random sample of 241 investor-owned, 96 cooperative, and 94 municipal utilities in the United States between 1999 and 2012. I conclude that municipal utilitiesﾒ in-efficiencies are more important in causing power outages than investor-owned utilitiesﾒ disincentives to spend on maintenance.