
Robert McnabOld Dominion University | ODU · Department of Economics
Robert Mcnab
Ph.D. Economics
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55
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August 2000 - June 2016
August 1996 - July 2000
August 2000 - August 2016
Publications
Publications (55)
Corruption lowers public sector productivity, crowds out private investment, reduces foreign direct investment, and negatively impacts a host of social outcomes. These outcomes suggest that the optimal level of corruption is zero, however, reducing corruption requires the commitment of scarce resources. A non-zero level of corruption may thus be ac...
Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) may, in the coming decades, result in tens of thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in additional economic activity. While much of the discussion surrounding AAM focuses on the technical aspects of the nascent industry, estimates of the potential economic impact vary significantly. Much less attention has been pa...
Because individual listing data for Airbnb typically are not publicly available, private companies have emerged to estimate the performance of Airbnb listings. The implicit assumption of a growing number of academics, policymakers, and consultants is that Airdna’s performance measures are directly comparable with those of STR. We argue that Airdna’...
Airbnb is an Internet-based firm that connects potential short-term renters with hosts who own or control rental properties. Its rapidly expanding activities are tracked by Airdna, an independent firm that generates seemingly conventional performance metrics describing Airbnb. These metrics include occupancy rates, average daily rates, and revenue...
This paper explores the relationship between natural resource revenues and expenditure decentralization. While the literature suggests that an abundance of natural resources may have deleterious effects on fiscal decentralization and other variables, existing empirical evidence regarding expenditure decentralization is scant and suspect. We find th...
Bilateral monopolies present challenges to private and public managers. In a market characterized by bilateral monopoly, the monopolist has an incentive to curtail production to maximize profit while the monopsonist should use its market power to expand production and lower unit cost. The final price and quantity are determined through a negotiatin...
This article empirically examines whether cultural values significantly influence budget transparency. We employ data for budget transparency from the Open Budget Index, and data for national culture from Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, the Global Leadership and Behavioral Effectiveness Research Project and the World Values Survey to explore this q...
Draft paper on the relationship between culture and budget transparency
This paper examines the impact of civil war on military expenditure. We employ two measures of military expenditure: the share of military expenditure in general government expenditure and the logarithm of military expenditures. We would reasonably expect a priori that military expenditure as a share of general government expenditure increases duri...
Bilateral monopolies present challenges to private and public managers. In a market characterized by bilateral monopoly, the monopolist has an incentive to curtail production to maximize profit while the monopsonist should use its market power to expand production and lower unit cost. The final price and quantity are determined through a negotiatin...
This paper empirically examines whether the aging of a fleet affects operational availability and operating cost using a unique data-set on the 117 47-foot Motor Lifeboats (MLBs) of the United States Coast Guard (USCG). Procured from 1997 to 2003, the 47-foot MLB is the standard lifeboat of the USCG and all 117 MLBs remain in service. The aging of...
The literature on decentralization has long asserted that decentralized governance increases public sector allocative efficiency. We offer an indirect test of this hypothesis by examining how decentralized governance affects revealed preferences for public goods. Specifically, we examine the relationship between expenditure decentralization and the...
This paper examines whether defense expenditures contributed to economic growth in China for the 1952–2012 period. We examine the contribution of defense to economic growth using recently published official data on economic activity, defense, and government expenditures. We employ the Feder-Ram and augmented Solow models of economic growth to explo...
This article examines the impact of civil war on democratization, particularly focusing on whether civil war provides an opportunity for institutional reform. We investigate the impact of war termination in general, along with prolonged violence, rebel victory and international intervention on democratization. Using an unbalanced panel data set of...
This article argues that the field of organization studies may learn from closer study of decision-making and behaviors in
military organizations. It describes some of the intellectual roots of organizational studies within a strategic, military
context; discusses some recent characteristics of strategic competition that organization scholars may f...
The United States Navy decided in the early 2000s to replace traditional, instructor-led schoolhouse training with computer-based training (CBT). While employing CBT may produce gains in knowledge acquisition and lower costs for repetitive, low-skill work, there is a lack of empirical evidence whether these benefits exist for more highly skilled Na...
Presidential elections are often seen as referendums on the health of the economy; however, little evidence exists on the president's ability to influence gross domestic product (GDP). This study examines the effect of the incentive to be reelected and the resulting increase in presidential effort on GDP growth. Growth is found to rise in reelectio...
The Republic of Serbia's Ministry of Defense (MoD) is attempting to implement a program-oriented, multi-year budgeting system in 2010. This paper reveals several challenges that threaten the success of this initiative. First, we find that the proposed budget system confuses organizations and programs. Second, there does not appear to be a centrally...
In this paper we explore whether violence in Iraq is gravitating towards a steady state level of violence observed in other civil wars, such as those in Colombia, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, among others. Using data from the Iraq Body Count for 2003-2007, we explore whether civilian casualties follow a power law distribution. We replicate previous ana...
The violence in Iraq has been gravitating towards a steady state level of violence observed in other civil wars, such as those in Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Sierra Leone. Fatalities in wars tend to be power law distributed. Power law distributions are used to describe the magnitude of events relative to their frequency of occurrence. The distribution...
The article investigates the potential impact of corruption on economic growth by examining the effect that corruption may have on several significant determinants of economic growth, namely, investment in human, private and public capital, and on governance. Our theoretical approach allows for corruption to influence economic growth directly and i...
This paper examines whether non-lethal weapons (NLWs) enhance the capability of the US armed forces to conduct irregular warfare (IW) operations. With expectations that the operational environment will only continue to become more complex in the future, NLWs may reduce the level of violence received, as well as dispensed, by US forces while perform...
Because of the presumed guns vs. butter trade-off, defense expenditures in developing countries are coming under increased scrutiny from the international lending agencies as well as key donors. As a result, defense expenditure cuts have often taken place despite rising security concerns. Empirically we find that developing countries may have more...
terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article maybe used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or m...
In the first decade that the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia transitioned toward freer markets, measured income inequality increased. Because this contradicted previous models of inequality, researchers linked the increase in inequality to a supposed equality under socialism and to the process of economic and political...
In this paper, we examine the current state of knowledge in the economics literature on the conduct of reconstruction activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. As stabilisation and reconstruction missions grow in importance for units deployed to these regions, it becomes more important to understand what activities can promote economic growth at the loca...
In this paper, we examine the national security issues resulting from environmental transformation
and demographic change in Latin America. We note a lack of consensus in the literature as to
what constitutes environmental change, security, and its corresponding impact on national security.
If environmental degradation and the national security of...
Many authors contend that ethnic extremism coupled with political manipulation were the primary factors behind the Rwandan genocide. Yet, to oversimplify the cause of this tragedy makes one blind to the complicated nexus that generated the outcome. Even though this genocide was quick in its execution, the events that lead to this massacre took year...
This paper examines how fiscal decentralization may influence economic growth. Previous research on this question has primarily focused on the potential direct relationship between decentralization and growth. In this paper, we also examine the potential indirect influence of decentralization on growth through its impact on macroeconomic stability....
Existing evidence suggests that U.S. Government budget receipts forecasts are unbiased and efficient. Our study is an attempt to examine the veracity of these findings. The time series framework employed in this study is distinguished from previous work in three ways. First, we build a model that explicitly admits serial correlation in the residual...
This paper examines how fiscal decentralization may influence economic growth. Previous research on this question has primarily focused on the potential direct relationship between decentralization and growth. In this paper, we also examine the potential indirect influence of decentralization on growth through its impact on macroeconomic stability....
This study examines the relationship between fiscal decentralization and the functional composition of public expenditures. We develop a theoretical model based on a distance-sensitive representative agent model, some applications of the median-voter theorem, and the Tiebout choice model. In our model, higher levels of fiscal decentralization lead...
The collapse of the socialist regimes in eastern Europe and central Asia brought an unprecedented increase in economic freedom for hundreds of millions of people. Many people, however, still believe that their lives have become worse since the start of the transition. One apparent reason for this belief is a perceived increase in income inequality,...
In this paper, we examine the prospects for base realignment and closure in Peru and develop an initial strategy for the realignment and closure process. While previous research has focused primarily on the realignment and closure process in developed countries, we instead focus on the need for the realignment and closure process to complement the...
The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) is the latest in a series of attempts to introduce performance-based management and budgeting techniques at the federal level in the United States. In the past, these attempts largely failed due to administrative complexities, lack of investment in managerial, accounting, and information systems, an...
Fiscal decentralization may indeed have a direct impact on economic growth but the theoretical underpinnings for this relationship remain largely undeveloped. A fair summary of the empirical search for a direct relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth is that it remains an open question. Much less attention has been devoted...
The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA) is the latest in a series of attempts to introduce performance budgeting at the federal level in the United States; attempts that largely failed due to administrative complexities, lack of investment in managerial, accounting, and information systems, and the absence of institutional incenti...
This paper reviews the current knowledge on an issue of increasing policy interest: what impact fiscal decentralization has on economic growth. Fiscal decentralization may indeed have a direct impact on economic growth but the theoretical underpinnings for this relationship remain largely undeveloped. The absence of an adequate theoretical framewor...
In recent years, many developed countries have moved to develop their annual budget process in a strategic multi-year framework. While a common feature of multi-year budgeting approaches is the inclusion of revenue forecasts and expenditures estimates for two or three years beyond the current year, multi-year budget practices vary substantially bet...
The last decade has been witness to one of the largest tax experiments in economic history, the transformation from centrally-planned to market-based tax systems. The cultural and institutional legacy of central planning has had a lasting impact on tax reform in countries in transition. The fundamental choices for reform were a ‘big-bang’ approach...
This paper empirically investigates the impact of trade policy on export expansion and on GDP growth in developing countries while controlling for the human capital stock and the initial level of development. By using a simultaneous system estimation we unite the approach found in the export expansion and growth literature with the approach found i...
The goal of this paper is to review the state of our knowledge in the economics literature on the causal relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth and democratic governance, whether these relationships are uni-directional or bi-directional, and to what extent there appear to exist synergies or pre-conditions between fiscal de...
As the governments of countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union continue to grapple with the challenges of transition, many significant policy developments have already taken place over the past six years, developments of interest to policymakers and economists alike. Conditions in these Countries in Transition (CITs) have presented a...
This paper presents an overview of taxation in the transitional economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. The governments of transitional economies have been implementingsimultaneous reforms of legal, political, and economic institutions, reforms which are dependent upon the ability of the emerging tax systems to efficien...
Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 299-309).