The voice of the American slave: A quantified and humanistic study comparison of slavery in Texas and South Carolina

Neal, Tara Jane The University of Texas at Dallas 2001 해외박사(DDOD)

The primary question addressed in this dissertation is whether masters transplanted a system of slavery from other southern states into new areas in the nineteenth century or adopted new practices to accommodate a frontier setting. Furthermore, if there were differences between slavery in Texas and an established southern state, could those conditions be attributed to the frontier? This study of the effect of the frontier on Texas slavery combines quantified and humanistic data derived from the Works Project Administration slave narratives. This dissertation examines medical care, slave quarters and punishment to illuminate the differences in slave communities between Texas and South Carolina and the role of the frontier in manifesting these differences. Quantified data demonstrates that frontier conditions had a minimal affect on Texas slavery. The sparse population density, smaller numbers of slaves owned by individual planters, and lack of developed infrastructure had a distinct but minor influence on Texas slavery. Frontier conditions altered certain aspects of medical care, but did not alter the medical care system itself. Slave quarters in Texas and South Carolina were remarkably similar; however, Texas owners did not modify the structures for the dramatic weather differential in Texas. Finally, although frontier conditions led to a more violent slave system in Texas they did not fundamentally alter slave punishment. Frontier conditions triggered small adjustments to the slave system, but did not fundamentally alter the slave's experience.

The impact of court-ordered scattered-site public housing on residential real estate values

Buckles, Brian William The University of Texas at Dallas 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

In response to a federal court order, the Dallas Housing Authority (DHA) announced in July 1995 that it would build the Frankford Townhomes public housing project in a neighborhood in the North of the city. The location of the project was chosen to satisfy specific racial and income conditions required by the judge. The order was the result of the Walker v. HUD lawsuit against the City of Dallas, DHA, and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for racial segregation in public housing and was designed to help some of Dallas’ poorest black residents. The first paper in this dissertation evaluates the effect of DHA’s site announcement on the sales prices of nearby homes using a difference-in-differences hedonic price model that controls for spatial autocorrelation with a weights matrix. The spatial models are estimated for different-sized treatment groups to measure the effects on neighborhoods at different distances from the project and to detect the maximum distance at which the effects are significant. We also compare the initial Announcement Effect with the long-run change in prices (the Real Effect) in order to establish if there was a behavioral over-reaction. The second paper applies the above methodology for the case of Frankford Townhomes to four additional Walker v. HUD scattered public housing sites in Dallas. Maps and a brief history of the neighborhood opposition and legal challenges to each site provide context to the results. As a robustness check of the methodology, the third paper performs a spatial falsification exercise by simulating the spatial GMM estimation of Villas at Hillcrest, the site with the fiercest neighborhood opposition of the five, on over 5,000 randomly drawn locations satisfying the court’s criteria. The position of the “true” statistically significant estimates from Hillcrest in the tails of the distribution of “false” estimates seems to reinforce the peculiarity of the Hillcrest site, which suggests that the spatial hedonic difference-in-differences methodology and its treatment/control group “rings” are appropriate for understanding price dynamics around a location.

Three Essays on Postsecondary Education

Thompson, John C The University of Texas at Dallas ProQuest Dissert 2019 해외박사(DDOD)

Postsecondary education has numerous long-term impacts on those students who go on to pursue and complete it. In this work, I examine the impact of several policies which influence student’s entry into and matriculation through the postsecondary system of Texas. My first chapter looks at the impact of going to a flagship university for students who gain access to that school through an uncommon pathway. My second chapter examines the impact of the Budget Control Act of 2011, and its elimination of subsidized student loans for graduate students, on educational outcomes for graduate students. My third chapter looks at the impacts that graduate student instructors have on the students who take their courses.

Essays in behavioral and experimental economics: Time preferences and risk measures

Haydel, Michael Paul The University of Texas at Dallas 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

The first essay looks at the interconnectedness of elicited discount rates with individual personality and demographic characteristics in an experimental setting. Using an experimental technique to identify an individual's discount rate, this study examines, through regression analysis, correlations between elicited discount rate and both demographic characteristics and survey measures of impatience. This analysis concludes that certain demographic characteristics such as age play a role in predicting discount rates, supporting the previous literature. Correlations between self-reported measures of impulsivity and consideration of future consequences with elicited discount rate remain inconclusive, contradicting some previous studies. The second study examines two main concepts: how a person's own characteristics and perceptions of others may bias their ability to predict the discount rate of others, and how these same characteristics and perceptions may affect how they advise others to consider intertemporal economics choices. An experiment was used to ascertain the discount rates of individuals followed by a task where they are asked either to predict how the other participants in the room played the task or to advise them on how they should choose in the task. This analysis finds that subjects predicted others to be much less patient than they actually were and tended to advise others to be much more patient than they actually were. Various perceptions and characteristics of both the target and predictor/advisor, such as gender or attractiveness, significantly biased the predictions and advice. The third essay explores how risk perceptions and behavior are classified into specific domains in low income populations. Although risk domains have been examined in many studies, the psychometric scales that are used to measure these risk attitudes have not been widely tested on populations of varying socioeconomic backgrounds. This analysis tests whether the risk domains of the Domain Specific Risk-Taking Scale (DOSPERT) first developed by Weber, Blais, and Betz (2002) can be found in low-income populations around the state of Texas. Through a confirmatory factor analysis we conclude that the original factor structure is not supported in any of the three samples tested.

New methods in common factor modeling and experimetrics

Parker, Jason Alexander The University of Texas at Dallas 2014 해외박사(DDOD)

The first chapter, Identification of Unknown Factors: Leaders and Followers, concerns finding an economic interpretation of an underlying factor model. Previously, factors have been considered an unimportant nuisance parameter in the data. With factor identification, factors can be economically interpreted, creating more clear descriptions of the underlying patterns in the data. The authors also propose a leadership model where one individual in the panel is the common factor, the source of cross-sectional dependence (CSD) in the data. In the second chapter, Heavy Traffic: Determination of Homicide Rates across the 50 United States, the author uses these new methods to analyze state-level crime rates in the U.S. from 1971 to 2011. Few papers have previously explored CSD between states in the crime data. While property crimes may be influenced by the common U.S. business cycle, it is somewhat puzzling that murder rates exhibit CSD between states. Using the leadership method detailed in the first chapter, the source of CSD in the data is found to be equivalent to the murder rates in California and Texas. The reason for this effect is likely to be related to drug-trafficking from Mexico through these key states and into the U.S. as a whole. In the third chapter, Improved Two-Sample Comparisons for Laboratory Data, the author proposes a new approach to comparing the distributions of randomly drawn, independent samples. The Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMW) rank sum test is criticized for its complicated hypothesis and for having low power while laboratory data is quite costly. In contrast to this nonparametric approach, the author proposes a parametric test using the beta distribution to gain a significant power advantage. Further, the author introduces the idea of comparing higher-moments, e.g., skewness, of the respective distributions to find differences which first-moment comparisons will miss. Altogether, this dissertation provides new methods for understanding economic and laboratory data in a more meaningful way.

Disparity in Risk Factors for Urban Residential Fire Related Injuries and Deaths

Min, Soojin The University of Texas at Dallas ProQuest Dissert 2018 해외박사(DDOD)

The location characteristics of neighborhoods and balance in demand and supply capacity may play a role in determining the effectiveness of fire protection service delivery. Spatial accessibility to fire protection services integrates the location characteristics of neighborhoods and the dimensions of demand and supply capacity of fire protection services. Using the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method and logistic regression, this study measures spatial accessibility to fire protection services and examines its association with unintentional residential fire related injuries and deaths in Dallas, Texas. This analysis uses annual public fire incident data from 2012 to 2015, obtained from the U.S. Fire Administration, and census. In addition to fire characteristics and neighborhood demographics, spatial accessibility to fire protection services was significantly associated with unintentional residential fire related injuries with a small effect size. The analysis results suggest that there is disparity in the spatial accessibility score between low-income and non low-income census block groups, mainly in northeast and southwest service areas. The findings can be used to help identify high-risk neighborhoods for implementing fire injury prevention programs and select locations of additional fire stations.

Simulation and estimation of viscoelastic and scattering effects in seismic data

강익범 University of Texas at Dallas 1994 해외박사

탄성파 기록지는 P파와 S파의 속도와 밀도뿐만 아니라 P파와 S파의 Q값도 측정될수있다. Q측정 은 주파수의 함수로써 처음에 도착한 P파와 S파로부터의 에너지 손실을직접 측정함으로써 얻어질. North Sea, New Madrid, Turkey, north Texas에서얻어진 탄성파 기록지로 부터 얻어진 결론은 적으로부터도 접근할수 있는 결과를가지며 P파에서는 intrinsic과 scattering 효과 모두 중요하낵��intrinsic효과가 더 중요한 것으로 여겨진다.

What are the effects of tax abatements and government incentives on economic development? A study of select Texas cities

Rutherford, Jerry W The University of Texas at Dallas 2012 해외박사(DDOD)

The debate over whether government incentives and tax abatements will enhance economic development continues to receive serious consideration by granting agencies. The State of Texas authorized the use of economic development programs via the Development Corporation Act in 1989 and various incentives have been used by Texas cities since its enactment. Currently, all fifty states and over 13,000 cities utilize many types of government incentives to stimulate economic development. While many government agencies continue to utilize incentives, there are no published financial models to help determine if the use of taxpayer dollars to stimulate economic development is a good financial investment of resources. This paper is an attempt to determine if the goals of granting economic development incentives have been realized and to shed light on the organizational and service characteristics that make it more likely that the results of offering a particular incentive will be positive. To ascertain the research goal, the financial models (slightly modified) of Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), and the Payback Method were studied for seven Texas cities with unique characteristics. In addition to utilizing the models, several personal interviews were conducted of economic development professionals to understand the practical application of the incentives. While practicing economic development professionals acknowledge that all decisions to grant or not grant economic incentive applications are not purely financial and include political consideration, this dissertation seeks to add a financial calculation that may be considered in the decision making process. Of the seven cities studied, five showed positive results while two showed negative results.

Spectroscopic studies of the interfacial interactions between polymers and nanostructures

Sampson, William M The University of Texas at Dallas 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

Optical and vibrational spectroscopies are used to study the interactions of various polymers with several nanoscopic materials. First, two new conjugated polymers manufactured by the Ferraris Group in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Texas at Dallas, poly [1,4-bis-2-ethylhexylmercapto]- p-phenylenevinylene (BEHM-PPV)and poly [1,4-bis-(2-ethylhexyl-sulfinyl)]- p-phenylenevinylene (BEHSO-PPV) are studied along with poly (2,5-bis (2'-ethylhexyloxy)-1,4-p-phenylenevinylene) (BEH-PPV). It is found that the two sulphur containing polymers BEHM-PPV and BEHSO-PPV have a greater tendency to aggregate than does BEH-PPV, and also have bluer photoluminescence. These three polymers are then studied in composite with single walled carbon nanotubes where charge transfer occurs across the interface from the polymer to the nanotubes. These three polymers are studied in mixture with aggregated quantum dots, where it is seen that the quantum dot aggregation prevents significant interactions to occur. The energy transfer interaction between conjugated polymers and transparent, conducting multiwalled carbon nanotubes films is investigated. It is found that a coating of PEDOT-PSS between the nanotubes and conjugated polymer suppresses the quenching of photoluminescence. This effect is important for enhancement of electroluminescence of organic LED devices, in which MWCNT hole injectors are used instead of the usual ITO. The University of Texas developed peptide nano-1 has been shown to engage in charge transfer interactions with SWNTs and, perhaps more importantly, can enable self assembly of complex nanotube structures. Finally, poly [2-methoxy-5-(2'-ethylhexyloxy)- p-phenylenevinylene] (MEH-PPV) and poly[3-hexyl thiophene] (P3HT) are studied in composite with titanium dioxide and an increase in the photoluminescence is seen, induced by interfacial interactions between the polymer and TiO 2. An explanation based on polaron mediated triplet to singlet exciton conversion is presented as an explanation for this effect.

Interorganizational relationship structuration and dissolution : a study of strategic alliances in semiconductor start-up manufacturing

Shi, Yuwei University of Texas at Dallas 1994 해외박사