The Solutions to America's Infrastructure Crisis - Achieving Efficiency and Effectiveness of State Public Highway Infrastructure Investment

America's infrastructure is the backbone of its economy. However, today America's infrastructure is woefully underfunded and its condition is severely deteriorated and degraded. Given the significant amount of public infrastructure spending and the widely expressed concern about the declining quality of the American public infrastructure system, research about the efficiency and effectiveness of public infrastructure investment is especially timely and crucial. In response to the current American infrastructure crisis, this dissertation contributes to the link between public infrastructure finance and public infrastructure performance, and empirically examines the efficiency and effectiveness of state public highway infrastructure investment.;Drawing from public service production theory and public choice theory, this dissertation develops a realistic and full theoretical model of public highway production by taking state highway efficiency differences into account, and then applies the public highway production model to empirically examine the efficiency and effectiveness of state public highway infrastructure investment. To estimate and explain state highway efficiency, the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method is used to estimate the efficiency differences of state highway investment, and then the panel Tobit method is employed to explain the efficiency differences of state highway investment. The panel fixed effects method is utilized to examine the effects of state highway investment on state highway infrastructure quality and performance including: state-administered road quality, state-owned bridge conditions, state-administered urban highway congestion, and the Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based overall state highway performance index.;The state highway efficiency study finds that there is a large efficiency variation among states in terms of producing quality highway infrastructure services. Interstate competition, highway-user fees financing, citizen monitoring pressure, and institutional structure are significant factors affecting state highway efficiency. The state highway spending effectiveness study finds that state highway maintenance spending is critical to improve state highway quality and performance. In addition, highway efficiency elements matter for state highway performance. This dissertation makes significant theoretical contributions to the studies of public infrastructure spending efficiency and effectiveness, and also offers practical implications for improving American public infrastructure performance and conditions.