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Scaling Social Impact Bonds in the United States: Barriers, Incentives, and Policy Solutions
Get PDFSocial Impact Bonds (SIBs) are a form of outcomes-based financing that fund social programs by shifting financial risk from the government to private investors. While SIBs have gained international traction, their long-term viability in the United States depends on structural reforms. This thesis examines two completed U.S. SIB projects, Rikers Island in New York and the Just-in-Reach project in Los Angeles, through an analysis of their design, implementation, and outcomes. While both projects focus on criminal justice, they provide context about the scalability of SIBs across multiple social policy areas.The three primary constraints are high transaction costs, limited investor interest, and concerns about project cherry-picking. However, these challenges can be addressed by standardizing contracts and evaluation methods, tiered return structures, tax incentives, improved liquidity through secondary markets, and ensuring SIBs include requirements to serve high-risk populations. This paper explores evolving federal and state policies, including the Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act (SIPPRA), which provides federal funding for SIBs, and related legislation. It also examines how growing political backlash against ESG investing, which incorporates environmental, social, and governance factors into investment decisions, could impact the future of SIBs. Ultimately, this paper argues that SIBs could have beneficial outcomes for social programs but require targeted reforms to enhance their scalability and public value
Team Masters Project: ANDA Submission Preparedness, Use of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies, & Impact of Artificial Intelligence
No full textBright Path Labs (BPL) is a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and manufacturing small-molecule drugs while reshoring American pharmaceutical production. The U.S. is currently facing a severe generic drug shortage, leaving millions of Americans struggling to afford essential medications. Approximately 80% of key starting materials and active pharmaceutical ingredients sourced from foreign countries, supply chain disruptions and material shortages are making life-saving treatments increasingly scarce. BPL aims to enhance oversight, ensure sustainability, and improve the availability of affordable medicines. This project examines regulatory pathways for Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) submissions and continuous manufacturing to address generic drug shortages. BPL seeks to streamline the ANDA submission process, ensuring compliance with regulations while identifying areas for improvement. Our first objective, completed in the first semester, involved researching FDA ANDA guidelines, submission methods, and future regulatory requirements. We learned that average approval times for ANDAs is 4x longer than for New Drug Applications (NDAs), although changes to priority review should help BPL. Our second objective involved identifying AI vendors to support ANDA submissions, particularly for structured content. We identified two AI vendors that we believe together will help optimize BPL ANDA generation process. Our third objective centered on investigating pharmaceutical trends within agile manufacturing, continuous manufacturing, and process analytical technology (PAT). We identified precedent examples of continuous flow and agile manufacturing approval, the primary regulatory risks for agile manufacturing, and Raman and near-infrared spectroscopy as strong real-time release testing technologies for continuous flow. Our final objective included a survey or interviews on AI adoption and agile manufacturing, synthesizing key findings. During our engagement we helped BPL enhance regulatory efficiency, explore innovative manufacturing models, and leverage AI for streamlined ANDA submissions
Money Matters: Investigating the Emotional, Cognitive, and Biological Pathways Connecting Maternal Early Life Financial Insecurity and Parenting Quality
Get PDFEarly life adversity has been shown to have a variety of negative effects on adult functioning, including parenting quality, with implications for child wellbeing. Adverse early life experiences including poverty have been linked to long-term disruptions in emotional, cognitive, and physiological functioning that compromise the ability to provide sensitive, nurturing care. The present study investigated whether emotional regulation difficulties, physiological regulation, and cognitive function mediate the relationship between early life financial insecurity and parenting quality. A sample of 132 mother-child dyads completed self-report measures, biological samples, and cognitive assessments. A multiple mediation model ran in SPSS, revealed a significant indirect effect of early life financial insecurity on parenting quality through emotion regulation difficulties, while physiological regulation and cognitive function did not significantly mediate the relationship. The findings suggest that a primary mechanism explaining why early life financial insecurity affects parenting quality is through the mother’s ability to regulate her emotions. While cognitive and physiological systems are often assumed to be affected by early adversity, impacting parenting quality, findings support emotion regulation as the core mediator. These findings highlight the importance of targeting emotion regulation skills in intervention programs for children living in poverty
Exporting Culture, Building a Nation: South Korea’s Use of Pop Culture as a Soft Power Tool
Get PDFThis thesis examines the multiple governmental plans, policies, and actions by the South Korean government to support and globalize their pop culture products. After the crumbling of its economy and global image due to many external factors in the 1900s, South Korea found itself in poverty with very little global influence. To rebuild their nation, the government implemented many actions to help grow and strengthen their pop culture products to make them more desirable, domestically and internationally. This thesis analyzes three of the major pop culture exports for South Korea, television, movies, and music, and demonstrates how the government has supported and exported these products to international markets as a means of soft power. Then, I examine the negative effects that the soft power agenda has brought onto Korean society and argue that the South Korean government can lessen their investments and support for the development and exportation of their pop culture products due to their immense popularity and emergence of other major issues
Safeguarding Minors Online Without Silencing First Amendment Rights
No full textThe rapid incorporation of social media platforms into the daily lives of American citizens has shed light to urgent debates regarding how to regulate these digital spaces while upholding the rights rooted in the Constitution. In particular, arguments around the First Amendment of free expression. The dissertation examines to changing political landscape of regulating media in the United States, primarily focusing on the initiatives built to protect minors and increase user privacy without infringing on people’s free speech rights. Major federal efforts such as the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act and the EARN IT Act demonstrate how well intentioned laws can still struggle under the scrutiny of the Constitution over concerns about compelled speech, prior restraint, and overbearing censorship. Through analysis of policies both internally and internationally, this thesis proposes various paths forward in respect to America\u27s constitutional rights
Vacated Gaps: Undocumented Student Survival and Educational Policy in the Post-DACA Era
No full textWhile public universities and community colleges in California have taken substantial steps towards supporting undocumented students, including the establishment of in-state tuition laws and Dream Resource Centers, these efforts have not been mirrored in private universities. This disparity raises an essential question: How do undocumented students survive and thrive in private institutions that do not support them? What forms of resistance, resilience, and community-building emerge in the absence of institutional safety nets? These are the questions at the heart of this research. It is only through understanding and analyzing the various aspects of the immigrant identity that one can undertake a comprehensive initiative toward institutional change.
Current research on the experiences of undocumented students is almost exclusively focused on those attending public universities and community colleges in California. Their school sizes, public funding, and state accountability have become central to the discourse on undocumented student experiences. However, little to no academic attention has been paid to the experiences of undocumented students in private liberal arts colleges, which are often smaller, more selective, and less accountable to state oversight or public policy mandates. In the course of conducting my literature review, I encountered only a single study focused on undocumented students in private and liberal arts colleges, which was written by Gloria Itzel Montiel (2017). The lack of scholarship in this area makes it challenging to advocate for institutional change within private colleges. It also contributes to the erasure of students whose educational journeys fall outside the public university framework. This includes the lack of access to specific state-funded resources, legal protections, and organized advocacy efforts centered around public institutions, as they must continue to navigate them independently. Moreover, within the existing literature on undocumented students, much of it tends to focus on the barriers they face rather than how they are being overcome. While these challenges are real and deserve attention, what is too often overlooked is the ways students persist, adapt, and survive in the face of systematic marginalization. Many are building informal support networks, developing mutual aid practices, and cultivating community resilience. These strategies are both crucial for survival and should be shown as rich sites of knowledge that can be used to create institutional transformations
Capital Structure Determinants: Pricing Power and Leverage
No full textWhile equity investors have long prioritized pricing power as a key indicator of long-term value creation, it is rarely emphasized by debt stakeholders. Existing literature on capital structure determinants largely overlooks pricing power perhaps due to the inherent misalignment between incremental profitability and lender returns, which are contractually fixed. This thesis challenges that perception by arguing that pricing power should be a critical consideration in lending decisions. Firms with strong pricing power can preserve cash flows during macroeconomic volatility by passing cost increases onto customers. Without this ability, maintaining debt service capacity is difficult in inflationary environments, increasing the risk of interest payment defaults and covenant breaches. To test this hypothesis, I run panel OLS regressions using firm-level data and find that pricing power is positively and significantly associated with leverage, even after controlling for firm fundamentals and fixed effects. In the most robust specification, a one-unit increase in pricing power corresponds to an 11.4% increase in leverage. I then explore sized-based heterogeneity and find that the pricing power–leverage relationship is particularly pronounced among small-cap firms. The interaction term between pricing power and small-cap status is positive and highly significant (β = 0.0857, p \u3c 0.01). Finally, I use the 1994 Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act (IBBEA) as a quasi-natural experiment and present suggestive evidence of a causal relationship between pricing power and leverage. Overall, this thesis highlights pricing power as an underappreciated determinant of capital structure and advocates for its inclusion in credit risk frameworks
Social Capital and American Democracy: How the Digital Age has Created Challenges for Social Cohesion in America
Get PDFThis thesis examines the connection between social capital and politics in the context of American democracy. I begin by showing how society and government have been deeply linked since the political theories of Plato and Aristotle. I maintain that these philosophers conceptualized politics as a reflection of social conditions. Next, I demonstrate how Tocqueville builds on this tradition in his assertion that American democracy rose out of the nation’s unique equality of conditions and strong social bonds. With the understanding that civil society is crucial to American democracy, I then show how this fundamental pillar has been deteriorating. I present the empirical evidence on the decline in social capital in America in the late twentieth century, drawing primarily from Robert Putnam. As a response to Putnam’s findings, many hoped that the Internet would provide an avenue for boosting social capital in America. I will consider how the digital revolution has played out since these optimistic projections in the late 1990s. Ultimately, I argue that, considering the classical lens, the proliferation of smartphones and social media present serious challenges for the strength of social capital, and ultimately, democracy in the United States
GOLD AND GLORY The Fate of Hungary’s Lost Treasures after World War Two
Get PDFThis thesis examines Hungary’s national identity and Cold-War diplomacy through the fate of two major cultural treasures: The Holy Crown of St Stephen and the Hungarian Gold Train (Werfen Train). By tracing the history of the Holy Crown from its origin myths and evolving role alongside the changing concept of Kingship the study shows how it became a crucial aspect of national identity and legitimacy not just for leaders but for the Hungarian people. By analyzing the seizure, mishandling and prolonged American custody of the Gold Train, this thesis exposes a different dimension of American postwar literature by showing a situation where it deviated from policy. Drawing on extensive archive research- including diplomatic correspondence, military records and restitution documentation- this thesis argues that while the United States framed its custody of these items as protective it often acted in direct violation of its own state principles. The treatment of these treasures reveals a broader underlying tension implicit in postwar Allied policy while illuminating Hungary’s distinct struggle for sovereignty and cultural continuity across a millennium
Built to Last: Intergenerational Transfers and the Architecture of Inequality
Get PDFThis paper explores how altruistic motivations around bequests affect the distribution of wealth and consumption across generations. Using a two-period overlapping generations model with stochastic inheritance and distinct labor types, agents make decisions about consumption, savings, and bequests under CRRA utility. Altruism is modeled as a separate utility component, allowing the strength of intentional bequesting to vary across simulations.
Simulation results show that altruism reduces within-group wealth inequality: both rich and poor agents exhibit tighter, less skewed wealth distributions. However, between-group inequality increases, as rich agents capture a larger share of total wealth. The net effect is a modest decline in overall wealth inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient. Consumption inequality also falls slightly, driven by high-wealth agents reducing their consumption to leave larger bequests. Altruism amplifies the incentive to save rather than spend.
Taken together, these findings show that altruism doesn’t uniformly reduce inequality, it redistributes it