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Lunch will be served. Join the PIPE Collaborative for a research presentation by Heonuk Ha (USC Price).

The title of Heonuk’s talk and abstract appear below:

Grant Need Index and Fair Grant Amount: Determining Who Needs and How Much

The Federal grant-in-aid system, established in the late 18th century, has been intended to ameliorate income and resource disparities among individuals and communities, and its allocations have spanned across broad policy areas. In particular, numerous political actors partake in the grant writing and allocation process, each with their own specific interests. The political dynamics of federal grants, together with their economic and social ramifications, have been the focus of in-depth studies in social science. Prior research has examined the strategies and benefits of involving actors at both the federal and subnational levels in the grant process. Nevertheless, there remains a substantial research gap in understanding the demand side, particularly in quantifying the specific needs of each recipient jurisdiction for each grant. To address this gap, this research introduces the Grant Need Index and the Fair Grant Amount at the state level. This study scrutinizes the objectives and eligibility criteria of 288 block and project grants from 2005 to 2020 at the state level to construct the Grant Need Index, and computes the Fair Grant Amount by multiplying the Grant Need Index (ratio) by the total amount of each grant at state level. The aim of grant need index and fair grant amount is to determine the political and economic circumstances under which the appropriate amount of federal grants has been allocated to right places.

He will also present an application of his Grant Need Index and Fair Grant Amount metrics. See this paper:

Agency Politicization and Grant Allocation Performance

While the federal bureaucracy has played a crucial role in the allocation of block and project grants to subnational governments within the federal grant process, previous research on distributive politics has predominantly concentrated on the influence and strategies employed by the president and Congress. Furthermore, the question of political actors’ impact on the performance of federal agencies in policy implementation remains unresolved due to the challenge of measuring the agencies’ performance consistently over time, despite its significance in the U.S. democracy. This paper seeks to address the gap in previous studies on federal grant allocation by exploring the role of the federal bureaucracy. I first undertake the calculation of each state’s grant need level and determine the fair grant amount for a total of 288 block and project grants spanning the years 2005 to 2020, and calculate the deviation between the fair grant amount and actual allocation amount to show the agency’s grant allocation performance. By conducting an analysis of the impact of politicization on grant allocation performance across 66 federal agencies from 2005 to 2020, using Ordinary Least Squares models with various fixed effects, including agency, state, and year, I find that agencies with a heightened degree of politicization, both in terms of personnel and organizational structure, tend to exhibit a lower level of performance in grant allocation.

After Heonuk’s talk, we’ll have a formal discussant: TBD