Browsing by Subject "Public"
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Item A fiscal neutrality analysis of the equity consequences of recalculating the local wealth component of the Texas Education finance plan(Texas Tech University, 1996-08) Koeninger, Larry D.Swanson and King (1991) and Oakland (1994) stated that by sharing revenues from windfalls, such as natural resources, industrial plants, and utilities plants, local tax base values would be more equitable. Smith (1994) and Stark (1992) found that redistributing specified classifications of local property wealth in Illinois and Indiana created more equitable school finance plans in those states. This study examined the equity consequences of recalculating the local tax base in the Texas school finance system. For the purposes of this study, properties which were classified by the state as commercial, industrial, mineral, or utilities property, were taxed at the state level rather than the local level. Business property taxes (commercial, industrial, mineral, and utilities property combined) accounted for approximately 51 per cent of revenues generated by the local property tax, in 1994, in Texas.Item An analysis of the effect of auditee-based, auditor-based, and audit risk factors on the discovery and reporting of compliance deficiencies and their association with single audit quality(Texas Tech University, 1994-12) Aldhizer, George R,The Single Audit Act of 1984 was adopted by Congress to improve efficiency and effectiveness in audits of federal financial assistance administered through state and local governments (SLGs). As a result, Congress hoped to provide greater assurance as to the credibility of SLG compliance with federal assistance guidelines. This research studied the relationships between a comprehensive set of auditee-based, auditor-based, and audit risk factors and two output indicators of single audit quality. The output indicators of quality are based on auditor findings included in single audit reports. Data were collected for 1987 and 1991. 1987 was selected in order to allow public accounting firms a one year grace period to become more familiar with the Act, since it did not take effect until 1986. Changes in the results between 1987 and 1991 were examined. This study sent out a request to all U.S. cities with a population size of at least 25,000. This request sought copies of their 1987 and 1991 single audit reports and a response to a questionnaire. The data were analyzed using tobit and logit regression. The overall tobit models for 1987 and 1991 were highly statistically significant. All but one of the individual auditee-based, auditor-based and audit risk factors in 1987 were significantly associated with the output indicator. In 1991, only two factors were significantly associated with the output indicator. The overall logit model results also were statistically significant. The coefficient signs for the eight factors were generally consistent with the tobit results. The statistical analyses added validity to the descriptive results. However, only one auditee-based factor was significantly associated with the output indicator of quality.Item Circling the drain: content analysis of cost reduction documents from financially exigent school districts in the State of Texas(Texas Tech University, 2004-05) Rees, Reagan CarterNot availableItem Decremental budgeting in an incremental era: a study of the central-provincial budgetary relationship in the People's Republic of China after 1978(Texas Tech University, 1995-05) Yan, BaiThe Caiden and Wildavsky work of 1974 postulates a model of poverty-uncertainty: the governments of poor countries face disappearing and decremental budgets in financing public programs because of a lack of economic growth or poverty. The core argument is that economic development, as a critical variable, determines increments in budgeting practices. In other words, budgeting is incremental, and incremental budgeting results from the growth of GNP. This model has since become a set of principles with identifiable attributes to explain the budgetary processes in poor nations. This study is about application of that model in China's budgeting. China has a unitary budget system. The central government used to draw most of its revenues from provinces and its budget includes those of 31 provinces. Provinces thus play a dual role of collecting revenues from within and remitting them to the center in the name of revenue sharing. In 1978 China decided to open to the world, reform its economy, and decentralize budget to provinces. But the original intent of decentralization was to give incentives so that provinces accumulate more resources for further central extraction. The decentralization, however, has led to fiscal decline not anticipated by the reformers.Item Digging through time: psychogeographies of occupation(2015-12) Simblist, Noah Leon; Reynolds, Ann Morris; El-Ariss, Tarek; Mulder, Stephennie; Di-Capua, Yoav; Flaherty, GeorgeThis dissertation is about the relationship between contemporary art and politics in the case of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Specifically, I look at the ways that artists have dealt with the history of this region and its impact on the present, using four moments as the subject of the following chapters: ancient Palestine, the Holocaust, The nakba, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The historiographical impulse has a particular resonance for artists making work about the Middle East, a political space where competing historical narratives are the basis for disagreements about sovereignty. I focus on works by Avi Mograbi, Gilad Efrat, Ayreen Anastas, Amir Yatziv, Yael Bartana, Omer Fast, Khaled Hourani, Dor Guez, Campus in Camps, and Akram Zaatari. A number of patterns emerge when we look at how these artists approach history. One is the tendency for artists to act like historians. As a subset of this tendency is the archival impulse, wherein artists use found photographs, film or documents to intervene in normative representations of history. Another is for artists to act like archaeologists, digging up repressed histories. Another is to commemorate a traumatic event in a way that rejects traditional forms of memorialization such as monuments. At the core of each chapter are examples of artistic practices that use conversation as a medium. I analyze these conversations about history as a dialogical practice and argue that this methodology offers a uniquely productive opportunity to work through the ideologies embedded within the psychogeographies of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Within these conversations and other aesthetic structures, I argue that these artists emphasize the all too common challenge in producing new forms of civic imagination – the tendency to address historical trauma though repetition compulsion and melancholia. They react to this challenge by engaging collective memory, producing counter-memories and, in some cases, produce counterpublics.Item Learning to write in (networked) public: children and the delivery of writing online(2014-12) Roach, Audra Katherine; Bomer, Randy; Hoffman, Jim; Maloch, Beth; Schallert, Diane; Hodgson, JustinThis investigation explored how three children (together with parents) developed networked publics that were diverse, well-connected, and powerful in the world. It was framed in response to calls in the field to better understand the new literacies young writers develop online and outside of school, and to increase literacy educators’ attention to the role of public audiences in writing and how writing is circulated. Performative case study methodology, ethnographic methods, and digital methods were employed to track and describe the online networks of three children (ages 11-13). These focal children were actively involved with their parents in social media, and had developed widespread networks with shared interests in children’s books and book reviews (Case 1), baseball (Case 2), and helping the homeless (Case 3). The children’s online networks were conceptualized as networked publics, drawing on Warner’s (2002) notion of publics as ongoing discursive relations among strangers, and on Actor-Network Theory’s notion of networks as assemblages of diverse interests that mobilize toward a common goal (Callon, 1986) and that develop stability in relation to ongoing circulations of texts (Latour, 1986; Spinuzzi, 2008). Research questions were framed broadly around the rhetorical canon of delivery [now digital delivery (Porter, 2009)], and were concerned with how writers distributed texts online, how those texts circulated, how the networked publics become more stable and powerful, and what instabilities children and parents had to negotiate in order to accomplish all of this. Data sources included interviews with 15 children and 28 adults, and fieldnotes observations of approximately 1,700 screen-captured webpages and other online artifacts. Findings showed that the young writers and their parents initiated and sustained networked publics through distribution practices that were oriented toward building trust; their texts displayed: interest, appreciation, reliability, service, credibility, and responsiveness. Both grassroots and commercial entities circulated texts in these networks, as they were sources of the ongoing renewal these different groups all needed in order to thrive. Sources of instability included conflicts over standards of writing quality, matters of profit, and the constancy of the demand to generate new interest and writing online. Children and their parents responded to these instabilities by welcoming and negotiating heterogeneous perspectives and partnerships. Implications of the study call for further research and teaching about the art of networked public discourse and digital delivery.Item Local government taxation in Texas: with special emphasis on Lubbock(Texas Tech University, 1963-06) Elliott, Charles P.NOT AVAILABLEItem Municipal economic growth through green projects and policies(2012-05) Lindner, Harry Dreyfus; Gamkhar, ShamaCities generally need economic growth. Green policies and projects are environmentally beneficial, desirable, expected by the public, and pragmatic in the long term. However, there is insufficient research on what, if any, municipal green projects and policies generate economic growth. To address this question, the author created a database of green and economic indicators, and modeled the green indicators to predict the economic indicators. The database included carbon usage, transportation metrics, water usage, the number of green jobs, and the gross domestic product (GDP) for the 100 largest cities, defined by metropolitan statistical area (MSA), in the U.S. To gather data on green indicators, existing green rankings, indices, and reports were evaluated for methodology and usability for this paper. The results of the data-gathering step show the need for more and better data collection. That means an increased number of green indicators should be collected, and data should be collected at the MSA (or county) level for more of the largest cities. Specifically to name some green indicators, data collection on energy usage, buildings, waste, land use, air quality, and food could be improved. Those green indicators would likely be included in a model that uses green indicators to predict green jobs or GDP. However, those were not included for the regressions in this paper. The results of the regressions in this paper show two indicators with promise for predicting economic growth as defined by GDP and number of green jobs: (1) percent of people using public transportation, biking, or walking to work, and (2) public water consumption per person. The first explanatory variable indirectly measures the adoption of policies that promote public transportation, biking, and walking. The results suggest that these policies have a positive effect on GDP and number of green jobs. This means the results suggest that as the percent increases, so does GDP and number of green jobs. The second explanatory variable measures the water conservation policies. The results suggest this variable has a negative, albeit weaker relationship with GDP per person. This means the results suggest as water conservation increases (less water usage per person), the GDP per person increases. This paper offers a methodology and some of the groundwork for building a model to show which, if any, municipal green projects and policies predict economic growth.Item Social forces and hedonic adaptation(2013-05) Chugani, Sunaina Kumar; Irwin, Julie R.Consumers acquire products to enhance their lives, but the happiness from these acquisitions generally decreases with the passage of time. This process of hedonic adaptation plays an integral role in post-acquisition consumer satisfaction, product disposal and replacement behavior, and the "hedonic treadmill" that partially drives the relationship between consumption and happiness. Humans are social animals, however, and we know little about the relationship between the social environment and hedonic adaptation. My dissertation addresses this gap by exploring the moderating role of social presence (Essay 1) and self-concepts (Essay 2) on hedonic adaptation to products. Essay 1 explores how social presence affects hedonic adaptation to products. Research on general happiness has shown that significantly positive life events tend to maintain their positivity for longer periods of time when they involve active social interactions. I examine a more common situation in the domain of product consumption, i.e., the presence of others during consumption, and test whether hedonic adaptation to products is moderated by public contexts. By tracking happiness with products over time, I show that a "social audience" (i.e., the presence of others and the perception that those others notice the consumer) moderates hedonic adaptation through a consumer's inference of the social audience perspective. Inferring that the social audience is admiring one's product slows down adaptation, and inferring that the social audience is negatively viewing one's product accelerates adaptation. Essay 2 explores the role the identity-relevance of a product plays in hedonic adaptation. Extant research illustrates that consumers avoid consuming identity-inconsistent products in order to avoid dissonance arising from product choices conflicting with important self-concepts. I show that dissonance can also arise from consuming identity-consistent products because of the force of hedonic adaptation. I provide evidence that consumers feel uncomfortable experiencing declining happiness with identity-consistent products and thus resist hedonic adaptation to such products in order to resolve the dissonance.Item The origin, measurement and implications of the indirect national debt(Texas Tech University, 1956-08) Witt, JarvisNot available