Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)

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    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 Hill
    Nonprofit 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.
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    The effects of flood zone designations on land development
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2024) Poteet, Samantha Joy; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Nick Hagerty
    In 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.
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    Dam removals: an agricultural analysis
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2024) Bush, Nathan Alexander; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Melissa C. LoPalo
    Dam 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.
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    The effect of conservation easements on residential housing prices in the contiguous United States: a county-level panel data approach
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2024) Hillis, Holly Leigh; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Nicole Karwowski
    Permanent conservation easements, an increasingly popular conservation tool, may increase the average sales price of nearby homes due to an interaction between supply and demand effects. I use panel data from the contiguous United States from 2001-2022 in a two-way fixed effect model to identify the causal effect of additional conservation easement acres on a county's median housing price. I find a statistically significant average increase of about $885.10 or 0.64% after a 1% increase in county land acreage under easement. The magnitude and direction of this effect varies depending on county characteristics, such as ruralness, population density, and building density, as well as the specific type of conservation easement. An overall rise in housing prices may have effects on property taxes, making these findings particularly relevant for homeowners and policymakers.
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    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. LoPalo
    The 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.
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    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 Swensen
    Civil 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.
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    Evaluating the impact of permanent school closure
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2022) Robinson, Willard Montellous, IV; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Gregory Gilpin
    In 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.
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    Evolutionary combinatorial optimization on the grain mixing problem
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2022) Noor, Md Asaduzzaman; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: John Sheppard
    Combinatorial 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.
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    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 Yaw
    Studies 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.
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    Navigating the local costs and benefits of modern mineral mines: the role of non-regulatory agreements
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2020) Rose, Jackson Cooper; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Julia Hobson Haggerty; Julia H. Haggerty was a co-author of the article, 'Navigating the local costs and benefits of modern mineral mines: the role of non-regulatory agreements' submitted to the journal 'Society and Natural Resources' which is contained within this thesis.
    This thesis explores natural resource development at the local level from the perspective of resource peripheries in the United States. Using three case studies--two in Montana and one in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan--this study combines qualitative mixed-methods with on-the-ground experience to explore the dynamics of the costs and benefits of extractive industries in the context of short-duration, high-impact underground mines. Research questions focused on the specific concerns and priorities in each place and the novel tools communities are using to address both short-term impacts and long-term economic development. The methodology relied on in-person, semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, participant observation, and document and policy analysis. Results reveal that rural places share similar concerns tied to these projects, although multiple stakeholder groups often have divergent ideas and priorities. Non-regulatory agreements show promise as a tool for stakeholder groups to navigate the balancing act of mining projects, but the initiatives found in these agreements are often affected by classic dilemmas facing resource peripheries as well as individual places' institutional and regulatory context. Findings also suggest that communities are granted a limited window of opportunity to maximize their negotiating power in the social license to operate process. Ultimately, non-regulatory agreements should be tailored to fill regulatory gaps and, in the best cases, are able to focus on delivering lasting economic benefits from short-term mining developments.
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