Three Essays on Public Economics

Abstract

The research involves three studies. The first study examined state-level marijuana legalization and its impacts on crime rates. The second study explored the nudging technique—deliberate and impulsive type information—to promote charitable giving to food banks amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The final study analyzed the transformation of donation decisions under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic for food banks and other nonprofit organizations. The major findings are as follows: 1) While the results from difference-in-differences and the synthetic control methods showed mostly insignificant relationships between recreational marijuana legalization and crime rates as extant literature, significant increases in crime rates were found when used synthetic control inference with staggered adoption. 2) The second research confirmed that deliberate nudging information is more efficient to increase donation rate for food banks during the COVID19 pandemic and that how to frame donation timing affects giving decisions as well. Also, the deliberate nudging information was particularly more efficient in increasing the giving rate of those with low empathy. 3) The final study provided a detailed decomposition of changes in actual giving decisions and found the probabilities of changes in giving decisions for food banks and other nonprofit organizations before and after the COVID-19 outbreak by individuals’ characteristics. The results from using the conditional inference tree suggest that the experience as a food assistance recipient and marital status are the prominent factors to explain the changes in donation status under the impact of the COVID-19.