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open access

The Adoption, Management, and Performance of Local Government Investment Pools: A Comparative Analysis of State Practices

Description: This dissertation examines the factors influencing a state’s decision to adopt a local government investment pool (LGIP), the institutional arrangements used in managing them, and the effect of the institutional types on LGIP performance. The dissertation extends the policy adoption theory with insights from investment theory to demonstrate that management credibility influences the likelihood of a state’s LGIP adoption. The study finds that the quality of financial management, the quality of p… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Nukpezah, Julius Atsu
open access

Age Friendly Cities: The Bureaucratic Responsiveness Effects on Age Friendly Policy Adoption

Description: Challenging a long-held attachment to the medical model, this research develops a cultural model placing local governments at the center of policy making and refocusing policy attention on mobility, housing, the built environment and services. To examine the phenomenon of age friendly policy adoption by cities and the magnitude of adoption, a 21-question web-based survey was administered to a sample of 1,050 cities from the U.S. Census having a population over 10,000 and having at least 14% of … more
Date: May 2017
Creator: Keyes, Laura Marie

An Analysis of the Flypaper and Fungibility Effects of Intergovernmental Revenue on Municipal Operating and Capital Budgets

Description: The flypaper effect states that grants-in-aid increases public spending more than a comparable increase in personal income. If aid increases spending, then there is the possibility that it displaces own-source revenue or a portion of the aid itself is used to meet other priorities of governments, fungibility. Different local government structures have the tendency to prioritize either the operating or capital budget. Empirical evidence shows that federal and state grants have different flypaper… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Boadu, Bernard
open access

The Civic Roles of Neighborhood Associations in Seoul, Korea: Implications for Urban Governance

Description: This dissertation answers three research questions: "What differences and similarities exist among neighborhood associations in the United States, Japan, and Seoul, South Korea?," "What are the civic roles of neighborhood associations in apartment complexes in Seoul, South Korea?," and "What factors promote neighborhood associations to play civic roles in urban governance?" To answer the first question, this research analyzes the purposes, governance structures, roles, and legal substance of ne… more
Date: May 2017
Creator: Kim, Jung Wook
open access

Community Resilience in Thailand: a Case Study of Flood Response in Nakhonsawan City Municipality

Description: Natural disasters such as flooding often affect vast areas and create infinite demands that need to be addressed in the same time. The wide scopes and severe impacts of such catastrophes often exceed, if not overwhelm, capacity of the national government to handle. In such a situation, communities such as cities and neighborhoods need to rely on their own capacity (resources, strategies, and expertise) to respond to disaster impacts at least until external assistance can be reached. Thus, study… more
Date: May 2013
Creator: Khunwishit, Somporn
open access

Connected and Benevolent: The Positive Impact of Social Connections in Reducing Economic Concerns for Volunteering

Description: This dissertation attempts to answer how social and economic mechanisms operate in individual, community and state levels to impact volunteering. Both social processes and economic factors significantly impact the amount of volunteering. However, researchers have a tendency to explain volunteering only by one of these factors. As both theories are equally important in explaining volunteerism, the development of a coherent theory is necessary to combine economic and social theories. This dissert… more
Date: May 2018
Creator: Baktir, Yusuf

The Economic Impact of Expenditures by Local Governments and Nonprofits on Property Values: Evidence from 41 Large Texas Cities

Description: This dissertation uses property values to investigate the economic effect of public expenditures for operations and capital improvements on place value. Given the increasing role of nonprofit services in augmenting those of cities and school districts, the dissertation research investigates whether nonprofit expenditures join those of cities and school districts as Tiebout commodities, thereby contributing to place value. Furthermore, the research examines whether those expenditures contribute … more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Prentice, Valencia Antoinette

Entrepreneurial Orientation: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Public Entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia

Description: The increasing demands of efficiency and effectiveness in the public sector encourage political leaders and policy makers to adopt and apply advanced techniques and solutions to overcome flaws in public organizational performance. Entrepreneurship was introduced in several Western countries as a way to improve their processes and management through adopting private sector management principles and market-oriented techniques. In 2015, Saudi Arabia announced its 2030 vision, which introduced hund… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Alzomia, Abdullah
open access

Explaining Economic Development Strategies Using Product Differentiation Theory: a Reconceptualization of Competition Among City Governments

Description: Local governments do not operate in a vacuum. Instead, they are part of a complex “polycentric” system of governments where politically autonomous and self-ruled cities compete with one another over taxable wealth. Missing from the scholarship on metropolitan governance is an understanding of the factors driving competition among local governments. The purpose of this dissertation is to fill this gap by examining how interjurisdictional competition over economic development impacts a city’s cho… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Overton, Michael R.

Exploring Factors Affecting Public Service Motivation: An Investigation of Public Service Motivation in Saudi Arabia

Description: This research builds on social exchange theory and self-determination theory to better understand the relationships between employee engagement, demographic and personal attributes, and public service motivation (PSM). It hypothesizes that employee engagement and demographic and personal characteristics (education, income, gender, and parents working in civil service) will directly affect PSM. I also hypothesize that education, income, and gender will have an indirect effect and moderate the re… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Alotaibi, Saud G.
open access

Interlocal Competition and Local Fiscal Health

Description: A sizeable literature documents patterns of competition between local governments in metropolitan regions, while also exploring variation in such local government financial attributes as efficiency, budget size, fiscal disparity, and service equity, which are frequently bound together under the concept of fiscal health. However, the concept of fiscal health is broader and more sophisticated than any one fiscal measure, and empirical studies tend to focus only on multi-purpose governments. This … more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Park, Hyunggun

Interorganizational Collaboration in Implementing Urban Greening Policies in Saudi Arabia: An Institutional Collective Action Framework

Description: This dissertation aims to examine the relationship between interorganizational collaboration and the implementation of urban greening policy. Specifically, it discusses bonding and bridging relationships that explain a successful interorganizational collaboration, and to what extent these factors explain the perception of success in the implementation of public programs. The effects of risks of collaboration on the implementation of urban greening policy are also studied. To frame the analysis,… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Alkhurayyif, Mohammed A.
open access

Investigating Communication and Warning Channels to Enhance Crowd Management Strategies: a Study of Hajj Pilgrims in Saudi Arabia

Description: The global increase in the number of mass gatherings and crowded events has brought with it new emergencies and unintended consequences for public administrators and first responders. Crowd managers attempt to overcome these challenges by enhancing operations, alleviating financial losses, keeping event organizers safe from liability and, most importantly, keeping the attendees safe. Effective communication among and between officials and guests has been identified as a key element in this proc… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Taibah, Hassan
open access

Local Government Fiscal Stress and Financial Coping Strategies Following Disasters

Description: This dissertation analyzes how local governments adapt to the fiscal stress of major disasters. Unifying theories of fiscal stress with emergency management theories, the dissertation presents a model of what influences local governments coping strategy use following disasters. Using new survey data and secondary financial data on cities, counties, and school districts that experienced Hurricane Harvey, findings show that local governments adapt in a variety of ways; of 137 local governments th… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Winkler, Julie Georgina

Procurement of Smart City Technologies: Smart City or Smart Governance?

Description: This dissertation argues that the core of building smart cities is through the procurement and implementation of smart city technologies (SCTs) by either individual (i.e., smart city) or collaborative endeavors (i.e., smart governance). Given that urbanization problems (e.g., air pollution) usually spill over city boundaries, building smart cities as silos may not solve these problems. Therefore, utilizing smart governance in SCT procurement and implementation should be a better approach. Consi… more
Date: May 2021
Creator: Tao, Jie

Sources of Household Resilience during the 2018/2019 Saudi Floods

Description: This research studied the relationship between social capital and household resilience. In particular, how bonding and bridging relationships affect household resilience was the question selected to illustrate this relationship between social capital and household resilience. Moreover, how the vulnerability of household impacts household resilience was also empirically examined. Social capital theory and vulnerability paradigm studies were used to discover explanations for why and how social co… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Alshammari, Abdullah Fahad
open access

Sources of Organizational Resilience During the 2012 Korean Typhoons: an Institutional Collective Action Framework

Description: The objective of this proposed research is to test whether interorganizational collaboration contributes to the ability of an organization to bounce back swiftly from disasters. The research questions are examined from the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) perspective. The general argument of this dissertation is that organizational resilience can be explained by interorganizational collaboration. The ICA framework, specifically, identifies two general network structures to explain strategi… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Jung, Kyujin
open access

A Study of Nonprofit Governance through the Lens of Stewardship Theory

Description: This dissertation examines the association between independent governance structure and various measures of good governance. The evaluation draws on observations of a dataset of 101 Texas public charities, in particular the organization's self-disclosed governance-related activities as reflected in the transparency, monitoring, and strategic tools available to the public. The study reveals that two measures of good governance are associated with an identified independent governance structure at… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Humphrey, Duchess Deidre

Third-Party Perception: Implications for Governance and Communication of Health Risks during the Umrah in Saudi Arabia

Description: The current study projects the third-person perception phenomenon into the area of emergency management, specifically regarding risk communication in the context of religious gatherings. This study utilized the Umrah religious gathering in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, during summer 2019 as a case study (N = 257). This study aimed to investigate whether pilgrims perceive there was a greater effect of health information on others than on themselves. Survey results were translated and then coded and anal… more
Date: May 2020
Creator: Alkhurayyif, Saad A.
open access

Utilizing Traditional Environmental Knowledge in Industrialized Nations to Assist in Disaster Evacuations

Description: Using traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), which is typically reserved for understanding how indigenous societies function successfully, and applying this to developed countries' ideas of disaster planning and response, emergency planners, public officials, and lay-persons can gain an understanding of their environment. Stories, history, education, and The waterborne evacuation of Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001 provides a backdrop with which to test the tenets of TEK in a developed na… more
Date: May 2013
Creator: Lea, Brandi M.
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