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A Framework for Institutional Turnaround at a Historically Black University
No full textMany small private, non-profit liberal arts colleges and universities struggle to survive and thrive especially in the face of declining enrollment, increased competition, the demographic shift, little to no returns on endowments, and dwindling philanthropic support. These small colleges typically are four-year private institutions that admit fewer than 2,500 students who may be high or low academic achievers, frequently church-affiliated, and most likely to close. Enrollment decline or stagnant growth can signal an institution is headed for trouble. Not all institutions demonstrate the same indicators of trouble, but they do show common harmful patterns. For example, common indicators include 5% or greater declines in fall enrollment for three consecutive years; 50% deferred maintenance of plant and equipment; diminishing ratio of net worth (assets) to debt-load; placement on financial warning with the regional accreditor; to name a few. Albeit troubled historically black colleges and universities’ (HBCUs) warning indicators follow a pattern similar to their peer historically white institutions (HWIs), their distress is frequently exacerbated by historical perceptions, systemic racism, and more than a century of being underfunded. This study used qualitative research to examine the decline experienced by an HBCU and the strategies employed by its leaders to turnaround their institution. MacTaggart’s (2010) three-stage turnaround circle is used to assess the effectiveness of the strategies implemented to change the trajectory of the decline. This single case study revealed that the institution employed strong, competent leadership who was guided by meticulous strategic planning to stabilize the finances of the university and grow student enrollment by expanding and marketing new curricula, extra-curricular, and co-curricular programs. Once additional revenue was realized, its leaders implemented measures to rebrand the institution. However, many external (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic) and internal (e.g., organizational culture) environmental factors impacted the institution’s efforts to achieve the enduring transformational stage of the turnaround process. Policy makers, governing boards, presidents, and leadership should find the study useful in implementing turnaround strategies through the lens of HBCU leaders and the obstacles they encountered throughout their journey
Collation Model for Ms. Codex 1154: [Benedictiones episcopales]
Get PDFCollection of instructions for bishops. Work 1 is possibly an older variation of the episcopal benedictions found in Fasc. IV of the Roman Pontifical as published by Leo XIII. Includes De patenae et calicis consecratione; De benedictione mapparum, seu linteaminum sacris altaris; De benedictione corporalium; and De benedictione sacrorum vasorum, et aliorum ornamentorum in genere. Work 2 is a portion of the Ordo Romanus, likely copied from a printed edition. Original work was compiled around 730 in France, as an instruction book for clergymen on the performance of various religious ceremonies. Work 3 is a collection of prayers for certain occassions, or concerning certain religious figures, which includes In die natalium domini; De sancto Johanne evangelista; In ascensione domini; In die Penthecosten; In die corpus Xristi; and De sancta Trinitate; as well as daily prayers, prayers to the Virgin Mary, to John the Baptist, to Peter and Paul, concerning the annunciation of Mary, to St. Martin, and for dinner. Although the entire manuscript is French in origin, and the Ordo Romanus seems to have its origins in the practices of French bishops, work 3 specifically references the Gallic rite, In gallicantu benedictio (f. 21r).https://repository.upenn.edu/sims_models/1105/thumbnail.jp
Shareholder Activism in the ESG Space: An Analysis of the Composition, Success Rates, and ESG Score Relationship of Shareholder Proposals from 2013-2020
Get PDFThis paper examines shareholder proposals provided by Institutional Shareholder Services from 2013 to 2020. It analyzes (1) the breakdown between SRI-related and governance related shareholder proposals over time and across industries, (2) trends in passage rates of SRI-related proposals over time and across industries, and (3) the relationship between passage rates of shareholder proposals and the ESG scores of the target firms. Using a simple linear regression, we find that (1) SRI-related proposal passage rates are on average 9.78% less than their non-SRI counterparts, when controlling for year fixed effects, (2) the average increase in passage rates of SRI-related proposals per year is 0.4%, (3) target companies whose proposals are passed by their shareholders have significantly poorer ESG-performance than target companies whose proposals did not pass, and this effect is augmented when looking specifically at SRI-related proposals
Motivated Errors
Get PDFIn three sets of experiments involving 5,432 subjects, we show that agents make more errors when doing so allows them to justify selfish behavior. We show that errors relating to addition arise when they can help to justify selfishness but are eliminated when selfish motives are removed. In addition, we show that selfish motives can either exacerbate or mitigate errors relating to correlation neglect and anchoring. Our results are consistent with individuals acting confused as a justification for selfish behavior
Light and Black Magic: Alvin Langdon Coburn and the Potential of Abstract Photography
No full textThanks to his dazzling Vortographs, Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882–1966) is known as one of the first to create abstract photographs. Through these remarkable pictures, made in 1916 and 1917 with a peripheral connection to the British Vorticist movement, he opened new and fertile territory within early-twentieth century avant-garde photography and within avant-garde visual culture more broadly. My dissertation brings to light the conditions that enabled Coburn to conceive of abstract photography, that guided him to the specific forms of the Vortographs, and that drove him to present the pictures as a vitally necessary breakthrough in his chosen medium. This study begins with an examination of Coburn’s early career, during which he became dedicated to photography as an art of composition in which aesthetic value was located primarily in the carefully considered arrangement of shapes and tones. This led him to nearly abstract pictures as early as 1906. A decade later, the trying conditions of World War I drove Coburn to studio work (taking a camera outdoors would have seen him arrested on suspicion of spying) and high ambition (disturbed by the war, he sought to assert his humanity through heroic art). To better understand the abstract images that followed, I partnered with the artist and photographer Gregory Vershbow to reconstruct the processes behind Coburn’s glistening pictures, which have previously remained unexplained. Our discoveries show that the Vortographs resulted from a range of methods that were skillfully conceived to preserve the pictures’ abstraction through visual disorientation. I then trace Coburn’s promotion of his new work as proof of photography’s modernist potential, and his efforts to urge his fellow photographers towards parallel avant-garde experimentation—efforts that ultimately failed amid the traditionalism of the British photography community. Although he could not sway his contemporaries, Coburn opened the possibility of abstract photography for every artist that would follow him. In my conclusion, I describe how the Vortographs circumvent photography’s vaunted connection to indexical representation to achieve abstraction not in spite of, but through their intensive grounding in the physical world
Towards Precision Measurements of the Optical Depth to Reionization Using 21 cm Data and Machine Learning
No full textThe Epoch of Reionization (EoR) was a phase transition from a neutral state to an ionized state where the first generation of luminous objects were able to heat and ionize the surrounding predominantly neutral hydrogen gas. Detection of brightness temperature fluctuations from the redshifted hyperfine 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen would provide a direct three-dimensional probe of astrophysics and cosmology during this period. Another important property of reionization is the redshift of its midpoint, when half the hydrogen in the intergalactic medium (IGM) was ionized. This quantity is often estimated by using the cosmic microwave background (CMB) optical depth, tau . Since the optical depth is obtained by integrating along the line of sight, it provides just one number to characterize reionization. As a result, this can be converted into a constraint for the midpoint under the assumption of a parametric form for the ionization history. This is also a probe of the EoR. Upcoming measurements of the high-redshift 21cm signal from the EoR are a promising probe of the astrophysics of the first galaxies and of cosmological parameters. In particular, the optical depth tau to the last scattering surface of the CMB should be tightly constrained by direct measurements of the neutral hydrogen state at high redshift. A robust measurement of from 21cm data would help eliminate it as a nuisance parameter from CMB estimates of cosmological parameters. Previous proposals for extracting tau from future 21cm datasets have typically used the 21cm power spectra generated by semi-numerical models to reconstruct the reionization history. I present in this thesis a different approach which uses convolution neural networks (CNNs) trained on mock images of the 21cm EoR signal to extract tau. I constructed a CNN that improves upon on previously proposed architectures, and perform an automated hyperparameter optimization. I showed that well-trained CNNs are able to accurately predict tau, even when removing Fourier modes that are expected to be corrupted by bright foreground contamination of the 21cm signal. I then began answering a slightly different question that involved raining three different Bayesian models using mock images of ionized fields of hydrogen to extract the ionization fraction of hydrogen by only looks at one redshift to infer the ionization fraction of each simulated image. I showed that for a simple fully Bayesian network it is possible to successfully produces predicted values that are closely aligned with the true values and the model was tuned to find the ``best\u27\u27 generalized model architecture for this particular problem
Essays on Strategic Choices Over Impaired Water Quality
No full textThis dissertation studies the strategic choices made by both governments and private citizens in relation to impairment of water quality over both surface and drinking water in the United States. In the first chapter, I investigate whether delegating responsibility for surface water quality management to state governments generates negative externalities against downstream neighboring states. To separate the effect of state-level policy from other sources of water quality variation, I rely on the staggered roll-out of state water management programs under the Clean Water Act to conduct a difference-in-difference analysis. I find that water quality declines in downstream states in response to upstream decentralization, but that the effect is not concentrated at borders. I additionally investigate whether interstate water compacts and political cooperation reduce cross-state spillovers. I find evidence that interstate cooperative agreements have modest success in serving as a hybrid between state and federal jurisdiction: I find no evidence of political cooperation. In my second chapter, co-authored with Felipe Flores Golfin, we evaluate potential benefits of drinking water infrastructure investments in the United States. We first estimate willingness-to-pay for high-quality drinking water using consumer avoidance behavior in response to health-based drinking water quality violations. We find a modest but statistically significant increase in bottled water purchases in the year in which a county has at least one active violation. We then estimate a household-level discrete choice model of drinking water. We find that the average household is willing to pay $162 per year to avoid a one standard deviation decrease in water quality. We additionally find that WTP for bottled water increases in income. We further discuss how our estimates suggest that consumer preferences strongly justify major increases in water infrastructure investments in the United States
Essays in Online News Consumption
No full textThis thesis focuses on the impact of the consumption environment on consumer preferences and decision making in consuming online news. The two chapters explore the effects of variation in the consumption environment in two different ways: offline, via differences in environmental factors, and online, via news-delivery platform changes. The first chapter addresses whether the offline news environment affects online news consumption choices, focusing on whether consumers are more influenced by their innate preferences or outside environments when choosing to consume news - do consumers trade off online and offline news consumption? We build and estimate a model extending the standard discrete choice framework that allows us to identify this relationship via recovery of a single structural parameter. This parameter interprets the relationship between inside goods (online news) and the outside option (offline environmental news options). To estimate our model, we take advantage of a large novel data set of a subset of US users from a major web browser. We exploit the migration patterns of users as our source of identifying variation. In particular, we analyze consumer browsing before and after a move to identify our model. This exercise leads to evidence of independence between online and offline news goods at the population level, suggesting minimal offline environmental influence. However, further investigation points to significant between-individual heterogeneity in the relationship between online and offline news, which we then show is partially explained by observable consumer characteristics via machine learning methods. We explore the implications of this heterogeneity and propose additional analysis to identify the potential mechanisms behind our findings. In the second chapter, we examine a change in the Facebook algorithm and its impact on online news browsing. We ask the question whether social media increases or decreases online news consumption, specifically of opinion-oriented content. The key to our identification of this impact is a change in the Facebook news algorithm that occurred over the first few months of 2018. Facebook deprioritized content that a users\u27 connections did not interact with, resulting in a large reduction in news consumption. We employ a matching design wherein we match treatment users who use Facebook - and thus are affected by changes in the Facebook algorithm - to those who do not use Facebook using characteristics of these users\u27 browsing habits. When news content is reduced on Facebook, we see a drop in news browsing behavior for these users relative to their peers who do not use Facebook, suggesting that social media use does increase news consumption as users do not merely substitute to other media. However, we also observe that compared to control users, our treatment users experience an increase in opinion-oriented content browsing when their access to social media news is reduced. This runs counter to our original speculation that social media would be correlated with increased opinion-oriented media consumption. We hypothesize potential mechanisms for these effects and propose tests to distinguish them. Overall, we see evidence consistent with online consumption environments having impact on consumption decisions, with much less impact coming from offline consumption environment
Counting Extreme Points from Poisson Processes on a Half Line
No full textRun a Poisson process to generate points on the positive vertical axis, so that the counting process looks like an increasing arc with random jagged edges (see Figure 1.2). The outermost Poisson points—the extreme points—are those that sit on the boundary of the counting process\u27 convex hull. How many extreme points are there? This thesis examines numerous approaches to this question with different styles of answers. Originally, the inspiration for this problem and the purpose of an answer was to guess a growth exponent for the extreme primes studied by McNew (2018), Tutaj (2018), and Pomerance (1979); from estimates here, one might guess 1/3. Upon exploration, the Poisson problem, certain results, and certain techniques herein have unmistakable ties to work by Groeneboom (2011) on a closely related problem about empirical distributions. In fact, the approach by Groeneboom (2011) would likely yield these 1/3 answers for our problem, as well (perhaps even with greater precision than we can provide), though we cannot say with complete certainty, since not all the details were laid out. Moreover, certain techniques here share features with the work by Groeneboom (2011), though the approach here begins from a slightly different point-by-point perspective. We also comment on these similarities and make use of this relationship. Aside from Poisson processes leading to growth exponent 1/3, we study other examples that have growth exponent 1 instead
Collation Model for Oversize Ms. Codex 1147: Textus tertius libri sententiarum
Get PDFContains most of Book III (De incarnatione Verbi) of Peter Lombard\u27s Sentences. A table of contents at the beginning lists all the chapters from all forty disputations, but the text breaks off in the middle of Disputation 35, Chapter 3, leaving a blank verso and another empty folio. Erased pencil page numbers, lack of a title page, and the finding tab all suggest that this manuscript may once have included Books I-II.https://repository.upenn.edu/sims_models/1042/thumbnail.jp