Mitch Kunce

The Impact of Socioeconomic Factors on State Suicide Rates: A Methodological Note

This note examines the purported impact of conventional socioeconomic and social environment factors on annual, state-level suicide rates. Results from an inductive fixed-effects (covariance) analysis, of state-level time-series/cross-section data for the period 1985-95, do little to support Durkheims social causes hypothesis that aggregate socioeconomic factors matter in explaining state suicide rates. A possible source of heterogeneity-aggregation bias is identified raising questions surrounding past inferences made in aggregate suicide research. The data and empirical method support a mounting sentiment of an abiding ecological fallacy in the suicide literature. Implications of this investigation call for a shift in research focus and method to a smaller unit of analysis (for example, individual-level, controlling for key social processes).

Pre-Election Polling and the Rational Voter: Evidence from State Panel Data (1986–1998)

This study examines the role of pre-election perceptions of race closeness, by way of newspaper polls, in motivating citizens to vote on a specific contest while in the voting booth. Results from an error components model (random effects), employing state panel data of concurrent gubernatorial and Senate elections for the period 1986 to 1998, fail to bolster the rational voter hypothesis that perceived closeness matters. The extent to which pre-election perception matters is shown to depend directly on how one measures the likelihood of a close contest. In contrast, few long-standing variables, inherent to the voting literature, have any impact on “within-booth” voting behavior. The majority of within-booth abstention is left unexplained; furthering the notion of Matsusaka and Palda (1999) that the act of voting, indeed, may be random.

Effectiveness of Severance Tax Incentives in the U.S. Oil Industry

This paper develops a dynamic empirical framework that can be used to test the effectiveness of state-level severance tax incentives in the U.S. oil industry. The framework embeds U.S. state-level panel data estimates into Pindycks (1978) widely received theoretical model of exhaustible resource supply and can be applied to any of 20 states that produce significant quantities of oil. The model allows for interactions between taxes levied by different levels of government and for the first time addresses potential interstate differences in exploration costs, extraction costs, and reserve additions. In general, results show that severance tax incentives (in the form of tax rate reductions) substantially reduce state tax revenue collected, but yield moderate to little change in oil drilling and production activity. This outcome suggests that states should be wary of arguments asserting that large swings in oil field activity can be obtained from changes in severance tax rates.

Centralized versus local environmental standard setting: firm, capital, and labor mobility in an interjurisdictional model of firm-specific emission permitting

An important public policy question that remains unresolved is whether environmental standards are best set centrally or locally. At the center of the debate is whether devolution can induce jurisdictions of a federation to “race to the bottom” in pursuit of industry and jobs. A widely cited and received exception to this line of reasoning was forwarded by Oates and Schwab in 1988. Their results suggested that immobile homogeneous residents of a jurisdiction trade higher aggregate emissions (localized) for increased wage income in a socially efficient manner. The fixity of the number of firms in each jurisdiction, however, is implicitly assumed and appears to be the linchpin to their equilibrium. This article reexamines potential distortions in decentralized decisionmaking by extending the Oates and Schwab general equilibrium construct to include labor mobility, explicit firm mobility, and firm-specific emission permitting. Whenever firms, labor, and capital are mobile across jurisdictions, decentralized environmental standards can be set too high, too low, or socially efficient depending on jurisdictional production relationships and firms’ responsiveness to key policy variables. This outcome implies that the decentralized efficiency result might not be as prominent as previously argued and appears as a single case in a more general model of decentralized government behavior.

A Natural Rate of Suicide for the U.S., Revisited

The proposition of a positive, nonzero “natural rate” of suicide (Yang&Lester, 1991) for a society is extended by examining time-series, cross-section (panel) data of state suicide rates and socioeconomic factors over the 1985–1995 time period. Statistical allowances are made to control for the majority of observed and unobserved state and time factors affecting suicide rates. Results lend support to the natural rate hypothesis with robust specification.