Browsing by Subject "Policy analysis"

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Contemporary policy issues in the State of Texas : a series of policy analyses
(2015-08) Sandberg, Faith Erin; Rodriguez, Victoria Elizabeth, 1954-; McDaniel Rhodes, Diane
This report is a combination of individual policy analyses on food deserts, groundwater management, teenage pregnancy, and transportation capacity in the State of Texas. Additionally, an analysis on the gender pay gap viewed from the national level is included. These analyses suggest the critical importance of all five issues to the future of Texas as the state faces continued population growth and changing demographics. Furthermore, taken in tandem, these policy issues present an opportunity to reconsider the approach of policymakers working toward achieving social and economic justice. The commonalities amongst these issues suggest that moving from a policy agenda centered around a core of social issues to a broad, all-encompassing agenda that considers the disparate impact of issues like water scarcity and traffic congestion may have a more profound impact on the eradication of social and economic injustice.
Essays on shared micromobility in the US
(2023-12) Erkan, Hale; Stamatopoulos, Ioannis; Sanders, Robbie; Muthuraman, Kumar; Agarwal, Ashish
The emergence of dockless electric scooters in 2018 transformed urban transportation seemingly overnight. As a new PhD student, I witnessed firsthand the immense popularity gains of e scooters, with over 220 million trips taken in just 4 short years. In this thesis, I tackle pressing policy questions surrounding scooter oversupply, equitable fleet distribution, and day-to-day operations. Using data-driven models and simulations, I delineate how policymakers could regulate firms to address problems like oversupply and inequity, ensuring scooters enhance, rather than hinder, city transportation networks. My research combines empirical analysis, game theory, and optimization modeling to evaluate real world policies and uncover actionable insights for regulators overseeing this rapidly evolving mobility innovation.
The historical origins of wilderness management : a comparative analysis of fixed anchor policy
(1999) Scales, Thomas Arthur; Trubowitz, Peter
Driven by normative concerns with the inherent tension between bureaucratic accountability and discretion, much of the public administration literature places explanatory primacy on the procedural evolution of proposed rules and policies. While perhaps advantageous from a reformative standpoint, such studies provide little insight into the nature and origins of the agency preferences which underpin these proposed rules and policies. Employing a preprocedural analytical framework, this study attempts to explain variation in agency preferences concerning the management of fixed climbing anchors in designated wilderness areas. The author suggests that this variation in preferences may be a function of distinctive, historically based management traditions which have developed within the agencies
A multifocal analysis of Korean educational policies on the teaching profession
(2011-05) Kim, Kyu Tae; Reyes, Pedro, 1954-; Sharpe, Edwin R.; Young, Michelle D.; Holme, Jennifer J.; Sakamoto, Arthur
Korean education policies were derived from the 5.31 Education Reform oriented to the increase of autonomy and accountability for school effectiveness and the quality instruction through teacher professionalism enhancement. The policies are related to the influences of historical events and contexts embedded in the interactions of policy players who have their own arguments, particularly professionalism versus managerialism. The policies have been driven by right-wing perspectives. As a result, the roles, powers, functions, and structures of teaching profession have gradually changed. From the structural analysts, Basil Bernstein and Michel Foucault, teaching profession has become a system of supervision, compliance, normalization, isomorphism related to the collection code. The dynamic, complex and multilevel policy implementation need to be analyzed from a multifocal approach coupled with historical institutional, political, and structural analysis. This analysis contributes to understanding the changes of teaching profession resulted from intricate and dynamic interactions embedded in policy environments causing or influencing policy implementation directly and indirectly. Korean educational policy analysts, generally, tend to use one of the institutional, the political, and the structural perspective. Most policy analyses are concerned with the political analysis focused on exploring the political interaction between policy players, presenting policy issues and alternatives, analyzing the new institutionalism of education policy formation and implementation process, and influencing of policies on school organization and teachers apart from the political environment and the political interactions. In this respect, the multifocal policy analysis will be beneficial to shed light on a multifocal analysis of Korean educational policies.
Operations research models of technology transitions and the role of policy support
(2020-05-05) Brozynski, Max Tomasz; Leibowicz, Benjamin D.; Bickel, James E; Hasenbein, John J; Olmstead, Sheila; Webber, Michael E
Technology exists to fulfill functions in society, and technological innovations are continuously proposed to fulfill a particular function more effectively than an incumbent technology. These innovations are disseminated through society in a process called technology diffusion, and may ultimately replace an incumbent system in what is known as a technology transition. Due to the complex and uncertain underlying processes of technology adoption and diffusion, technical systems are resistant to transition to possibly superior alternatives. To address market, systemic, and structural failures preventing a desired technology transition, a policymaker, or other motivated agent, may strategically intervene to stimulate or accelerate the diffusion process. The success or failure of such policy intervention carries crucial implications for climate change mitigation, healthcare advances, and any other aspect of society that technology touches. However, existing models of optimal technology policy design omit or otherwise offer crude representations of these underlying processes and are largely case-specific at the expense of gleaning generalizable insights. The goal of this dissertation is to advance the operations research modeling of technology transitions and the role of policy support. Through a variety of powerful operations research methodologies and relevant case studies, the individual projects in this dissertation offer novel models of technology transitions and insights into real-world technology policy, especially in the energy and climate domain. The three core chapters of this dissertation begin with the development of an applied energy system optimization model to assess a real-world climate policy, then move on to present two novel theoretical models that yield more general, analytical insights into technology policy decision making. Chapter 2 addresses the growing importance of cities in climate change mitigation with the development of an energy system optimization model for urban-scale decarbonization. Our optimization model determines the least-cost power and transportation technology pathways to achieve a policy goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and is used to analyze the Community Climate Plan adopted by Austin, Texas. We find that the policy objective can be achieved at a modest 2.7% increase in net present power and transportation costs relative to business-as-usual. The optimal decarbonization pathway proceeds through two distinct stages, first reducing power sector emissions, then electrifying transportation. Solar PV expands in the long run with or without the climate plan based on favorable cost projections, but the policy causes wind to replace natural gas as a complement to solar PV. Our findings also highlight the substantial value of intelligently scheduled battery storage operations and electric vehicle charging. While the energy system optimization model of Chapter 2 captures numerous decisions for a complex urban energy system, it carries limiting assumptions about how technology diffusion occurs and the role of a policymaker in supporting a technology transition. Addressing these larger questions motivates the project in Chapter 3, which describes the development of two stylized models of technology policy decision making under uncertainty. The first model is a Markov reward process (MRP) that represents policy interventions with one-time, upfront costs, while the second is a Markov decision process (MDP) that represents interventions with recurring costs. For each model, we derive analytical expressions for the policymaker's willingness to pay (WTP) to raise the probabilities of advancing a technology development or diffusion process at various stages and compare and contrast the behaviors of the MRP and MDP models. Most notably, our analytical findings elucidate how the different cost-accounting schemes and the possibility of regressing from a more advanced development or diffusion stage back to an earlier one affect the WTP. Then, we conduct numerical sensitivity analysis to explore how the optimal technology policy portfolio varies with certain parameters, and present a case study on lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles to demonstrate the practical application of our model to technology policy decision making. In Chapter 4, we narrow our focus on technology transitions to infrastructure-dependent technologies common in energy, transportation, and telecommunications systems. Policymakers seeking to promote the diffusion of infrastructure-dependent technologies are often confronted with the chicken-and-egg problem: consumers are reluctant to adopt the technology without adequate infrastructure available, and firms are reluctant to invest in infrastructure without a sufficient number of adopters. This chicken-and-egg problem can hinder the diffusion of new technologies and prolong the timeframe over which existing technological systems remain locked-in. In this paper, we formulate a stylized model of technology policy decision making from the perspective of a policymaker who seeks to stimulate the market penetration of an infrastructure-dependent technology. Our model is a bilevel optimization problem in which a policymaker (leader) maximizes net social benefits by setting the levels of two incentives: a subsidy for a profit-maximizing firm (follower) to invest in infrastructure that raises the benefit of adoption to consumers, and a direct subsidy for consumers to adopt the technology. We analytically derive the firm's optimal infrastructure investment response to the upper-level policy decisions, and show that the bilevel model is equivalent to a quadratic program. To bypass non-convexity, we develop a custom solution strategy based on decomposition, and find that it performs better than directly applying an off-the-shelf solver to the potentially non-convex problem. Finally, we present a case study on the diffusion of battery electric vehicles and obtain insights into how a policymaker should allocate resources to charging infrastructure and vehicle incentives. The three projects of this dissertation employ operations research methods to model technology transitions and the role of policy support. While each captures a variety of phenomena affecting technology transitions and optimal technology policy decision making, there remain thought-provoking questions that future research can address. We conclude this dissertation with proposed research directions and contemplate the high-level, real-world implications of this work.
A policy analysis of community college funding in Texas
(2008-05) Hudson, Donald C.; Lasher, William F.
The purpose of this investigation was to analyze the public policy guiding the funding of community colleges in Texas. In essence, the history of community college funding from 1942 to 2006 has been documented. Specifically, the study focused on the funds community colleges have received from the State of Texas, analyzed the funding shares from state and local sources, assessed the changes in the state/local source relationship over time, and detailed the development of the Texas community college formula system. A two-phase research process was used for this policy analysis. First, an archival analysis located both primary and secondary documents related to Texas community college funding. After examining these records, a revenue database for Texas community colleges was created. Second, thirteen open-ended interviews of individuals with knowledge of community college funding were conducted. Based upon the analysis of state funds and other revenue sources, several conclusions were reached including: 1) During the pre-formula period (1942-1973), state funds were provided solely as an instructional supplement to public community colleges. This was known as the sufficient-to-supplement policy; 2) There has been an agreement between the State of Texas and the community colleges regarding community college funding as the formula system was implemented. The state would fund instruction and the college districts would pay for facilities; 3) The proportion of Texas community college operating revenues from the state has decreased relative to the other sources of revenue available to community colleges; 4) Full formula funding is a concept that is much discussed among Texas community college leaders. However, it has never been realized in the history of funding Texas public community colleges; 5) "Sufficient-to-supplement" is not an adequate or meaningful policy for funding community colleges in Texas. The policy recommendations that emerged from the study were: 1) The State of Texas should establish an explicit policy on how public community colleges will be financed, and 2) The State of Texas should adequately fund the new policy.