Economics Commons^™

Non-Market Food Practices Do Things Markets Cannot: Why Vermonters Produce And Distribute Food That's Not For Sale, Sam Bliss

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Researchers tend to portray food self-provisioning in high-income societies as a coping mechanism for the poor or a hobby for the well-off. They describe food charity as a regrettable band-aid. Vegetable gardens and neighborly sharing are considered remnants of precapitalist tradition. These are non-market food practices: producing food that is not for sale and distributing food in ways other than selling it. Recent scholarship challenges those standard understandings by showing (i) that non-market food practices remain prevalent in high-income countries, (ii) that people in diverse social groups engage in these practices, and (iii) that they articulate diverse reasons for doing …

A Quantitative Study Of The Impact Of Foreign Aid On Economic Growth And Human Development Index In Afghanistan From 1960-2020, Fareed Ahmadi

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The aim of this thesis is to study the impact of aggregate foreign aid (FAID), foreign direct investment (FDI) and exports on economic growth measured by real gross domestic product (GDP) and Human development index (HDI) in Afghanistan from 1960 to 2020. The effectiveness of foreign aid on economic growth is highly contested among scholars and it is open to further research. The existing literature also lacks a comprehensive analysis on Afghanistan; thus, this study will add significant findings to this debate by using Afghanistan as a case study. After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the U.S. …

Get Rich And Die Trying: Capitalism, Its Repetitions, And The Financial Plot, Richard Chapman Matis

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Most people want to be rich, and the reasons why usually do not require exposition. Despite gospel warnings about the difficulties of the wealthy entering paradise, multitudes clamor for the possibility of facing this dilemma firsthand. Tales from antiquity and mythologies utilize recognizable archetypes such as the profligate spender or stubborn miser that are still employed as rote moral instruction today. In one sense, exchangeability between positions of rich and poor is a staple of social storytelling because of its universal mutual intelligibility across time and place. Modern readers can likely identify descriptors and coding of rich and poor, despite …

Reorienting Local Housing Development Trends Via Land Value Taxation: A Bottom-Up And Top-Down Quantitative Analysis, Dakota B. Walker

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The region surrounding Burlington, Vermont is in the midst of sparse, decentralized growth which threatens the sense of place from which it has thrived. Many have argued that such development tendencies result from a disconnect between land use incentives at the individual level and the fruits of compact settlement, which materialize at larger scales. Two overarching problems are understood to contribute to this disconnect; the ability to privately appropriate the collectively-created value of land, and the inability to recognize ecological opportunity costs of natural land conversion in land use decisions. One proposed solution is the Land Value Tax (LVT). By …

Sustainability Transitions With Precision Agriculture And Compatible Incentives For Farmers, Benjamin E. Ryan

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Planetary sustainability hinges on transforming agriculture. Agriculture is both a fundamental driver of climate change as well as vulnerable to its adverse impacts. Furthermore, with increasing demands for agricultural production due to both global population increase and more affluent populations, its pressures on water quality, water availability and soil health are profound. To address these rising demands and pressures, climate smart agriculture and precision agriculture are touted as highly technical solutions with great merit in providing economic efficiencies as well as socio-environmental sustainability goals. With these promising technologies using high-resolution data, comes key challenges surrounding data privacy, access, and power. …

The Gradual Disappearance Of Financial Literacy In Today's World. What Is Financial Literacy And Why Is It So Important? My Own Story Of Acquisition, Eileen Gertrude Cammilla Kristiansen

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

There is a growing concern in this country that the middle class is disappearing and not in the way one would hope. Instead of families moving into a higher socio-economic class and being able to provide richer life experiences for themselves and their children, vast numbers are shifting to a lower socio-economic status level. The gap between the affluent and those barely eking out an existence is increasing at an alarming rate. This trend will directly affect who can successfully attend college and who will be available and capable to perform the blue-collar jobs that are vital to the continuation …

Hemp In The United States: An Analysis Of Policy And Consumption, Amanda Falkner

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

As highlighted by its history, the association between hemp and marijuana has proven to be a barrier to success for industrial hemp production for decades. Once a prevalent agricultural crop in the United States, prohibitive legislation discouraged its production and formally made hemp an illegal crop in 1970. Consequently, hemp and its myriad applications remained underutilized by the United States for over forty years. It wasn’t until the 2014 Farm Bill that hemp production was reintroduced as an option for farmers. This hemp hiatus has created the need for interdisciplinary research in order for the market for the crop to …

Policy And Economic Variables Influencing Adoption Of Sustainable Electrification In Rural Sub-Saharan Africa, Payne William Morgan

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Limited access to electricity remains a primary constraint to economic growth and the improvement of livelihoods throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In rural areas, electricity access is especially sparse. The reasons for the scarcity of electricity supply in the region are well documented, with low population density, limited household incomes, and poor regulatory institutions compounding to often make the investment of expanding electricity access result in poor or risky economic returns. However, the declining cost of solar PV and mandates for clean energy development throughout the region have created new channels for bringing electricity supply in potentially more cost-effective ways.Despite these macro …

William S. Culbertson And The Search For The Geopolitical Imperium, Gerard Colby

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis aims to demonstrate that the Middle East was not, as so often depicted, a mere peripheral concern as World War II progressed, but an integral part of President Roosevelt’s goals as he planned for the postwar era. This thesis seeks to demonstrate how the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt undertook an unprecedented policy of trade expansion and corporate investment in the Middle East, a region previously an unchallenged British and French sphere of influence. Using the Lend-Lease program to challenge the hegemony of France and Britain’s imperial preferential systems, Roosevelt achieved American economic penetration and dominance of …

From Tap To Table: Consumer Values, Producer Attitudes, And Vermont Maple Syrup In A Dynamic Landscape, Aidan Conor Mccracken

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Harvesting the sap of maple trees [Acer saccharum] for use in the production of syrups and sugars has a storied history stretching back to the pre-Columbian practices of North America’s indigenous peoples. Since its adaptation by European settlers in the late seventeenth century and into the present day, the production of maple syrup has become especially integral to the livelihoods and cultural identities of farmers in Vermont. While oftentimes esteemed as a timeless agrarian tradition, market forces and environmental changes have led maple syrup producers (or sugarmakers) to adopt new production practices that scarcely resemble the taps, buckets, and draft …

Measuring Comprehensive Wellbeing In Vermont: An Applied Economics Perspective, Katherine Gallagher

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

While human “wellbeing” has historically been measured by economic growth, traditional metrics do not fit the challenges of the 21st century. Increasingly, decision-makers are adopting new guiding frameworks that encompass a more holistic understanding of wellbeing and progress including concepts such as ecological health and subjective wellbeing. Yet, the development processes and implementation challenges faced by these initiatives - as well as the opportunities for advancement - remain relatively unexamined for state and regional communities. This research considers the implementation and potential of existing wellbeing indicator systems in Vermont. With limited research on wellbeing measurement at the state or local …

Essays On Modeling And Analysis Of Dynamic Sociotechnical Systems, David Rushing Dewhurst

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

A sociotechnical system is a collection of humans and algorithms that interact under the partial supervision of a decentralized controller. These systems often display in- tricate dynamics and can be characterized by their unique emergent behavior. In this work, we describe, analyze, and model aspects of three distinct classes of sociotech- nical systems: financial markets, social media platforms, and elections. Though our work is diverse in subject matter content, it is unified though the study of evolution- and adaptation-driven change in social systems and the development of methods used to infer this change.

We first analyze evolutionary financial market microstructure …

Stress And Stressors Affecting Latino Migrant Dairy Farmworkers In Vermont: An Exploratory Analysis, Virginia Kades

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Vermont is a largely rural and homogenous New England state not often thought of as a destination for Latino migrant farm laborers, but in recent years dairy farms have begun hiring Latino workers; there are now an estimated 1200 in the state, although the exact number is unknown (Baker, 2013). As the dairy industry is the largest contributor to sales from agriculture for the state, these farmworkers play an essential role in Vermont’s economy (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2014b). These migrant dairy farmworkers hail primarily from Mexico, with a small fraction from Central America, and lack sufficient documentation to work …

Organic Dairy Profitability In Vermont: Measuring The Impacts Of Management And Market Forces On Farm Financial Performance, Jonathan Patrick Walsh

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The total number of operating dairy farms in the US has decreased by 74.1% over the past 25 years, dropping from 155,339 in 1992 to just 40,219 in 2017. As milk prices have fallen and become more volatile, profit margins have tightened, causing farmers to leave the business due to low profitability. Some Vermont farmers are currently looking for new economic strategies. One approach has been to transition from conventional to organic production in order to take advantage of better prices and new market opportunities. In order to make production decisions, farmers need accurate financial information on the costs and …

A Socio-Ecological Revolution In Monetary Theory: An Argument For, The Development Of, And An Application Of Ecological Monetary Theory, Joe Allen Ament

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Money is the most ubiquitous institution on the planet. It gave rise to literacy, mathematics, sedentary community, and the concept of universal value. Against this backdrop, however, hardly anyone understands what money is. Orthodox monetary theory conceives of money as a neutral commodity that facilitates barter. Presupposing this theory is a dualistic and atomistic ontology in which reality is organized into hierarchically ordered opposites of superiority and inferiority and complex interactions are reduced to summations of their attendant parts. Accordingly, monetary policy is enacted as though money were any other commodity, subject to the barter dynamics of supply and demand. …

Market Efficiency In U.S. Stock Markets: A Study Of The Dow 30 And The S&P 30, Colin Michael Van Oort

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The U.S. National Market System (NMS), the largest marketplace in the world for securities and exchange traded funds, suffers from geographic market fragmentation which leads to reduced market efficiency.

Communication lines transmit price updates and other information between geographically isolated exchanges at varying speeds, bounded above by the speed of light.

Market participants have access to federally mandated information provided by the Securities Information Processor (SIP) and privately offered information provided by the exchanges, often called direct feeds.

These feeds are quantitatively and qualitatively distinct, with the direct feeds tending to provide more information at a faster rate than the …

Some Results On A Class Of Functional Optimization Problems, David Rushing Dewhurst

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

We first describe a general class of optimization problems that describe many natu- ral, economic, and statistical phenomena. After noting the existence of a conserved quantity in a transformed coordinate system, we outline several instances of these problems in statistical physics, facility allocation, and machine learning. A dynamic description and statement of a partial inverse problem follow. When attempting to optimize the state of a system governed by the generalized equipartitioning princi- ple, it is vital to understand the nature of the governing probability distribution. We show that optimiziation for the incorrect probability distribution can have catas- trophic results, e.g., …

A Human Side Of The Smart Grid: Behavior-Based Energy Efficiency From Renters Using Real-Time Feedback And Competitive Performance-Based Incentives, Daniel Fredman

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Our energy system is rapidly transforming, partially due to advances in internet and communications technologies that leverage an unprecedented amount of data. Industry proponents of the so-called “smart grid” suggest these technologies facilitate deeper engagement with end-users of energy (utility customers) that can in turn drive behavior-based changes and accelerate a renewable energy transition. While there has been progress in understanding how these technologies change consumer behavior using, for example, real-time feedback, it’s unclear how specific segments (e.g., renters) respond to these interventions; it’s also unclear why feedback is, or is not, producing changes in energy consumption. The literature suggests …

Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Universal Influenza Vaccination Programs: A Historical-Perspective Case Study Of Vermont, Bryan Charles O'Connor

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Since 2010 the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) have recommended annual influenza vaccinations for all persons aged six months and up (ACIP, 2017). In December of the same year, the Agency of Health and Human Services (AHHS) unveiled Healthy People 2020, a series of health indicators and corresponding 10-year objectives. This newest iteration of the Healthy People program set target influenza vaccination levels for healthy adults 18 and older at 80% (AHHS, 2010).

Aside from the inherent health benefits, multiple studies conducted over the past decade suggest there may be significant economic …

Do Labels Make A Difference: Estimating The Impacts Of Vermont’S Gmo Labeling Law On Perceptions And Prices, Orest V. Pazuniak

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Vermont is the first and only state in the US to establish mandatory labels for food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This thesis investigates the impact of the mandatory labeling law as it relates to changes in prices, quantities sold, and opinions of GMOs. First, grocery store scanner data from Vermont and Oregon are compared using triple difference (difference-in-difference-in-difference) models. Next, Vermont, Oregon, and Colorado survey response data are compared using difference-in-difference models. The findings reveal that there is a general price premium for non-GMO goods of $0.05/oz across all states and times, that mandatory labeling laws do not result …

Who Really Controls Haiti's Destiny? An Examination Of Haiti's Historical Underdevelopment, Endless Poverty, And The Role Played By Non-Governmental Organizations (Ngos), Patrick Scheld

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The presence of NGOs and development agencies is often considered an apolitical phenomenon, and that the very presence of NGOs within a country is a symbol of a global humanity in action; in short, NGOs equal charity which equals good work. Unfortunately, the reality is often much more complicated as NGOs can also be found to be self-serving, anti-democratic and strictly in pursuit of their next funding source. In this thesis I advance the central hypothesis that the international community’s continued pursuit of an NGO-led neoliberal economic development model has systematically failed to contribute to the sustainable development of Haiti …

Becoming Eco-Logical With Second-Order Systems Theory: Sustainability In Re-Organization Of Economies And Food Systems, Skyler Knox Perkins

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Ecological Economics has emerged across disciplines, and has begun to disentangle, not only the relationship between biophysical earth systems and economic activity, but also, fundamental relationships between objectivity, power, value, ethics, perspective and purpose.

In part, this thesis represents an effort to illustrate basic transdisciplinary concepts necessary for understanding the project of Ecological Economics. At present, Ecological Economics is challenged by a seemingly infinite number of available considerations, with a relatively narrow repertoire of impactful mechanisms of control. Given this, it is apparent that the application of Cybernetics to Ecological Economics might provide insights. Cybernetics can help to lend concise …

Shaping Policy In The Anthropocene: Gender Justice As A Social, Economic And Ecological Challenge, Phoebe Spencer

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Environmental pressures such as natural disasters, resource scarcity, and conflict related to climate change have emphasized the importance of considering social justice within its ecological context. Gender inequality is one type of injustice that has traditionally been addressed as a social matter, yet gendered divisions in bargaining power, mobility, and access to resources are exacerbated by environmental instability. One barrier to gender equity in the face of a changing climate is the mainstream economic paradigm, which promotes growth and individualism, often at the cost of environmental and social wellbeing. The issue of gender inequality in the Anthropocene, the proposed geological …

Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Taxes In Vermont: Media Framing And Public Perception, Benjamin Lloyd Crosby

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the conversation surrounding the recent attempts by the Vermont Legislature to pass a Sugar-Sweetened Beverage tax in the years 2014-2016. We explore the common perceptions expressed by a sample of Vermont residents and also look at how Vermont media outlets portrayed the tax through frames of reference. Framing is a method of emphasizing certain points of an issue. This thesis reports the common opinions of Vermonters, the media framing of the issue, and if there is any relationship between them in two academic journal articles.

The first article looks at the common frames used in Vermont media …

Designing For Economic Success: A 50-State Analysis Of The Genuine Progress Indicator, Mairi-Jane Venesky Fox

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The use of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the primary measure of economic progress has arguably led to unintended consequences of environmental degradation and socially skewed outcomes. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was designed to reveal the trade offs associated with conventional economic growth and to assess the broader impact of economic benefits and costs on sustainable human welfare. Although originally designed for use at the national scale, an interest has developed in the United States in a state-level uptake of the GPI to inform and guide policy. However, questions exist about the quality and legitimacy of the GPI as …

Working In Utopia: Locating Marx's "Realm Of Necessity" In The Socialist Futures Of Bellamy And Morris, Kira Braham

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This project examines two works of nineteenth-century utopian fiction, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and William Morris's News from Nowhere, and considers the way in which the organization of work in these imagined post-capitalist futures is guided by their respective philosophies of labor: while Bellamy's utopia is structured by an understanding of labor as primarily a social duty, Morris presents labor as central to the full development and happiness of the individual. These two utopias are read as representative of a fundamental tension within the writings of Marx: while Morris's understanding of labor aligns with the early works of Marx, Bellamy's …

Early Adoption Dynamics Of Private Sustainability Governance Initiatives: A Case Study Of The Marine Cultured-Pearl Industry, Julie Nash

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

We are witnessing a time of unprecedented human impact on the natural environment. Coral reefs, one of the most biologically diverse and productive ecosystems, are at the forefront of enduring these human impacts. Despite widespread recognition of coral reef degradation, counter measures have not reached a scale to offset the threat. The magnitude of this and other environmental issues call for a deeper understanding of the role the private sector can play in sustainable development.

In response to environmental pressures and the shortcomings of global-scale governance, private sustainability governance initiatives have developed. In the last decade, these initiatives have flourished, …

An Exploratory Statistical Analysis Of Nasdaq Provided Trade Data, Michael Foley

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Since Benoit Mandelbrot's discovery of the fractal nature of financial price series, the quantitative analysis of financial markets has been an area of increasing interest for scientists, traders, and regulators. Further, major technological advances over this time have facilitated not only financial innovations, but also the computational ability to analyze and model markets.

The stylized facts are qualitative statistical signatures of financial market data that hold true across different stocks and over many different timescales. In pursuit of a mechanistic understanding of markets, we look to accurately quantify such statistics. With this quantification, we can test computational market models against …