Essays on excise taxation: Cross-border effects, quality substitution, and tax earmarking

Nesbit, Todd M West Virginia University 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation is a collection of essays examining the secondary effects of excise taxation. The first chapter discusses the history of the excise tax in the United States and provides an introduction to some of the major areas of research examining the excise tax. In addition, this chapter outlines the research agenda for the dissertation. Chapter 2 considers the effects of cross-border sales and tourism on state tax revenues from wine and liquor taxation in the state of West Virginia. The empirical results of this chapter suggest that the revenue impact of cross-border shopping and tourism is economically significant relative to the total tax revenue collected from these sources. Chapter 3 empirically analyzes the effects of the gasoline excise tax on the purchase of gasoline grade. The results show that the per-unit excise tax causes consumers to substitute toward higher quality (higher octane) gasoline while the ad valorem excise tax exerts little influence on the purchase of gasoline grade. Chapter 4 builds upon the previous chapter by modifying the empirical model to control for spatial dependence and controlling for the impact that cross-border shopping may have on the purchase of quality. The results suggest that an increase in a state's per-unit excise tax induces two conflicting effects on the purchase of product quality, with the cross-border effect dominating the relative-price effect. Thus, an increase in a state's per-unit excise tax is found to cause a decline in average product quality in the state. Chapter 5 examines the potential for crowd-out in state highway financing. The results indicate that states respond to federal grants and state earmarked revenues similarly and that these sources of revenue do not cause crowding-out. Finally, Chapter 6 summarizes the major findings of the previous chapters and discusses areas of future research.

Virtual Private Machines: A resource abstraction for multicore computer systems

Nesbit, Kyle J The University of Wisconsin - Madison 2009 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Resource sharing is a common technique to improve the resource utilization of a computer system. If poorly managed, however, resource sharing can lead to unpredictable performance, which can violate applications' Quality of Service requirements. Traditionally, computer applications share resources at coarse granularities (e.g., complete processor(s) and physical memory pages), and conventional instruction set architecture features allow OS policies to manage sharing in order to ensure applications' performance requirements are satisfied. However, with the evolution toward single chip multicore hardware, threads can share fine-grained, microarchitecture hardware resources. To efficiently satisfy the demands of future platforms, multicore systems should employ coordinated hardware/software microarchitecture resource management. Coordinated microarchitecture resource management requires a well-structured framework for building solutions that can be tailored to applications' specific requirements. Such a framework should be consistent with established system abstractions and provide a distinct separation between mechanisms and policies. A system's mechanisms should provide a universal set of workload independent resource management primitives, and a system's policies should provide workload dependent resource management solutions. To this end, I introduce Virtual Private Machines (VPMs). The VPM abstraction acts as the interface between policies and mechanisms. A VPM consists of a complete set of virtual microarchitecture resources, where a virtual resource has both a microarchitectural component and a temporal component (time slices). By design, a VPM has the same performance characteristics as a real machine with an equivalent set of resources. VPM policies, implemented primarily in software, translate application performance objectives into VPM resource assignments, thereby managing system resources. Then, VPM mechanisms securely multiplex and arbitrate hardware resources to satisfy the VPM assignments.

The institutional context of volunteering: The impact of families, paid labor, state policies, and military service

Nesbit, Rebecca Ann Indiana University 2008 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

This dissertation explores whether institutions can impact civic engagement. Specifically, I look at the impact of families, the paid labor market, state-level civic service education policies, and the military. Most studies of volunteering focus on individual motivations and characteristics that drive volunteering. However, institutions can affect a person's motivations, skills and resources. Institutions like these can help to overcome some of the barriers to volunteering by providing people with the resources and skills necessary for volunteering, socializing people with values and motivations that support volunteering, or providing the social networks where people can be asked to volunteer. The data that I use to examine this question come from two sources---the 2003 Philanthropy Module of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the 2002/2005 September Volunteering Supplement of the Current Population Survey. My methods include logit and tobit regression analysis. The primary findings of this dissertation are that institutions do matter when it comes to volunteering, but that some institutions only have a weak effect on volunteering or that they only impact specific subgroups of the population. Of all the institutions studied, families have the strongest influence on volunteering; people are more likely to volunteer when others in their family also volunteer. For women, being employed was associated with greater volunteering. Some state-level high school volunteering policies impact the volunteering of males. Military service impacts the volunteering of minority veterans, married veterans, and older veterans. The results of this dissertation show that the relationship between institutions and volunteering is very strong for families, but weaker for other institutions. The relationship between participation in institutions other than the family and volunteering is complex because institutions do not impact the volunteering of all people equally.

Spaceport: Technical Lands for Departing Earth

Nesbit, Jeffrey S Harvard University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Blurring the color line: Racial identity construction of individuals in interracial families

Tracy, Sandy Nesbit Colorado State University 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Stories provide meaning and challenge prevailing thinking. This interdisciplinary narrative inquiry uses lenses of feminist standpoint theories, critical race theories, family systems theory, and symbolic interactionism to select stories from twelve individuals from interracial families to tell the value of lived experience in understanding race and racial identity. The twelve participants include seven women and five men ranging in age from 23 to 67 and in educational levels from high school to Ph.D. Their racial backgrounds include African American, American Indian, Japanese American, Mexican American, and Caucasian, including mixtures of the above. They are partners, wives, husbands, parents, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, and grandparents in families in which individuals identify with different races, through marriage, partnership, birth, and adoption. One participant is the adult daughter of the researcher. Each participant or couple is portrayed in an individual section with intercalary space, poetic representations, narratives, visual images of their hands, and a description by the researcher. A chapter on all participants' stories in different stages of harmony and cacophony compares and contrasts their stories on race, family, religion, community, work, school, historical context, adoption, and intersections of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. Participants' own words on what they want educators and community professionals to know are included. People in interracial families blur the color line that is so deeply entrenched within United States American culture. Their contexts---generation, geography, appearance, abilities, experiences, orientations, religion, families---influence their identities. They ask to be accepted, not "othered." Their stories continue their family stories in past, present, and future, speaking to a time for healing and harmony. This narrative inquiry reflects the tension of a push for traditional research according to certain formulas and a pull of feminist and borderland thinking that challenges the dominant culture. Privileging stories over numbers and questions over answers, this study invites the reader's participation.

"Beyond the power of criticism": Vulnerability and invulnerability for Cowper, Wordsworth, and Austen (William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen)

Gilman, Priscilla Nesbit Yale University 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

My dissertation takes part of its title from one of Francis Jeffrey's most notorious critical comments about Wordsworth: “the case of Mr. Wordsworth…is now manifestly hopeless, and we give up as altogether incurable, and beyond the power of criticism.” In fact, to move beyond the tyrannical power of criticism was just what Wordsworth and many later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century authors were aiming for. My dissertation examines the strategies and defenses, aggressions and evasions, with which writers in the period 1750–1830 negotiated the rising influence of literary criticism. I consider both criticism's increasing professionalization and dissemination and the attitudes taken towards it by imaginative authors in what <italic>Blackwood's Magazine</italic> declared “the most critical age ever the world produced.” While all writers in the period 1750–1820 respond in some way to the broad developments I describe, I focus my investigations on three authors—William Cowper, William Wordsworth, and Jane Austen—who have been traditionally considered especially detached from such concerns. I do so both in order to demonstrate the ubiquity of concern with criticism in the period and to explore the complex strategies with which unusually private and retiring writers confronted the threat of being exposed to public criticism. A focus on these authors' relation to criticism allows me to address various kinds of broader issues: writers' attitudes towards the concept of authorship, the nature of literary creativity, and authors' relation to their historical moment.

The G1 DNA damage checkpoint in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Fitz Gerald, Jonathan Nesbit The University of Chicago 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

소속기관이 구독 중이 아닌 경우 오후 4시부터 익일 오전 9시까지 원문보기가 가능합니다.

Inhibition of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) is a conserved downstream effect of DNA damage checkpoint signaling pathways in eukaryotes. This role in the regulation of cell proliferation and prevention of cancer has made CDK a leading target for rational drug design and chemotherapy. It is possible that <italic>S. cerevisiae</italic> CDK, Cdc28, may similarly respond to checkpoint signals, though currently no such Cdc28 function has been described. In this work, 6 point mutations in the <italic>CDC28</italic> gene were isolated that confer DNA damage checkpoint defects. Homology modeling of the <italic>CDC28 </italic> describes a putative N-terminal binding site that may function in this pathway. In these studies it was noticed that 40% of asynchronous wild-type yeast arrest as unbudded cells after 1600 Gy gamma irradiation. This suggests the existence of a novel G1 DNA damage checkpoint. DNA damage in G1 was found to delay onset of replication, bud emergence and spindle pole body duplication and to extend the window of sensitivity to the yeast mating pheromone. These findings all argue that DNA damage can inhibit the Start event in the yeast cell cycle. This G1 arrest is dose-dependent and requires the DNA damage detector <italic> RAD9</italic>, but not the DNA polymerase <italic>POL</italic>ϵ. Whether induced by lethal γ or UV irradiation, the <italic>RAD9</italic>- and <italic> RAD17</italic>-dependent G1 checkpoint arrest can be maintained over 18 hours. Sub-lethal γ irradiation causes haploid yeast to preferentially arrest in G1. This G1 arrest after γ irradiation is prolonged by defects in double-strand break repair, but UV irradiation requires excision repair to initiate an arrest. These results are consistent with single-strand DNA being the initiating signal of checkpoint arrest in G1. The molecular components of the G1 DNA damage checkpoint may provide novel targets for future chemotherapies in the treatment of cancer.