Dr. David Konisky will be visiting the University of Alabama Political Science Department on Friday, January 25th to give a talk in ten Hoor 346 from 12:00-1:30 pm.

Title: Policy Devolution and Coordination Dilemmas.

How do public good spillovers influence agent effort in an interconnected environment? We develop a model for a general class of problems in which agents share the provision of a public good and “˜downstream” agents experience positive spillovers. We characterize endogenous agent effort as the result of the boundary quality within which agents operate, the size of their relative jurisdiction and their reward structure. We examine our findings with an empirical exercise centered on the regulation of 6,000 major water pollution sources under the U.S. Clean Water Act. We construct a novel dataset of U.S. state water pollution regional offices and use geographic information on agency jurisdictions, watershed boundaries, and elevation-induced streamflow to characterize the propensity for shirking in an agent’s local environment. Our empirical results support our expectations.

About:

David Konisky’s research focuses on American politics and public policy, with particular emphasis on environmental politics and policy, regulation, federalism, state politics, and public opinion. His research has been published in various journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Politics, and Public Opinion Quarterly. He has authored or edited three books on environmental politics and policy, including most recently Failed Promises: Evaluating the Federal Government’s Response to Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2015) and Cheap and Clean: How Americans Think about Energy in the Age of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2014, with Steve Ansolabehere).

His CV is available at https://spea.indiana.edu/faculty-research/directory/profiles/faculty/full-time/konisky-david.html.