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Corporate Social Responsibility: Are There Financial Incentives?
Full text linkIn the early 2000s, consumer trends increasingly influenced corporations to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). More recently, however, this trend has shown signs of reversing, which is puzzling, given that engagement in CSR may lead to enhanced company financial performance through channels of competitive advantage or risk reduction. Using event study methods, I analyze how investors respond to signals in the form of third-party recognitions for companies’ CSR activities. Third-party recognitions, may provide new information, altering investor behaviors and decision making. I find no statistically significant relationship between the announcement of these recognitions and either abnormal stock returns or changes in log stock prices
Industrial Parks and Domestic Power: Work, Industrialization, and Intimate Partner Violence in Nigeria
Full text linkThis paper examines the effect of industrial zone openings on women\u27s employment, relative earnings, and intimate partner violence (IPV) in Nigeria. I exploit variation in the timing of industrial zone openings to use a staggered difference-in-differences model. I compare women near industrial zones to women near not-yet-built industrial zones and capture the effect of the average treatment effect on the treated. I perform this analysis for women within 10, 15, 20, and 25 kilometers of an industrial zone. I find that being within all distances of an industrial zone increases a woman\u27s relative earnings compared to women in non-industrialized zones. Women within 25 km of industrial zones also experienced significantly less emotional violence and more sexual violence than those in non-industrialized areas. The percentage of women who experienced any form of violence was also lower for those within 20 and 25 km of industrial areas. However, the possible presence of pre-trends threatens the validity of these results
Motivating Pro-Environmental Behavior: The Roles of Emotions, Habits, and Status in Consumer and Lifestyle Choices
Full text linkGiven the urgency of addressing climate change, research on how sustainable behavior can be motivated is essential. The present research investigates how message framing, self-focused emotions, habits, and perceived status influence pro-environmental decision-making. Study 1 examined the effects of message frame (positive, negative, neutral), commitment level (one-time, long-term), and behavior type (consumer, lifestyle) on pro-environmental intent. Participants (N = 110) read two separate narrative scenarios describing one consumer and one lifestyle choice, each manipulated by message frame and commitment level. After reading each scenario, participants rated their feelings of anticipated shame and pride and indicated the likelihood (scale of 1-100%) of engaging in the environmentally-conscious choice in the future. Findings revealed that self-focused emotions predicted pro-environmental intent. However, contrary to previous research, intent was unaffected by message framing. Study 2 examined the effects of visibility, expense, and behavior type (consumer, lifestyle) on pro-environmental willingness. Participants (N = 95) were presented a set of eight pro-environmental behaviors (four consumer, four lifestyle) that varied in visibility and expense, and were asked to indicate their willingness to engage in each behavior. Findings showed that expense was positively associated with pro-environmental willingness, but only when visibility was high. Importantly, both studies found that lifestyle behaviors were more challenging to motivate than consumer behaviors. However, the underlying reasons for this disparity remain unclear, as neither habit nor status explained this effect. Limitations of the present studies and areas of future research are discussed
Backlash and the ADA: Conflicting Constructions of Disability in U.S. Policy
Full text linkThe Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has faced significant judicial and regulatory backlash, even after the passage of the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA). Examining the legislative histories and trends in ADA litigation, I argue that this backlash arises from conflicts between the medical and social models of disability embedded in both laws. Compromises made during both legislative processes resulted in a law that accommodates multiple conceptions of disability, allowing courts to reshape the law according to their own views. Ultimately, the ADA remains a site of contestation as its internal contradictions have gone unresolved
Gaps in Knowledge: Topological Insights into the Structure of Science
Full text linkUnderstanding scientific development is essential to ascertaining the mechanisms leading us into the future. Building this understanding requires both methodological developments and empirical research. This thesis contributes in both aspects using a topological approach to examine scientific knowledge. The first section presents a new algorithm to find optimal cycle representatives for homological features in complex networks, a context for which we demonstrate existing algorithms can be inadequate. The second section applies a number of topological methods, including our cycle optimization algorithm, to data on individual scientific fields, demonstrating the value of topological approaches and highlighting new insights about how science evolves
On the Hölder Continuity of the Brascamp-Lieb Constant
Full text linkThe Brascamp-Lieb inequality is a generalization of many well-known multilinear functional inequalities. The Brascamp-Lieb constant is the best constant that works for the Brascamp-Lieb inequality for a given tuple of input linear maps and powers. If we keep the powers constant while varying the input linear maps, the Brascamp-Lieb constant becomes a function of the linear maps. In this thesis, we explore the Hölder continuity of the Brascamp-Lieb constant. Specifically,we prove that the general 4-linear case of the Brascamp-Lieb inequality is locally Lipschitz continuous. Additionally, we provide an improvement of a previous result on the local Hölder continuity of the Brascamp-Lieb constant
Making and Breaking Chaos: Analog Computer Implementation of the Lorenz Model
Full text linkHybrid analogue-digital computers have been shown to have certain advantages over traditional digital computers when solving nonlinear partial differential equations. Motivated by this fact, we implement the Lorenz equations on an analogue electronic computer and vary the parameters to analyze the bifurcations. With the working circuit, we compared experimental results to various digital simulations to assess the effectiveness of our circuit. We find clear qualitative agreement between the physical circuit and digital simulations; however, we observe a noticeable quantitative difference in behavior. The circuit depicts a picturesque Lorenz Butterfly plot and bifurcates into fixed points and chaos; however, these bifurcations occur at different r values than the theory predicts. Lastly, we built a noise generation circuit and observed the stochastic effects on the circuit
Crowded Air: Poems
No full textThis project is a collection of poems which draw from my experiences as a women\u27s basketball player to explore the personal and political resonances of sport, centered around themes of time, physicality, and connection. The poems document the intimate metamorphoses through which the body passes to reach the edges of its possibilities, and examine structures of nationalism, gender bias, and racism that are inextricable from the sporting world. In creating this poetic landscape, I fuse two worlds which I\u27ve kept separate in my mind, but continually find their way towards a kind of interweaving — my creative self and my life as an athlete
Seas of Lemongrass: A Political Ecology Perspective on Urban Agriculture and Immigrant Food Security in the Twin Cities, Minnesota
Full text linkUrban agriculture (UA) frequently employs organic, polycultural and agroecological techniques in order to farm suboptimal urban land with limited resources. However, less scholarly attention has been paid to its actual impacts on the eating patterns of marginalized groups like immigrants, which is important to study for political debates about the expansion and purpose of UA. In this study, I examined how different forms of UA affect food security and dietary diversity for immigrants in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Using dietary surveys, food access questionnaires, and informal conversations, I determined that a simplistic definition of food security focused only on overall dietary diversity, caloric intake, and basic food access fails to reveal differences in these outcomes between UA and the control. However, a multidimensional approach shows that UA helps immigrants access crucial micronutrients through fresh vegetables and can increase immigrant agency in the food system by allowing people to plant or eat culturally relevant crops and preserve their traditional food cultures. While this agency effect is stronger for community gardens, there is a tradeoff with availability here as farm stands can provide a wider variety of vegetables. Overall, this analysis shows significant potential for UA to substantially increase food security with increased land access, season extension, and by providing additional food groups, but this would require careful attention to place-specific dynamics, such as pressure from more profitable land uses in a booming metropolitan area, Minnesota’s harsh winters, and the unique mixtures of immigrants and cultures in a region
Generational Remigration of the Latvian Diaspora: Tracing the Confluence of Cultural Identity and Economic Opportunity
Full text linkAt just 1.85 million, Latvia’s current population is declining at one of the fastest rates in Europe. This situation is prompting the Latvian government to introduce policies seeking economic, political, educational, and cultural engagement with the country’s diaspora with the hope that some of the approximately 390,000 emigrants and their descendants living abroad will return to live in Latvia. This paper asks whether these government initiatives are successful in their goal of influencing Latvian diaspora members to remigrate, and if the policies acknowledge and reconcile generational differences in the diaspora’s attitudes towards cultural involvement and eventual remigration. Through surveys and one-on-one interviews, it is evident that diaspora members who have returned to live in Latvia display strong links to their heritage and have a desire to strengthen these connections into the future, and that Latvian government-supported programs and initiatives abroad have been instrumental in maintaining the diaspora’s ties to their heritage. However, financial status, educational status, and employment opportunities in Latvia are found to be major factors in remigration since the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. A better understanding of the effectiveness of Latvian diaspora policies in light of generational differences in the diaspora, and clarification of what motivates Latvians abroad to return to their native country despite the challenges of doing so, is crucial to curb the sharp decline in Latvia’s population