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Essays on Behavioral Matching and Apportionment Methods for Affirmative Action:
Get PDFThesis advisor: M. Utku ÜnverThesis advisor: M. Bumin YenmezThis thesis is a collection of three essays in market design concerning designs of matching markets, affirmative action schemes, and COVID-19 testing policies. In Chapter 1, we explore the possibility of designing matching mechanisms that can accommodate non-standard choice behavior. In the standard model of matching markets, preferences over potential assignments encode participants' choice behavior. Our contribution to this literature is introducing behavioral participants to matching theory's setup. We pin down the necessary and sufficient conditions on participants' choice behavior for the existence of stable and incentive compatible matching mechanisms. Our results imply that well-functioning matching markets can be designed to adequately accommodate a plethora of non-standard (and standard) choice behaviors. We illustrate the applicability of our results by demonstrating that a simple modification in a commonly used matching mechanism enables it to accommodate non-standard choice behavior. In Chapter 2, we show that commonly used methods in reserving positions for beneficiaries of affirmative action are often inadequate in settings where affirmative action policies apply at two levels simultaneously, for instance, at university and itsdepartments. We present a comprehensive evaluation of existing procedures and formally and empirically document their shortcomings. We propose a new solution with appealing theoretical properties and quantify the benefits of adopting it using recruitment advertisement data from India. Our theoretical analysis hints at new possibilities for future work in the literature on the theory of apportionment (of parliamentary seats). Chapter 3 delves into the designs of the commonly used and advocated COVID-19 testing policies to resolve a conflict between their allocative efficiency and the ability to identify the infection rates. We present a novel comparison of various COVID-19 testing policies that allows us to pin down ordinally efficient testing policies that generate reliable estimates of infection rates while prioritizing testing of persons suspected of having the disease.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Economics
Nonlinear Effects in International Finance and Macroeconomics:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Pablo Guerron-QuintanaThe dissertation consists of three independent chapters that study nonlinear effects in international finance and macroeconomics. The implications of presence of nonlinear effects are examined both in the context of a puzzle in international financial markets, a constrained policy within a closed economy, and are also ap- proached as a general problem in macro and macroeconometric modeling. I quantify the role of nonlinear effects in these contexts, and make a case for the application of nonlinear modeling techniques.The first chapter of the dissertation titled “Sovereign Default Risk and Currency Returns” is solo-authored. Many currencies exhibit non-zero average returns with respect to US dollar, in an apparent violation of textbook uncovered and covered interest parities. I first show that in the cross-section of countries foreign currency returns are positively related to the sovereign default risk, and then reconcile this finding with the standard theory via the “peso problem”. Market players collect premium for bearing the risk of sharp devaluation in case of default. Since defaults are rare in the data, default premium manifests itself in higher currency returns. To formalize the link between default risk and currency returns, I discipline quantitatively a model “with default” based on Arellano (2008) for a set of developing countries. I then use the implications of this model to construct an econometric model for cross-section of currency returns that I estimate using extended Fama and MacBeth (1973) method. I find strong evidence supporting the “peso problem” explanation: credit default swaps’ spreads serving as proxy for the risk of default explain around 25% of the cross-country variation of average currency returns. I also estimate that the market participants expect a 50% depreciation of national currency upon default.
The second chapter is titled “Nonlinear Dynamic Factor Model in Application to Financial and Macroeconomic data”, and is joint work with Pablo Guerron- Quintana and Molin Zhong. Through the lens of a nonlinear dynamic factor model, we study the role of exogenous shocks and internal propagation forces in driving the fluctuations of macroeconomic and financial data. The proposed model 1) allows for nonlinear dynamics in the state and measurement equations; 2) can generate asymmetric, state-dependent, and size-dependent responses of observables to shocks; 3) and can produce time-varying volatility and asymmetric tail risks in predictive distributions. We find evidence in favor of the nonlinear factor model over its linear counterpart in applications that include interest rates with zero lower bounds, credit default swap spreads for European countries, and nonfinancial cor- porate credit default swap spreads in the U.S. We extract a shadow interest rate comparable to those in the literature. The results hint to an important role for a nonlinear internal propagation element to exogenous shocks during periods of tur- bulence such as the European debt crisis and the Great Recession. This nonlinear term allows the model to forecast better during the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis.
The third chapter is titled “Local Government spending and business cycle” and is based on a solo-authored paper. Local government revenues and spending in the United States are procyclical due to constitutional constraints of states and municipalities. As a result, the local government policies can act as amplifiers of the business cycle. This paper introduces fiscal policy conducted by local governments to an otherwise standard New Keynesian closed economy model to assess quantitatively the contribution of spending policies into the business cycle. The procyclical nature of local government spending generates an amplification mechanism that accounts for around 15% of fluctuations in output and hours worked.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Economics
Two Essays on Corporate Finance, Banking, and Political Economy:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Philip E. StrahanThe dissertation consists of two essays on corporate finance, banking, and political economy. The first chapter studies how partisan-driven views about climate change affect institutional investors’ investment in assets that are exposed to climate risk. The second chapter examines how unexpected political chaos can affect politically active companies in a negative way. In “Climate Change, the Partisan Divide, and Exposure to Climate Risk”, I study how partisan-driven beliefs about climate change affect the distribution of climate risk across mortgage lenders. Using wildfires to capture climate exposure, I find that Republican-leaning lenders are more likely to approve mortgage applications in high wildfire risk areas than Democratic-leaning lenders. This difference in approval rates is only evident among second-lien and jumbo mortgage applications, highlighting how securitization affects risk-taking incentives. Lastly, Republican-leaning lenders originate more climate-exposed second-lien and jumbo loans and thus hold more wildfire risk. The findings suggest that dispersion over climate change beliefs affects how institutional investors hold climate risks, potentially affecting financial stability. In “Downsides of Corporate Political Spending: Evidence from Mass Shootings”, I study the negative impacts of corporate political spending on firm outcomes. Using data from 20 years of mass shootings, I find that when mass shootings take place, companies that primarily donate to pro-gun-rights politicians experience negative stock price reactions and worse operating performance. The negative impacts on companies’ bottom line are stronger when incidents are deadlier. The decline in operating performance reverses within a couple of years. The findings are not driven by firms contributing to Republican politicians. Similarly, using Summary of Deposits data from FDIC, I find that banks primarily donating to pro-gun-rights politicians also experience higher deposit outflows around mass shootings. After incidents, firms significantly reduce corporate political donations to pro-gun-rights politicians. Overall, my findings highlight negative impacts on companies resulting from their political spending being disapproved by stakeholders. Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management.Discipline: Finance
Three Essays on Social Cognition in the Field of Jazz Music:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Mary Ann GlynnCategories are persistent features of cultural fields and markets, used to delineate boundaries between different kinds of cultural products and cultural producers. Categories are dynamic social constructions, evolving over time as their constitutive practices and meanings change, through a variety of processes that scholars are still describing and unpacking. This dissertation explores, in three papers, the processes through which categories change over time in the context of the field of jazz music, describing mechanisms of category change and theorizing processes of category evolution and decline. The first paper (chapter two) examines the emergence of a novel subcategory of jazz, called bebop, in the mid-1940’s, and the changes to jazz consumption practices and category meanings that bebop’s emergence wrought. It contributes to the categorization literature by highlighting the role of consumption practices in shaping category meanings. The second paper (chapter three) examines the emergence of another subcategory, called jazz fusion, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and unpacks gatekeeper responses to its emergence in the form of critical discourse, revealing how category gatekeepers codify category change by reordering their standards of value, quality, and category membership through their discourse. It contributes to the literature by showing how gatekeepers discursively modify categories as they make sense of new practices. The third paper (chapter 4) explores the processes through which subcategories are absorbed into broader umbrella categories, falling out of use even as their constitutive practices and meanings live on. This paper contributes to the literature by expanding our understanding of category decline. Overall, this dissertation contributes to literature on category dynamics and the practice turn in organization theory.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management.Discipline: Management and Organization
The Role of Peer Mentoring for Black and Latinx Doctoral Students' Success:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Karen ArnoldStudents in doctoral education view mentoring as the most important aspect of their educational experience (Golde et al., 2005). Mentoring can affect student retention and dissertation completion (Cronan-Hilllix et al., 1986) and is typically received from the student's advisor. However, many Black and Latinx doctoral students do not receive the critical feedback they need from faculty to develop their academic skills (Williams, 2018). Given reported problematic faculty interactions within the traditional mentoring model (Johnson-Bailey et al., 2008), peers offer an alternative source of support. Few empirical studies examine the effects of peer mentoring for doctoral students of color. This qualitative study examines how six Latinx and Black doctoral students engage in peer mentoring and how they perceive its effects on their doctoral experience. The maximum variation sample includes students in five disciplines who were enrolled in one of three research universities in the Northeast. Critical race theory (Bell, 1992; Crenshaw et al., 1995) was employed to frame institutions of higher education as sites of deeply ingrained racism that inform how Black and Latinx doctoral students receive support from formal institutional sources (e.g., faculty, institutional offices). During semi-structured interviews, students discussed how they drew on their own community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) to create networks of support with peers, and the ways that peers provided them with much-needed guidance. Findings reveal how peers played a profoundly important role in helping students overcome significant challenges in their program while providing key information. Students often received multiple, simultaneous forms of support from a single peer, including social/emotional, academic, and financial-related. Peers provided different forms of navigational capital (Yosso, 2005) to students, pairing them with tools and resources needed to maneuver through complex systems that were not designed for their success. Data also illuminated how students received resistant capital (Yosso, 2005) in order to manage numerous challenges. Findings point to the benefits of facilitating peer mentoring for Latinx and Black doctoral students, along with significant improvements in institutional support services and advising structures. Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education
Improving Health Care for Individuals with Serious Mental Illness Across the Lifespan:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Karen S. LyonsOBJECTIVES: Individuals with severe persistent mental illness (SPMI), also referred to as serious mental illness (SMI), experience significant inequities in health care access and outcomes. These inequities may span the lifetime of an individual living with SPMI, and include poorer cancer outcomes, shorter lifespans, barriers to having their needs met in long-term care, and a decreased likelihood of receiving hospice care when indicated. The purpose of this dissertation was to explore the causes of the disproportionately poor health outcomes for individuals living with SPMI and describe current facilitators and barriers to providing care to this vulnerable population.
METHODS: A qualitative descriptive study was carried out to explore health care professionals’ perception of the needs of long-term care residents with SPMI and chronic medical conditions. and barriers and facilitators to meeting the needs of this population. A narrative review was performed to identify what is currently known about cancer symptom clusters in individuals with schizophrenia. Lastly, an integrated review was conducted to identity factors associated with hospice use by individuals with SPMI and potential barriers to use of hospice services.
RESULTS: Ten health care professionals were interviewed for the qualitative study. The themes that emerged were: coming to know the individual and their unique needs takes time; being flexible and adapting approaches facilitates trust; respecting the inherent worth of each person contributes to caring. Participants described the importance of a person-centered approach when caring for long-term care residents with SPMI and chronic medical conditions. The narrative review of current literature pertaining to cancer symptom clusters in individuals with schizophrenia revealed that this phenomenon has been sparsely represented in research. No data directly pertaining to cancer symptom clusters in this population were identified. Data describing the related phenomena of health conditions that may influence cancer risk and outcomes, physical experiences of cancer, and emotional and behavioral symptoms which may impact ability to tolerate cancer treatments were identified. The integrated review of literature describing factors associated with hospice use among individuals with SPMI found that hospice and palliative care services may not be utilized by individuals with SPMI due to system-level barriers such as inadequate patient-provider communication, fragmented care, and absence of discussions around end-of-life care.
CONCLUSIONS: Systemic problems such as miscommunication, fragmentation of care, and stigma contribute to the health inequities experienced by individuals living with SPMI. Nurses and other health care providers can work to ameliorate these systemic problems by promoting and participating in collaborative care models and utilizing assessment techniques appropriate to individuals who may have difficulty communicating about their health-related symptoms. Individuals with SPMI should be offered opportunities to participate in research when appropriate so that they may benefit from newer treatments for disease, and health care providers may improve their understanding of how to address the medical needs of this population.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Connell School of Nursing.Discipline: Nursing
TheImpact of Leadership Transitions on School Change:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Patrick J. McQuillanIn a time of increasing accountability, school leaders are besieged with challenges to improve student performance (Cosner & Jones, 2016; Day et al., 2016), build teacher capacity (Beteille et al., 2012; Miller, 2013), and develop a coherent school vision (Finnigan & Stewart, 2009; Hitt & Tucker, 2016) to better meet the needs of increasingly diverse student populations. Unsurprisingly, the stress of these and other challenges has led to a marked increase in principal turnover in recent decades (Snodgrass Rangel, 2018). These conditions necessitate an understanding of how schools navigate transitions in leadership and the impact changes in leadership can have on a school’s ability to meet ever evolving challenges. Analyzing data from a seven-year study using a comparative case study approach (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017), this paper considers the experiences of three different schools as a single Catholic school principal transitions between the school sites. Drawing on complexity thinking (Goldstein et al., 2011; Lichtenstein & Plowman, 2009), this study explores the extent to which the principal was able to impact each school’s readiness for change through the interconnected processes of distributing authority, creating a common school vision, and fostering trust.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction
TheFirst Irish Diaspora in the Age of the Bourbon Reforms: Imperial Translation, Political Economy, and Slavery, 1713-1804
Get PDFThesis advisor: Owen StanwoodThis dissertation is a history of the First Irish Diaspora and its relationship to the Spanish Empire’s eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms. Although there is a long history of Irish migration to Spain, I argue that the conjuncture of the War of the English Succession (1688-1695) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) foreclosed hopes of a reversal of the seventeenth century Irish land-confiscations which defined the English conquest and colonization of Ireland, pushing thousands of Irish Catholics into exile near-simultaneous to the ascension of a reform-minded Bourbon monarchy to the Spanish thrown which opened new opportunities for useful subjects. At the same time, these wars established the emergent British Empire as a rising Atlantic hegemon and exposed the fragility of a Spanish Empire widely viewed by contemporaries as in decline. In such a context, Irish familiarity with British methods of empire-making made them ideal imperial translators for the Spanish Crown precisely as the empire embarked on its Bourbon Reform program. Genealogy and religion formed the foundations of Irish assimilation into the Spanish Empire – the Irish became Hiberno-Spaniards because of the “genealogical fiction” that the Irish sliocht (“race,” literally “seed”) descended from Spaniards and because they were Catholic. In Spain, the impact of this Hiberno-Spanish diaspora on the Bourbon Reforms began following the War of the Spanish Succession and reached its crescendo in the aftermath of Spain’s disastrous defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Specifically, Hiberno-Spanish imperialists in the metropole were important participants in the debates and decisions that promoted liberalizing national-colonial trade, investments in infrastructure, the emulation of foreign practices such as British and Irish economic societies, and more; i.e. the emulation of British political economy. Their principal contribution to the empire was the translation of political economic statecraft and a cosmopolitanism of exile that honed their ability to translate foreign ideas in an age of imperial emulation and made them especially effective imperial intermediaries in polyglot and liminal spaces such as the Gulf Coast borderlands. There, in Cuba, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, Hiberno-Spanish slavers, governors, merchants, and imperialists were important contributors to Spain’s real but ephemeral resurgence in colonial North America and the Atlantic world. The Spanish Empire collapsed and Irish emigration patterns rerouted to North America, but Hiberno-Spaniards and the Bourbon Reforms first accelerated the processes of colonization and slavery that transformed Cuba and the Gulf Coast into the world’s capital of cotton, sugar, and slavery in the nineteenth century.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: History
Aristophanes' Critique of Philosophic Wisdom in Clouds, Women at the Thesmophoria and Frogs:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Robert C. BartlettThis dissertation seeks to understand Aristophanes’ critique of philosophic wisdom in three of his comedies: Clouds (423 BC), Women at the Thesmophoria (411 BC) and Frogs (405 BC). Written over the politically turbulent period of the Peloponnesian war (434-404 BC), these comedies navigate a generational conflict between conservative defenders of Athens’s customs, laws and gods and the younger generation influenced by the atheistic teachings of the sophists. This dissertation seeks to contribute to our understanding of Aristophanes’ critique by comparing his presentation of Socrates with that of Euripides, a tragedian who ingenuously fuses poetry with the new sophistic teaching.
The first chapter considers Aristophanes’ representation of Socrates in Clouds as the sophist par excellence who replaces the gods of the city with natural causes, and respect for the city’s laws with rhetoric. Although the comedy looks like a conservative defense of traditional morality against the corrupting effects of philosophic novelty, the grounds of Aristophanes’ attack on Socrates are anything but clear. As Aristophanes’ depiction of the Clouds (strange airy deities worshipped by poets and sophists alike) shows, Socrates’ destruction at the end of the play occurs not because what Socrates teaches is false, but because his political isolation blinds him to the city’s demands and makes him vulnerable to persecution.
Socrates’ failure in Clouds establishes the basis for considering Euripides’ (partially) successful confrontation with the city in Women at the Thesmophoria. The second chapter assesses the extent to which this hybrid of tragedian and sophist can be harmonized with the needs of the city without compromising his own integrity as a poet whose power lies in his psychologically accurate depictions of human nature. Aristophanes thus points to the superiority of Euripides the poet over Socrates the philosopher, at the same time as he exposes Euripides’ limitations.
In Frogs, Aristophanes raises the stakes by pitting Euripides against another giant of tragedy, Aeschylus, in the Thunderdome of Hades with the god of the theatre, Dionysus, as judge. The comedy thus compares the two greatest poetic representatives of the generational conflict between conservative and sophist, old and new, common good and individual good, deciding at the last second in favor of Aeschylus. The chapter argues that Euripides fails because he cannot provide a sufficient political defense of his tragedy at the moment in which Athens faces imminent destruction at the hands of the Spartans.
The conclusion reflects on Aristophanes’ implicit claim to teach justice and the good through comedy’s capacity to mediate between the demands of the city, on the one hand, and the insights on human nature afforded by philosophy, on the other.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Political Science
"O why so eloquently speaks the maiden silence": The Armenian Genocide’s Impact on Women in Armenian Society
Get PDFThesis advisor: Elizabeth ShlalaThis thesis explores how the Armenian Genocide affected and changed Armenian womens’ roles in post-Ottoman society and how the national rebuilding project relied upon women in both traditional and "modern" positions; specifically, their roles as mothers, educators, nurses, workers, patriots, as well as addresses the fluidity of identity and belonging in post-genocide Armenian society. Based on their experiences during the Armenian Genocide, women received different treatment from the larger Armenian society, and had different, sometimes contradictory roles prescribed to them. Women’s different treatment based on their genocide experiences highlight the complexities, challenges, and contradictions of the Armenian national rebuilding project, as well as the centrality of gender in this project and Armenian society as a whole.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2022.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Departmental Honors.Discipline: History