Organizational Unit:
School of Public Policy

Permanent Link
https://hdl.handle.net/1853/70716
Research Organization Registry ID
Description
Previous Names
Parent Organization
Parent Organization
Includes Organization(s)
ArchiveSpace Name Record
https://finding-aids.library.gatech.edu/agents/corporate_entities/1033

Filters

2023 4
4
3 1
4
Reset filters

Settings
End date: 2023 × Start date: 2023 × Item Type: Publication ×

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Three Essays on Skills and Individual Decision-Making
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-12-10) Churkina, Olga
    The dissertation examines the concept of skills, and and their impact on charitable giving behavior, labor market outcomes, and marital choices. The first essay conducts a controlled laboratory experiment, investigating the relationship between worker performance and their pro-social behavior in the context of charitable contributions. The second essay estimates the employment premium associated with online certificates in data science through a randomized field experiment. The third essay expands on a multi-period microeconomics model of educational and marital choices in developing countries. The outcomes of this study address questions that are shared concern for the academic community and policy-makers.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Public Use of Open Access Research: Evidence from the National Academies and Harvard DASH Repository
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-08-09) Doshi, Ameet
    Once only available to those with university or scientific affiliations, the peer-reviewed literature is increasingly globally accessible to anyone with internet access. Over the past 20 years, this “open access” (OA) movement has transformed publishing business models, and changed the ways scholars use and cite research. However, given this unprecedented level of access to scientific and technical information, do non-researchers, or lay persons, who are not steeped in the foundational knowledge of a field use this information? Specialist knowledge requires effort by the general public to understand (Epstein, 1996; Savolainen, 1995; Shen, 1975). What motivates people to overcome obstacles to find and synthesize scholarly research into their everyday lives? The proposed research seeks to better understand this phenomenon in an emerging era of open access to science. There is an increase in government mandates to make publicly-funded research open (for example: NIH Open Access policy, OSTP Public Access Plan, EU Plan S). These mandates implicitly and explicitly assume that non-researchers desire access to, and can make productive use of, scientific literature. Thus, the question of how the public uses open access scholarship is a policy relevant inquiry worthy of study. As more journals offer (sometimes costly) OA options for publication in response to institutional mandates we can anticipate continued growth of openly accessible peer-reviewed science. Yet evidence is lacking about why non-researchers seek, read and integrate OA into their lives. Generally, there is a need to better understand open access use from the public’s perspective. This is a policy relevant area of inquiry since federal and international mandates are changing the way research is published, ostensibly to expand access to a wider array of society. Yet very little empirical work exists to understand if, and why, non-researchers use open access research. My thesis aims to fill this gap.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Who Owns America? A Methodology for Identifying Landlords’ Ownership Scale and the Implications for Targeted Code Enforcement
    ( 2023-05) An, Brian Y. ; Jakabovics, Andrew ; Orlando, Anthony W. ; Rodnyansky, Seva ; Son, Eunjee
    Scholars and practitioners are increasingly interested in understanding who owns real estate in communities and resultant implications for targeted planning approaches. Yet, practitioners lack an efficient and comprehensive methodology to assess landlords’ ownership scale, namely how many properties they own in a given geographic area. The existence of variegated ownership, multiple legal entities, siloed databases within government bureaucracies, and inconsistencies in spelling and documentation across data entries make it time-consuming and costly to determine the extent of real estate ownership by the same landlords. To address these challenges, this study provides a data-driven natural language processing solution. Using OpenRefine, an open-source software, we present a step-by-step, practice-oriented methodology for amassing data, cleaning textual inconsistencies, and clustering properties to uncover the truer ownership scale in local housing markets. Applied to a large U.S. urban county—Fulton, home to Atlanta, Georgia—our proposed methodology demonstrates its superior efficiency, comprehensiveness, and accuracy, compared to traditional approaches. Using code enforcement as a study frame, we then empirically examine a linkage between landlords’ ownership scale and their code violation patterns. With the proposed methodology in place, the analysis consistently shows that the ownership scale is related to both the likelihood and number of code violations. In contrast, the analysis misses such a critical linkage without applying the methodology. Our methodology yields practical implications regarding targeted code enforcement.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Essays in Education Policy Analytics: Prediction of At-Risk Students, International Mobility, Cognitive Trade-Offs
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-03-21) Zullo, Matteo
    The dissertation includes three essays contributing to our understanding of human capital development and student talent allocation. The first essay provides insights into the impact of algorithmic student advising programs, while the second essay highlights the role of higher education agencies in promoting international student mobility. The third essay evaluates the cognitive development trade-offs entailed by technical coursework. The first essay discusses the Graduation and Progression (GPS) program, which is an algorithmic student advising platform implemented by Georgia State University. The study analyzes the impact of this program on student course-taking by comparing GPS-advised students with those who did not receive advising. The study failed to credit the program to have increased graduation rates by improving academic fit but found that marginal students tended to leave college earlier. Also, the study provides evidence of assortative matching between students and course selection, albeit only for STEM Computational majors. The second essay examines the relationship between the 1996-2016 expansion of the German agency DAAD's outbound offices and international student enrollment in Germany. The findings suggest that an increase in the number of DAAD offices has a positive impact on international student enrollment in Germany, and that the first office foundation has the largest effect. The study concludes by discussing the policy implications of these findings for countries competing in the global race for talent. The third essay evaluates cognitive development trade-offs between numeracy and literacy skills. The study uses PISA data and analyzes the educational and financial gains from technical education versus the potential underdevelopment of verbal skills. The study finds that the technical track outperforms the Liberal Arts track due to greater educational production efficiency, which overcompensates for worse educational production inputs. The findings suggest that the STEM advantage is linked to the four additional instructional units in math and physics, and that there are no secondary effects due to differences in preexisting levels of student skills.