Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item The effect of peer ratings on nonprofit contributions: evidence from charity navigator(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2024) Pela, Tavio Aleksandrs; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Andrew HillNonprofit rating organizations publish third-party assessments of nonprofit organizations for current and prospective donors. Using charity-level yearly financial and ratings data for organizations rated by Charity Navigator, a prominent nonprofit rating organization, I employ a regression discontinuity design to investigate whether a charity's total contributions are impacted by changes in the ratings of its competitors. I find a negative relationship between current-period peer rating and current-period contributions, which is consistent with peer ratings being used to inform donation decisions between comparable organizations. However, difficulty substantiating a key identifying assumption of the RDD raises doubts that these findings identify a causal relationship.Item The effects of flood zone designations on land development(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2024) Poteet, Samantha Joy; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Nick HagertyIn 2017, Hurricane Harvey hit Harris County, Texas and caused devastating flood damages. These flood damages were exacerbated by a rapid land development. This paper estimates the impact of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) high risk flood zone designation, the Special Flood Hazard Area (SFHA), on land development. FEMA's flood maps convey information to homeowners regarding their property's flood risk and requires flood insurance for most properties in the SFHA. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design I find evidence of a 64% decrease in land development just inside of the SFHA boundary line. These results suggest FEMA can significantly impact the allocation of land development with the SFHA designation. Currently, FEMA underestimates flood risk, accurately assessing flood risk can help better prepare homeowners for future flooding events and allocate future land development in a more socially optimal way.Item Dam removals: an agricultural analysis(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2024) Bush, Nathan Alexander; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa C. LoPaloDam removals are occurring with increased frequency throughout the United States. 77% of all dam removal projects in U.S. history have occurred in the 21st century and the number of dams being removed each year is rising. Dams often play a key role in agricultural production, making it important for agricultural producers and policymakers to understand the effects of these removals as they become more common. This paper explores the causal effects of dam removal on agricultural productivity in the United States using a two-way fixed effects event study and an instrumental variable framework. Primary results of the analysis are mixed and differ based on exact specifications used but show initial evidence of per acre crop productivity increases and cash receipt declines following a removal. Further research is needed to explore the fine-scale effects of dam removals on individual agricultural producers and to expand on the preliminary causal relationships observed in this paper.Item The water quality impacts of critical habitat designation for endangered species(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2023) Carr, Taurey Rosenhahn; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa C. LoPaloThe Endangered Species Act of 1973 [ESA] is well-known by environmental economists for its extensive provisions that create a variety of impacts on housing, land development, timber harvesting, etc. However, the ESA's impact on water quality has not been formally studied despite being discussed extensively by federal agencies that administer the Act. I estimate the causal effect of critical habitat designation, an ESA provision that regulates land use, on a range of water quality outcomes. Using administrative data on water quality from 1970-2018, I employ event study and difference-in-differences [DiD] empirical models to evaluate temporal and spatial changes in water quality resulting from plausibly exogenous variation in critical habitat designations. I find null results for most water quality outcomes and mixed evidence of a decrease in pH after designations occur. However, pooled DiD results find no evidence of average declines in pH in the years following designation. Slight declines in pH from the event-study results are concentrated partially in urban areas and primarily around critical habitat designations involving fish species. Results provide some evidence that fish designations may result in more significant water quality impacts after designation across pH and additional outcomes than all designations on average. These results add to a body of research that questions if other species conservation provisions may lead to more efficient outcomes than critical habitat designation.Item Is sharing really caring? Estimating the effects of federal asset forfeiture revenue sharing on local policing outcomes(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2023) Buzzard, Jadon Jediah; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Isaac SwensenCivil asset forfeiture, whereby police agencies may profit from seized assets without a criminal conviction, is a contentious practice. Despite high-profile instances of abuse, law enforcement has made strong claims that forfeiture provides a critical funding mechanism for police departments. This paper offers a unique strategy to identify the causal relationship between asset forfeiture revenue and local policing outcomes, measured by crime reports and clearances (a standard proxy for police effort). I estimate the impact of a temporary suspension of Equitable Sharing, a program allowing local police agencies to financially benefit from asset forfeitures done in collaboration with federal law enforcement. The suspension was a plausibly exogenous shock to the forfeiture revenue received by participating police agencies. I exploit pre-suspension variation in program participation to study this interruption as a quasi-experiment; using a difference-in-differences design, my model estimates the differential impact of the suspension on participating agencies (treated) relative to non-participating agencies (control). My results indicate that the suspension led to a 4.7% increase in the number of violent crimes reported within participating agency jurisdictions relative to the baseline mean, but it also offers suggestive evidence of a small (2.5%) decrease in property crime reports as a result of the suspension. These effects appear to cancel out, producing a consistent null effect on total crime reports. While my results for violent crime are quite robust, the results for property crimes are more sensitive to model specification. My results for crime clearances also turn out to be inconclusive; as such, further research is required to determine whether the suspension's impact on crime reports stems from a change in police effort or an alternative explanatory mechanism.Item Community resilience in remote, resource-dependent communities: a case study of the U.S. coal transition(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2022) Roemer, Kelli Frances; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Julia Hobson Haggerty; This is a manuscript style paper that includes co-authored chapters.The United States is undergoing a significant energy system transition characterized by widespread retirement of coal-fired electricity generation facilities. In the next ten years, nearly 30 percent of the nation's coal power plant fleet will retire. The US West hosts a significant portion of these closures, with twenty-five generating units of coal-fired electricity retiring across six Western states. Retirements pose immediate social, economic, and environmental challenges for the localities and regions that host power plants and associated mines. Affected communities need to both plan for loss of employment and tax revenue and ensure thorough decommissioning and remediation of a major industrial facility. Successfully addressing the social, economic, and environmental legacies at coal facilities presents opportunities for enhancing equity and justice in rural energy communities. However, determining the appropriate policy and planning response to address challenges affecting fossil fuel-dependent communities drives significant debate over the implications of accelerating decarbonization in rural places. Interdependent social, political, economic, historical, and environmental processes influence community experiences of coal decline in the US West. This dissertation explores how such factors enable or constrain the resilience of coal-dependent communities to economic decline, where resilience refers to the capacity of a social system to mobilize its resources and respond to shock. This research is thus informed by and contributes to the multidisciplinary literature on resource geography, community resilience, and energy transitions. It makes the following contributions: (1) it investigates how federal and state policies influence community resilience pathways and decision-making at the local level; (2) it identifies and characterizes processes that constrain resilience or enable rural communities to overcome challenges and foster new trajectories; and (3) it identifies specific policies and strategies to support communities navigating energy transition and socioeconomic uncertainty. To make these contributions, this dissertation engages a mixed-methods approach, combining policy analysis and qualitative data collection to examine the coal transition in the US West at the regional and local scale.Item Evaluating the impact of permanent school closure(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2022) Robinson, Willard Montellous, IV; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Gregory GilpinIn any given school year, about seven percent of all U.S. public school districts will close one of its schools. In the years directly following the Great Recession, school closure increased by up to 5 percentage points. School closures can be devastating events that disrupt student and teacher routines, separate peer groups, and potentially overextend the resources of receiving schools. As a result, they are usually the last result of a school district to decrease funding. Closing a school allows districts to reduce spending by decreasing expenditures on building maintenance and operation. School closure was a tool used by districts to alleviate the financial distress following the extreme negative effects on public education caused by the Great Recession. During the recent Covid-19 pandemic, state funds began to follow similar trajectories to the 2008 recession. Thus, we ask ourselves 'what could we have done differently in response to the Great Recession?' This question is worth examining as it allows us to develop better policy in the wake of budget shocks that U.S. districts almost faced. While a closure is hard on a district, it can also provide a unique opportunity to re-allocate resources within the district to be more efficiently allocated. In normal years, tenure makes teacher re-allocation difficult, but the significant change in the educational environment brought about by closure can provide an opportunity to re-orient staff. Do districts take advantage of this opportunity? In this paper, I test the hypothesis that school districts used school closures as an opportunity to re-allocate resources in the wake of serious declining funds caused by the Great Recession. My results do not show convincing evidence that districts induced to close a school from the Great Recession's budget shocks used the opportunity to re-orient staff. This could be for two reasons: (1) they are not realizing the opportunity they have or (2) they are already allocating resources efficiently and that is not affected by the change in educational setting. If the first reason is the reality, this suggests that districts did not respond optimally to the event of school closure.Item Evolutionary combinatorial optimization on the grain mixing problem(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2022) Noor, Md Asaduzzaman; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: John SheppardCombinatorial optimization is an important area in computer science that uses combinatorics to solve discrete optimization problems. In this thesis, we considered a combinatorial optimization problem in the wheat supply chain known as grain mixing. The grain mixing problem involves mixing two or more collections of grain with different protein content to produce collections of grain with a weighted average protein content that improves the overall profit to the farmer. The presence of non-linearity in the objective function and some of the constraints in the grain mixing problem makes the problem difficult to solve exactly using linear programming (LP) or mixed-integer LP models. First, we presented an NP-Hardness proof for the grain mixing problem to justify the use of approximation algorithms. Then we explored several approaches to solve the grain mixing problem. For the approximation algorithms, we adapted two evolutionary approaches (EA) for the grain mixing problem: Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Differential Evolution (DE). We developed a pseudo-permutation-based representation for the EAs for which the conventional crossover operator for GA and mutation operator for DE had to be adapted to fit our problem representation. Specifically, we adapted two crossover operators for GA: Ordered Crossover (OX) and Partially Mapped Crossover (PMX), and two discrete mutation operators for DE: Relative Position Indexing (RPI) and Global Best Perturbation (GBP). Moreover, we introduced and compared three baseline approaches: no mixing, greedy mixing, and random mixing to evaluate the solution quality of the proposed EA approaches. The experimental results demonstrate that solutions obtained from the evolutionary approaches consistently provided a higher overall profit compared to the non-evolutionary baseline methods for both real and simulated datasets. It also suggests that grain mixing is beneficial to improve farmers' overall wheat selling profitability.Item Effects of tax credits on carbon capture and sequestration in a multi-phased model(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2021) Strahan, Cooper Davis; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Sean YawStudies have consistently shown that the increase of CO 2 in the atmosphere is correlated to rising temperatures. In order to stop the rise in global temperatures, climate change mitigation strategies will need to be deployed at scale. All of the plans that meet the goal of staying below 2 °C include CO 2 capture and storage (CCS) as one of those strategies. CCS is a climate change mitigation strategy aimed at reducing the amount of CO 2 vented into the atmosphere by capturing CO 2 emissions from industrial sources, transporting the CO 2 via a dedicated pipeline network, and injecting it into geologic reservoirs. Designing CCS infrastructure is a complex problem requiring concurrent optimization of source selection, reservoir selection, and pipeline routing decisions. Current CCS infrastructure design methods assume that project parameters including costs, capacities, and availability, remain constant throughout the project's lifespan. In this research, we introduce a novel, multi-phased, CCS infrastructure design model that allows for analysis of more complex scenarios that allow for variations in project parameters across distinct phases. We also apply this new model to a study exploring the impacts of modifying CCS tax credits on the economic viability of CCS projects.Item Improving malt barley agronomics via allelic selection of senescence and flowering time controlling genes(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2020) Alptekin, Burcu; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Andreas M. Fischer; Dylan Mangel, Duke Pauli, Tom Blake, Jennifer Lachowiec, Traci Hoogland, Andreas Fischer and Jamie Sherman were co-authors of the article, 'Combined effects of glycine-rich RNA binding protein and a NAC transcription factor extend grain fill duration and improve malt barley agronomic performance' submitted to the journal 'Theoretical and applied genetics' which is contained within this thesis.; Dylan Mangel, Duke Pauli, Tom Blake, Jennifer Lachowiec, Jamie Sherman and Andreas Fischer were co-authors of the article, 'Dissecting the effects of senescence-regulating HvNAM1 and HvNAM2 transcription factors on malt barley agronomics' submitted to the journal 'Molecular breeding' which is contained within this thesis.; Dylan Mangel, Duke Pauli, Tom Blake, Hannah Turner, Jennifer Lachowiec, Jamie Sherman and Andreas Fischer were co-authors of the article, 'Allelic selection of senescence and flowering time controlling genes confers malt extract stability' submitted to the journal 'Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists' which is contained within this thesis.Malt barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) is a high-profit crop for farmers; yet, its production raises challenges that need to be addressed. The standards for grain quality in malt barley are stringent, and the rejection of non-qualified grains by maltsters is the leading cause of revenue loss for malt barley producers. Rejection is mainly due to high grain protein content and low kernel plumpness which both cause significant problems in the malting process. While proper growing practices can improve malt quality, the industry requires genotypes that have more stable malt quality. Therefore, understanding the molecular mechanisms associated with grain quality can be applied to improve selection of superior malt varieties. A considerable volume of literature has suggested that regulation of whole-plant senescence and flowering processes in cereals have direct influences on grain yield and quality parameters. The central question in this dissertation examined whether malt barley agronomic and end use quality can be improved by the selection of varying alleles for genes associated with plant development. With this purpose, two whole-plant senescence-regulating NAM, ATAF and CUC (NAC) transcription factors, HvNAM1 and HvNAM2, and a flowering-time controlling Glycine-Rich RNA Binding Protein (HvGR-RBP1) were studied. Molecular markers for selection of alleles from varieties 'Karl' (with consistently low grain protein) and 'Lewis' were developed, and an advanced-generation malt barley breeding population was genotyped. Statistical analysis of growth parameters from this population showed that selection of HvNAM1 'Karl', HvNAM2 'Karl' and HvGR-RBP1 'Lewis' alleles ensures a longer grain filling period in malt barley. Plants with prolonged grain filling also exhibited increased kernel plumpness and test weight. Additionally, selection of 'Karl' alleles for both NAC genes decreased grain protein content ensuring grain quality for malting. The improvement of grain characteristics correlated with improved malt phenotypes, for example a ~2% increase in malt extract, and improvement in other malt characteristics such as beta-glucan content and alpha-amylase activity was observed. Overall, these data show that molecular genetics and allelic selection for genes controlling plant development is promising for advancing malt quality. Research performed here has a direct potential for improving the profits for malt barley producers.