Download or read book Three Essays on Quasi-experimental Analyses of Local Political Economy written by Masataka Harada and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is comprised of three independent essays that examine how exogenous law enforcement, historical events, and neighborhood environments shape public policies and political behaviors. The topics of each essay—strategic policy making, social capital, and Tiebout sorting—mirror the major policy issues currently faced by local governments in the U.S., specifically the accumulation of government deficits due to ethnic conflict and political competitions, the decaying democratic system due to eroding social capital, and residential segregation based on race and income. The causal analyses of these theories are often hampered by the unobservability of strategic intention, the time-invariability of social capital, and the endogeneity problem due to residential sorting. To overcome these challenges, my essays utilize exogenous variations of historical events, empirical implication of formal models, and various quasi-experimental methods, which identify the causal mechanisms of interest with a solid statistical foundation.