Economics Commons^™

A Pearl Ravaged: The Paradox Of Haiti And Its Socioeconomic Origins, Isabel Ishibe Exel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Saint-Domingue was once the most profitable colony of the Caribbean, the so-called pearl of the Antilles. Nowadays, Haiti is known for being the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, a dramatic shift that raises the question of the factors contributing to Haiti's current state, marked by persistent violence, natural disasters, and political instability. Various discourses have framed Haiti as a country doomed for failure. However, relying on binary concepts such as success and failure is counterproductive to a refined analysis. How, then, should we structure this conversation? My ultimate goal for this work is to provide a nuanced analysis of …

Economic Factors And Theories Of Decline And Reform In The Late Ottoman Empire C. 1789–1911, Peter S. Gomori

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Tribes of Turkish speaking people (“Turks”) migrated in the 11th century from the Central Asian Steppes to what we consider the Middle East. Over the next two centuries this community would expand north, west and south to form a vast empire: the Ottoman Empire. Possibly the peak of the size of this empire would probably occur during the 16^th century under the rule of the Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent (1494- 1566) where the population of the Ottoman Empire was estimated to be up to 30 million. Yet there would be rivals. To the East was the Safavid Empire (today …

Bearer Negotiable Instruments: Addressing A Financial Intelligence Gap And Identifying Criminogenic Weaknesses, Hollis B. Kegg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bearer Negotiable Instruments (BNI) are a long-standing category of financial instruments used to transfer large amounts of money in ways that may not be subject to regulation, reporting, tracking, review, or oversight. There is limited information available on BNIs, and no evidence that any studies have been undertaken on BNIs alone, much less reported. Increasingly, BNIs are being used for illegal purposes including money laundering. This study gathers information about their characteristics, nature, purpose, legal status, and numbers. It also focuses on the crime risks associated with BNIs, the crime opportunities they facilitate, and the criminal weaknesses in the financial …

The Euro And Bumps In The Road: Historical Patterns Of Nonresident Holdings In Eurozone Bonds, 1980–2018, Michael H. Scarlatos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A developed bond market which attracts nonresident investors both enables and reflects a host currency’s transition from domestic to international status. My analysis of historical private nonresident holdings of Eurozone portfolio debt securities spanning the euro’s 1999 creation and its subsequent 2008 crisis reveals diverging patterns.

This analysis, complemented by coefficient stability tests, discovers that the conversion of national currencies to the euro was reflected by a pickup in nonresident holdings of bonds issued by countries adopting the euro, especially those of the periphery (Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain) relative to the core (Germany, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, and the …

Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …

Runaway: A History Of Postwar New York In Four Factories, Andy Battle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At midcentury, New York City was among the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. Within a generation, this manufacturing economy suffered an extraordinary collapse. Beginning in the 1950s, workers and their unions began to use the term “runaway” to describe factories that pulled up stakes in New York and set them back down in other climes. This dissertation explores the deindustrialization of New York City through case studies of “runaway” plants, or factories that left New York for the American South or abroad between the years 1945 and 1975.

In general, the manufacturers that remained in New York at …

Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …

Immigration, Small Business And Assimilation: Three Stories Of Small-Time Capitalism On The Lower East Side, Marcus Hillman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Small businesses in New York City have often been a catalyst to assimilation for individual immigrants, their families and their communities. For this capstone project, I have recorded conversations with three small-time entrepreneurs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and created a narrative audio piece that explores some of the important and study-worthy characteristics of New York City including economic opportunities in the city, immigration, assimilation and the ways that New Yorkers share space, just to name a few. These themes are threads that ran through all three of the conversations that I had and are crucial elements of …

Corporate Urbanization: Between The Future And Survival In Lebanon, Deen S. Sharp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you look today at the skyline of downtowns throughout the Middle East and beyond, the joint-stock corporation has transformed the urban landscape. The corporation makes itself present through the proliferation of its urban mega-projects, including skyscrapers, downtown developments and gated communities; retail malls and artificial islands; airports and ports; and highways. Built into these corporate urban structures are edifices of politics, ideology and certain forms of socio-spatial and temporal organization. The corporation, however, has largely escaped critical scholarly analysis in Geography and/or Urban and Middle East Studies. In this thesis, I argue that the corporation is far more than …

Essays On Inequality And Macroeconomic Stability, Thomas Hauner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters. . .

Chapter 1: Aggregate Wealth and Its Distribution as Determinants of Financial Crises: Panel Evidence This essay investigates the relationship between wealth inequality and financial crises across a panel of nine advanced economies over the past 100 years. While substantiation of a role for income inequality is ambiguous in the literature, evidence is presented suggesting a unique capacity for the accumulation of assets to increase the likelihood of a future financial crisis episode. Testing long-run panel data with a reduced form, two-way fixed effects model, estimates suggest that increasing wealth inequality, in an …

The New American Slavery: Capitalism And The Ghettoization Of American Prisons As A Profitable Corporate Business, David A. Liburd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The labor of enslaved Africans and Black Americans played a large part in the history of colonial America, with the American plantation being the epicenter for all that was to be produced. While the two have never been completely tied together, capitalism and modern day slavery have been linked with one another. Some analysis sees slavery as a remote form of capitalism, a substitute, to an antiquated form of labor in the modern world.

Slave plantations adopted a new concentration in size and management, referred to by W.E. DuBois as a change "from a family institution to an industrial system."1 …

Imagining Basic Income As An International And Domestic Remedy To Wealth Inequality, Christian A. Davis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Has the success of corporate capitalism undermined the neoliberal ideas it presupposes, leading to the inevitable growth of socialism? While labor unions may lament the export of jobs, the real issue in today’s increasingly administered and mechanized economy is the global loss of jobs. James Ferguson has provided a strong argument that despite the triumphalist narratives of neoliberalism, capitalist development strategies particularly in South Africa have resulted in concentrated wealth, large unemployment, and the growth of transfer payments. More importantly, he shows how traditional critics of capitalism fall short in addressing the issues of a jobless future. For example, Marxists …

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 …

Firms' Decisions To Enter A Market Of Highly Differentiated Products: Apparel Industry And New York Fashion Week, Yoko Katagiri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation deals with economic aspects of the fashion industry. It begins with a discussion of the complex industrial organization aspects of the industry. A wealth of information in this area has been assembled and is presented for the first time. The focus is on the high-end fashion market: how it started, how it works, New York Fashion Week, and its significance for the industry. Then a comprehensive review of the economics literature as it pertains to the industry is presented, also for the first time. The empirical sections of the dissertation contain estimates of demand functions for apparel and …

Finance And Empire: 'Gentlemanly Capitalism' In Britain's Occupation Of Egypt, Jared Paul Iacolucci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, Egypt was being led by Mehmed Ali, a reformer eager to build his own dynastic state separate from the Ottoman Empire. Despite his achievements, by the end of the nineteenth century Egypt had been occupied by Great Britain for nearly two decades. This paper will examine the developments in Egypt and Great Britain that drew the two together, with particular emphasis on the growth and expansion of international finance into foreign government lending. As finance became an increasingly profitable career in Britain, financiers entered the gentlemanly class and socialized with the political elite. …

The Effects Of Fiscal Policy On Savings And Investment, Andrew A. Bossie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation contains three essays exploring the effect of fiscal policy shocks on savings and lending behavior of the private economy. Two essays focus on World War II and one essay focuses on the entire postwar period. Essay I looks at the response of monetary policy to fiscal policy shocks and the effect of fiscal policy on the private sector's balance sheet over a period that covers 1954 and 2007. I find a minimal response of the Federal Reserve to fiscal policy shocks. I also find the the main response of the private sector to fiscal policy shocks manifests itself …

For Right And Might: The Militarization Of The Cold War And The Remaking Of American Democracy, Michael Brenes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how Cold War defense spending shaped the evolution of American political culture and public policy from the 1940s until the 1990s. It argues that the Cold War economy contributed to the realignment of American politics in the postwar era. The fight against global communism abroad altered the structure, purpose, and public perception of the federal government following World War II, but also subsidized corporations, suburban communities, and individuals affected by defense spending. The militarization of the Cold War therefore created various dependents of America's military and defense apparatus that continuously pressed for more defense spending during the …