Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Effect Of Economic Integration And Political Centralization On Linguistic Diversity - And The New Function And Status Of The English Language In Europe, Demba K. Baldeh

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the effect of economic integration (EI) and political unity on

linguistic diversity and the new function and status of the English language in

Europe. It shows the current sociolinguistic transformation and the growing use of

English both as strong effects and key indicators of the process.

Fresh Air: The Impact Of Reformulated Gasoline On Infant Health, Mohammed Husain

Theses and Dissertations

This paper considers a 1996 Reformulated Gasoline program, where gasoline emissions were regulated in California, to observe the effects on infant health indicators. I use a cross-county analysis to find significant effects from the policy that suggests an improvement in birth weight, gestational length, and infant mortality.

The Effect Of Health Insurance On Young Adults' Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence From The Affordable Care Act's Dependent Coverage Expansion, Quazi Hassan

Theses and Dissertations

The Affordable Care Act’s dependent coverage mandate extended young adults’ parental coverage to age 26. I study the expansion’s impact on young adults’ labor market outcomes using a control function method. Following the expansion, I find dependent coverage lowered labor force participation, lowered incomes, and mixed evidence regarding labor supply.

The Effects Of The Implementation Of Green Carts On New Yorkers' Bmi, Ana L. Pacheco

Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the Green Cart Initiative implemented by the New York City Mayor’s Office of Food Policy. The Initiative was implemented to bring fresh fruits and vegetables in a fast, cheap, and efficient way to neighborhoods considered food deserts and areas with high rates of obesity.

The Impact Of The Federally Qualified Health Center Advanced Primary Care Practice Demonstration On The Poor And Elderly, Jaison R. Moreno

Theses and Dissertations

Implementing a difference-in-differences, I quantify the effects of the Federally Qualified Health Centers Advanced Primary Care Practice demonstration on the self-reported general health of 367 U.S. counties across 47 states. I find small positive statistically significant effects of the demonstration on the elderly and residents of high poverty communities.

How Should We Motivate Effort, Shamima Khan

Theses and Dissertations

This research uses an experimental design to study if the pattern and positioning of rewards influence the amount of effort participants put in. The three key hypotheses tested here are: 1) are people more likely to complete a task if the incentives are given in more regular intervals, 2) do uncertainty of reward timing hurt or help in maintaining motivation, 3) is intrinsic motivation more influential than the patterns in which incentives are structured? The treatments in this experiment are created by varying the reward structure of candies and pens in exchange of a simple math test completion. Among the …

Burden Of Disease Associated With Lower Levels Of Income Among Us Adults Aged 65 And Older, Erica I. Lubetkin, Haomia Jia

Publications and Research

Background: Persons aged 65 years and older represent a heterogeneous group whose prevalence in the USA is expected to markedly increase. Few investigations have examined the total burden of disease attributable to lower levels of income in a single number that accounts for morbidity and mortality.

Methods: We ascertained respondents’ health-related quality of life (HRQOL) scores and mortality status from the 2003 to 2004, 2005 to 2006, 2007 to 2008 and 2009 to 2010 cohorts of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) with mortality follow-up through 31 December 2011. A mapping algorithm based on respondents’ age and answers …

Still Here: Life In A New York Garment Factory, Veronika Bondarenko

Capstones

After the majority of clothing production jobs left the US for Asia in the 1990s, a new market of smaller factories that employ mostly immigrant women in their forties and fifties to create high-end clothes with a “Made in the USA” label emerged. But as factories struggle to survive in New York, large numbers of workers still endure long hours, on-job injuries, and lack of overtime pay in the name of homegrown fashion — often with little oversight.

http://lifeinanewyorkgarmentfactory.info

Broken Promesa: Puerto Rico Sinks, But The Life Rafts Can’T Save Everyone, Nico A. Grant

Capstones

Puerto Rico is in the midst of an economic calamity. The U.S. Territory faces a $73 billion debt, an economy on a downward spiral and hemorrhaging population numbers. In response, the U.S. Congress passed the PROMESA Act, which includes an oversight board to control Puerto Rico’s finances. But this purported pathway to prosperity won’t revitalize the Caribbean island.

As the board’s austerity measures fail to turn the economy around, ordinary Puerto Ricans are peddling to resurrect the island’s private sector. These stories from Puerto Rico illustrate the pain of economic decay and the hope that new technology can make a …

Slavery, Migration, And Local Development In The Western Us, Colin Q. Sharpe

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the effects of migration from eastern slave states in the 19th century on the subsequent development of counties in the Western US. I find that increased migration from slave states has a large, statistically significant negative effect on 2010 income, and no significant effect on racial inequality or overall income inequality. These findings are robust to a variety of specifications, including controls for geographic factors, state fixed effects, and various county level social and economic conditions. Data on individual migrants suggest that the cause of the negative income effect is the lower average human capital endowment of …

Three Essays On The Effects Of Childbearing On Economic Well-Being And Health, Ramazan Onur Altindag

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1: Couples in Turkey exhibit son preference through son-biased differential stopping behavior that does not cause a sex ratio imbalance in the population. Demand for sons leads to lower ratios of boys to girls in larger families but higher ratios in smaller families. Girls are born earlier than their male siblings, and son-biased fertility behavior is persistent in response to decline in fertility over time and across households with parents from different backgrounds. Parents use contraceptive methods to halt fertility following a male birth. The sibling sex composition is associated with gender disparities in health. Among third- or later-born …

Discourses Of "Cruelty-Free" Consumerism: Peta, The Vegan Society And Examples Of Contemporary Activism, Andrea Springirth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper draws upon the principles of critical discourse analysis in order to examine the production of capitalist and consumerist discourses within contemporary nonhuman animal rights activism. The analysis presents evidence to suggest that the discourses being produced via the websites of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Vegan Society are consistently being constructed through market-centric ideologies that treat activists mainly as middle-class consumers. This paper argues that the consistent presence of neoliberal discourse signals an instructive entanglement with broader sociopolitical issues. Specifically, there are concerns as to how this discourse relates to what is thought …

Can Noncompliant Behavior Explain Racial/Ethnic Disparities In The Use Of Force By The Nypd? An Econometric Analysis Of New York's Stop-And-Frisk, Omari-Khalid Rahman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to analyze spatiotemporal variations in NYPD policing patterns in an attempt to identify the causal mechanism(s) driving the observed racial/ethnic disparities; specifically, it addresses questions of how changing neighborhood demographics influence the decision-making of NYPD officers/precincts as it relates to their controversial Stop-and-Frisk policy.

Losing Values: Illiquidity, Personhood, And The Return Of Authoritarianism In Skopje, Macedonia, Fabio Mattioli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

On May 17, 2015, over 50,000 people took to the streets of Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, protesting against Prime Minister Gruevski and his party, the conservative neoliberal Internal Revolutionary Organization of Macedonia (VMRO). After nine years of authoritarian government, it was the first significant demonstration in which the population demanded accountability for Gruevski's despotic system of rule. This dissertation is the story of how Gruevski's system of power was built and why it lasted for so long. I argue that a series of failing financial processes, which included the use of illiquidity, created the material and …

The Transatlantic Oarsmen Cooperative: Doubling Down On A Transatlantic Financial Regulatory Regime, Joselyn Muhleisen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project argues that, in the wake of the 2007-09 financial crisis, the United States (US) and European Union (EU) are doubling down on finance-led domestic growth strategies and that this is their goal in constructing a transatlantic financial regulatory regime. The regime’s goal privileges the input of industry actors over other civil society actors. The construction of this regime is in response to pressure from emerging markets and to service domestic industry actors after the financial crisis. The regime is intended to allow the US and EU to maintain their dominance within the international financial regulatory regime and continue …

New Trade, New Politics: Intra-Industry Trade And Domestic Political Coalitions, Mary Anne Madeira

Publications and Research

Why are industries highly active in some battles over international trade policies, but in other instances, individual firms are highly active and industry groups are subdued? I argue that rising intra-industry trade in the postwar period has undermined traditional trade coalitions and created new opportunities for individual firms to become politically active. Drawing on new trade theories from economics, as well as work on firm heterogeneity and lobbying, I argue that industry associations become less active as intra-industry trade increases due to competing trade preferences among member firms. At the same time, individual firms become more politically active. My results …

Globalization And The Environmental Impact Of Fdi, Nadia Doytch, Merih Uctum

Economics Working Papers

We analyze the environmental impact of capital inflows and investigate the halo effect (FDI improves the environment). We control for the type of FDI inflows, the EKC (Environmental Kuznets Curve) effect and country income level, and find (i) a differential industry effect: while total foreign investment in aggregate has a negative effect on all countries, this can be traced in particular to capital flows to manufacturing and nonfinancial services sectors.; (ii) an income inequality effect: foreign investment flowing into poorer countries has harmful effects on environment consistent with the race-to-the bottom argument, while capital flowing to richer countries has a …

Intertemporal Poverty Among Older Americans, Gulgun Bayaz-Ozturk, Sean Macdonald

Publications and Research

This study uses aggregate intertemporal poverty indices proposed by Gradin, Del Rio, and Canto (2012) to measure poverty among older American households of different races from 2001 through 2009 employing data from the Health and Retirement Study. The findings indicate that the incidence of intertemporal poverty is higher among Black and Hispanic households and that it is also more intense and of longer duration. In our investigation of antipoverty effects of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, we find that the program has a significant impact in reducing intensity and inequality of poverty among poor populations. However, it does not significantly …

Essays On The Economics Of Health And Risky Behavior, Markus Gehrsitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As Forrest Gump has ever eloquently pointed out: stupid is as stupid does. It turns out that most people engage in behavior that could reasonably be considered stupid, or at least risky. People overeat, chain-smoke cigarettes, drink excessively, consume harmful drugs, and drive too fast; if worst comes to worst they do some of these things simultaneously. This work evaluates three policy measures that are designed to promote health and less risky behavior: I evaluate the effects of penalties for speeding transgressions on future driving behavior, the effects of low emission zones on infant health and air pollution, and the …

Essays In Labor And Development Economics, Stephen Daniel O'Connell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is comprised of two chapters that investigate the long-term effects of a quota policy for women in local government in India.

In the first chapter, "Political Inclusion and Educational Investment," I investigate whether political empowerment can affect the human capital investment decisions of children. By using exogenous variation in the implementation of the policy, nationally-representative survey data allow me to estimate effects on educational enrollment in a geographic discontinuity design using adjacent areas on either side of a state border as counterfactuals receiving different levels of exposure to the quota policy.

In this paper, I find a sizable …

The Effect Of Health Information Technology On Hospital Quality Of Care, Ruirui Sun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Health Information Technology (Health IT) is designed to store patients’ records safely and clearly, to reduce input errors and missing records, and to make communications more efficiently. Concerned with the relatively lower adoption rate among the US hospitals compared to most developed countries, the Bush Administration set up the Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in 2006 to mandate the Health IT implementation with $25.9 billion subsidies to eligible hospitals starting 2009. Underlying the huge subsidy is the belief that Health IT can reduce hospital cost by improving efficiency and quality, and can help reduce total health expenditure. …

Patterns Of Growth And The Economic Development Of China, Adam C. Watson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

By looking at the historical rise of modern China, starting with the end of the First Opium War (1842) through to the start of the war with Japan (1937), and then from the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms (1979) to the present, this work reveals the striking similarities between the earlier and the later periods of capitalist development. If the country had not been able to draw on the deep-rooted knowledge and skills which originated in Shanghai and the port cities in the mid-nineteenth century, and instead pursued only uninformed free market principles without the training to make these …

The Relative Impact Of Psychosocial Well-Being And Mental Health On The Relationship Between Economic Circumstance And Religiosity, Veronica Momjian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Employing Norris and Inglehart’s concept of existential security as a theoretical framework, this dissertation utilizes three data points from the Americans’ Changing Lives study (1986, 1994 and 2011) to interrogate the link between the economic circumstance and religiosity. More specifically, the mediating impact of psychosocial well-being and mental health on religiosity are explored.

This dissertation hypothesizes that individuals employ religious coping strategies to deal with the stress of economic uncertainty; and when that uncertainty subsides, so too does religiosity. The results of this study show that, on average, religiosity increases during times of economic instability, and decreases when the economy …

The Effects Of Globalization On An Emerging Economy: The Case Of South Africa, Oluwasheyi S. Oladipo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how globalization influences selected aspects of an emerging economy, using South Africa as a case study. The dissertation consists of three chapters: two microeconomic studies and one macroeconomic paper on the effects of globalization on some of the factors affecting economic growth. One micro paper explores the impacts of openness on inequality (Chapter 1), another investigates the impacts of trade liberalization on manufacturing sector wages (Chapter 2), and the macro study, which is the final chapter, examines the effects of inflation targeting on exchange rate pass through to domestic prices (Chapter 3).

In 1994, apartheid ended in …

Essays In Health Economics, Aigbokhai Unuigbe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is motivated by changes in health and labor policies of the United States that have occurred over the last two decades. It examines how these policies as well as public programs affect behavior and outcomes. These programs and policies have the potential to impact behavior directly at the individual level and could also have indirect effects at the household level. In addition, the effects on healthcare use and health status are also examined. This dissertation consists of three chapters.

The first chapter looks at the effect of changes in Medicaid policy on legal immigrant parents in the United …

Essays On The Well-Being Of An Aging Population, Alice Zulkarnain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three essays that examine health and labor issues among the middle aged and elderly.

Chapter 1. A Delayed Retirement Policy and Male Labor Supply: Evidence from the Entire Dutch Population

This chapter examines the labor supply effects of a national delayed retirement policy introduced in the Netherlands in 2009. The policy offers a reduction in taxes on labor income for each year after the age of 62 in which a person worked. I estimate the average effect of the policy on male labor supply as well as its responsiveness to the size of the incentive. Comparing …

Better Work And Global Governance, Paul Alois

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a case study of Better Work, a program run by the International Labor Organization and the International Finance Corporation. It aims to improve working conditions and productivity in the apparel industry. The purpose of this case study is to examine the role that international organizations can play in global governance. The research presented here comes from interviews, document analysis, and an examination of quantitative data on factories’ working conditions. In-person interviews were conducted in the United States, Switzerland, Vietnam, and Indonesia; many phone interviews took place with individuals in other countries. Both publicly available documents and internal …

Household Shocks And Transition Into Marriage: Evidence From Rural Ethiopia, Boyd K. Tembo

Theses and Dissertations

The study tests the primary hypothesis that household shocks do not have a positive and significant correlation with a child's transition into early marriage. It finds that there is no statistically significant correlation between parental death and transition into marriage for both genders of subjects in the study.

The Effect Of Gambling Expansion On Health, Marina Li

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the effect of gambling expansion on health and health behaviors. This paper hypothesized gambling expansion decreases individual’s health and increases negative health behaviors. The study is done by observing the health and health behavior of individuals and results generally supports hypothesis.

Causes And Consequences Of Risk Aversion In Middle Adulthood, Nataliya Rubinchik

Theses and Dissertations

I analyze how risk aversion may affect decision-making over time, what effects risk aversion may have on decisions, and whether one’s level of risk aversion varies over time. I find that risk preferences correlate with certain maternal factors, income, depression, and ethnicity. Risk aversion correlates with financial and health decisions.