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Dollars and Dissent: Unpacking the Relationship between U.S. Political Polarization and De-dollarisation
No full textM.P.P.The U.S. Dollar (USD) has long reigned as the world’s reserve currency yet its status atop the global financial hierarchy is less certain today than in decades gone by, primarily due to mounting interest in de-dollarisation. Since the dollar’s dominance imbues Washington with a host of exorbitant privileges, unpacking the dynamics underpinning the dollar’s role within FX reserves is vital to understanding a driving force of American economic superpower. However, researchers have yet to examine the interrelatedness of de-dollarisation and U.S. political polarization, choosing instead to focus on the role of economic fundamentals and U.S. foreign policy in influencing the dollar’s centrality to FX reserves worldwide. The following analysis addresses this gap by examining whether a relationship exists between a decade of polarization-induced dysfunction in Washington and the dollar’s share of FX reserves. Contrary to its hypothesis, this thesis finds that countries highly exposed to the dollar accumulate greenbacks in response to volatility in the degree of political polarization whilst states with diversified reserves are entirely insensitive to such swings. However, the initial flight to safety effect recedes over time, implying that meaningful de-dollarisation requires larger structural changes that cannot be achieved impulsively within the current global financial order. Therefore, even though heightened political polarization has barely impaired the dollar’s dominance so far, the dollar’s supremacy is not insuperable. Over the long-run, the mighty dollar cannot become mightier through further discord, division, and dissent on Capitol Hill
Essays on Migration
No full textPh.D.The dissertation comprises three chapters. Chapter 1 examines how political shocks impact the interstate migration of low-skilled immigrants, particularly Hispanics. Despite the Democratic Party’s pro-migration stance, regression discontinuity estimation shows a narrow Democratic win in a gubernatorial election leads to lower net interstate migration of low-skilled Hispanic immigrants, whereas low-skilled white natives exhibit higher netflows to the state. During Democratic governors’ terms, Hispanic immigrants experience higher unemployment rates while white natives experience lower unemployment rates. Democratic governors also tend to set higher state minimum wages and Earned Income Tax Credit rates. A simple interpretation, considering imperfect substitution between immigrants and natives in the labor market, indicates migration and labor outcomes align with the labor market policies of Democratic governors. Chapter 2 explores the political impact of first- and second-generation immigrants on US voting outcomes. A higher second-generation immigrant share in a county decreases the Republican vote share, particularly among high-skilled individuals. The study also finds evidence of labor market competition between first- and second-generation immigrants within skill cells. Chapter 3 analyzes how an increase in minimum wage forms divergent migration incentives for low-skilled immigrants and natives, using a theoretical model with imperfect substitution between the two groups in the labor market
Privacy Office Fiscal Year 2023 Second Semi-Annual Reports to Congress, April 2023-September 2023
No full textFirst page of documen
‘The Kingdom Will Prosper’: Imperialism In Fiji, 1800-1874
No full textPh.D.The nineteenth century was a century of extreme upheaval in Fiji. In 1800, there were only a handful of white men who had set foot in the archipelago. One hundred years later, the islands were a British Crown Colony with not only a white settler population but thousands of indentured workers and their descendants brought from India to work on plantations. This century of drastic change was epitomized by the life of the Fijian chief Seru Epenisa Cakobau. His long rise to power and his sudden fall from grace both influenced and were dependent on the wider history of the archipelago. I draw on the consular and naval archives of the United States, Great Britain, and France, as well as missionary letters from Protestant and Catholic orders in order to understand the history of empire in the nineteenth century from the perspective of Fiji and Fijians. Despite the efforts of officials in London or Washington, the British and American imperial projects were often guided by the ambitions and decisions of far-flung officials and Indigenous actors. I argue that it was the men-on-the-spot—European, American, and Indigenous—whose actions played a critical role in the outcome of imperial competition and colonization in nineteenth-century Fiji
The Symbolic Logic of Pogrom Violence: Evidence from Four Cases
No full textPh.D.What explains why pogroms target communities in some locations, but not in others? In this dissertation, I introduce a theory of pogroms that explains how the spatial pattern of pogrom violence varies systematically across four different types of political order: (1) *consolidated*, in which state actors provide explicit support to organizers with a broad base of social support; (2) *state-building*, in which organizers draw on explicit state support and a thin base of social support; (3) *contested*, which involve implicit state support and broad-networked organizers; and (4) *anarchic*, in which state actors provide implicit support to thin-networked organizers. I hypothesize that pogrom participants will target highly visible groups in consolidated and anarchic orders, whereas state-building and contested orders will follow from underlying patterns of political threat and economic competition, respectively.I test these hypotheses in four archetypal pogrom cases: Kristallnacht, in Nazi Germany in November 1938, is the consolidated case; La Matanza, against the Mexican population of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, in 1915, is the state-building case; the pogrom against the Black population of East St. Louis, IL, in 1917, is the contested case; and the anti-Caribbean violence in the London neighborhood of Notting Hill, in 1958, is the anarchic case. I use spatial regression analysis to test plausible explanations for pogrom attacks, using novel quantitative data that I collected and compiled from diverse historical sources.I find modest, but inconsistent, evidence in favor of the symbolic theory. In the Kristallnacht case, synagogue attacks were more likely where the Jewish population share was large. In the Lower Rio Grande Valley case, participants were more likely to organize anti-Mexican violence where previous attacks by so-called "bandits" were thought to pose a threat to the Anglo-dominated order. In East St. Louis, pogrom participants were more likely to attack the city's Black residents where White-Black diversity was more pronounced. Lastly, at Notting Hill, participants were more likely to attack their Caribbean neighbors nearer to a prominent gathering spot associated with a potential political threat from the Caribbean community. I conclude by discussing implications for historical political economy research about violence
Essays in Vehicle Safety and Demand Elasticities
No full textPh.D.This dissertation consists of two chapters on autonomous vehicle safety features and demand elasticities of new passenger vehicles. In the first chapter, AI at the Wheel: Effects and Policy Implications of Autonomous Vehicle Safety Features—co-authored with Clifford Winston and Vikram Maheshri—we construct a dataset of Texas households and their vehicle ownership that identifies each vehicle to the model year, make, model, and trim level. We then investigate the effectiveness and consumer adoption of level 1 (L1) safety features in automobiles. Leveraging a novel source of variation in the availability of L1 safety features over different vehicle model years and across different trim levels, we empirically estimate their effectiveness in reducing the probabilities of all accidents and fatal accidents. Additionally, we estimate a discrete choice model of consumers’ choices of vehicle make, model, and trim to calculate their willingness to pay (WTP) for L1 safety features. Our findings suggest that L1 safety features are effective in reducing accident probabilities and that consumers are, on average, willing to pay for them, indicating efficient market adoption. We further discuss the implications of our results for policy decisions regarding mandated safety features and emphasize the importance of considering the distribution of consumers’ WTP in cost-benefit analyses.In the second chapter, New Passenger Vehicle Demand Elasticities: Estimates and Policy Implications—co-authored with Benjamin Leard—we apply a simple methodology to estimate own- and cross-price elasticities of new passenger vehicle demand based on household-level survey data. Our methodology combines own-price elasticity estimates with diversion fractions constructed from second-choice data. We obtain a set of elasticities that are relevant for environmental policy analysis, including an aggregate market elasticity, a matrix of car and light truck elasticities, and a matrix of gasoline and electric vehicle (EV) elasticities. Our results provide estimates that can serve as inputs for models assessing the impact of fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards on passenger vehicles, as well as policies aimed at promoting the adoption of electric vehicles
Periodontal Disease and Hypertension: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
No full textM.S.Objective: The study aims to evaluate the relationship between periodontal disease (PD) and hypertension, providing insights into oral and cardiovascular epidemiology. The primary hypothesis is that periodontal disease is linked positively to cardiovascular diseases including hypertension, which, if confirmed, underscores the importance of assessing periodontal health for cardiovascular well-being and overall patient well-being.Study Design: I searched all published literature on the PubMed database since 1990. Thirty-four prospective cohort studies and 14 nested case-control studies, in which odds ratios (OR) and relative risks (RR), confidence intervals (CI), and p-values were reported or could be calculated to meet the inclusion criteria. I extracted ORs, RRs, CIs, and p-values from each study. A meta-analysis was conducted using the random effects model in R. Forest plots were generated for all the studies and stratified by region as well as study type.Results: The overall RR was 1.70 (95% CI: 1.54, 1.87) indicating a positive association between PD and hypertension. In an analysis stratified by region, Asian populations had an RR of 1.48 (95% CI: 1.23, 1.78), and the Western population had an OR of 1.89 (95% CI: 1.67, 2.15). In nested case-control studies, the overall RR was 2.46 (95% CI: 1.84, 3.29), indicating a significant positive association between periodontal disease and hypertension. In cohort studies the overall RR was 1.49 (95% CI: 1.33, 1.67), also demonstrating a significant positive association but with a smaller effect size.Conclusion: The potential link between PD and hypertension underscores the need for integrated healthcare, addressing both oral and cardiovascular health
A Tale of Three Islands: Recent Developments of Nationalism in Okinawa, Taiwan & Hong Kong
No full textIsolation, Trust, and Perceived Threat: A Sociopsychological Analysis of the Right in U.S. Politics
No full textIt is often claimed, historically and ideologically, that sentiments of isolation, distrust, and
perceived threat are an undercurrent of the Right in U.S. politics. There are significant
theoretical and historical analyses from Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in
American Politics to Leo Ribuffo’s The Old Christian Right that support this claim.
However, are these sentiments characteristic of conservatives in the U.S. today? To
what extent are the variables of isolation, distrust, and perceived threat characteristics of
contemporary American conservatives. Through a national survey, I conducted a primary
analysis of the relationship between the variables of isolation, trust, perceived threat, and
political orientation and identity. Results revealed that there is only a minor difference
between conservatives, respondents who identify as conservative or strongly conservative,
and non-conservatives, respondents who identify as moderate, liberal, and strongly liberal
when it comes to feelings of isolation and distrust. However, White conservative evangelicals
are more likely to feel isolated and threatened in the U.S. than any other demographic by
a substantial amount. The findings show that the frustrations of the Right derive not only
from political issues but may be produced by tensions from a complex interplay between
social and cultural concerns
Effective Domain-Specific Text Summarization
No full textPh.D.My research goal in this dissertation is to develop neural summarization methods for better adaptation to domain-specific corpora with a focus on Clinical Notes, Scientific Documents, Query-focused, and Social Media domains. This research is driven by a unifying vision: to push the boundaries of how neural summarization can be tailored to meet the unique demands of diverse domains, thereby enhancing the utility of summarized content across a broad spectrum of applications.To begin with, I propose an ontology-aware abstractive summarization system that incorporates significant clinical terms (i.e., domain knowledge), extracted from medical ontologies into the summarization system. Moreover, I propose a graph-based summarization system that explores and models the relationship between clinical ontologies, and incorporates this modeling into the summarizer, for the interest of generating better summaries. These sets of approaches not only highlight the importance of integrating domain-specific knowledge into clinical summarization but also serve as a conceptual bridge to my investigations in other knowledge-intensive areas, including the scientific domain.Expanding the scope of my research, I explore the adaptation of summarization models to scientific summarization domain through incorporation of document's domain-specific characteristics (e.g., sectional information). A part of my attempts in this domain is focused on proposing summarization methods to produce so-called "long/extended" summaries (400--600 words) from scientific papers as these summaries encompass more salient details.
Additionally, I investigate generating multi-perspective scientific summaries (with regular length of 100 words on average)
% each of which capture an aspect of the scientific paper
by proposing a topic-aware two-step summarizer with
the intuition that each perspective of the paper is discussed within specific topics and sets of paper's sentences. This exploration underscores my attempts to enhance the summarization of complex, information-dense documents by leveraging domain-specific features within the scientific domain.I further explore the query-focused summarization domain, where a summary is generated tailored to a specific query that is asked on source document. In the first part, to cope with the challenge of accurately identifying salient source regions---referred to as segments, I propose a contrastive learning based summarizer that distinguishes gold salient segments from non-gold segments that are typically the focus of the summarizer's attention. Subsequently, I shift focus to directly enhancing the segment selection/retrieval performance of the summarizer through a Learning-to-Rank technique, aiming to produce even more refined query-focused summaries. The works in this domain highlight my focus on developing summarization techniques that are not only responsive to the content of the documents but also to the specific informational needs within the query, thereby demonstrating the adaptability of my research across different summarization challenges.Finally, I focus on social media domain for generating "extremely short" yet "informative" summaries given users' posts. To facilitate social media summarization research, I introduce summarization datasets collected from Reddit communities, two of which (i.e., TLDR-9+ and TLDR-HQ) are on general domain, and the third one (i.e., MentSum) is on the mental health domain. I then propose a curriculum-guided abstractive summarization system for summarization of mental health posts from social media