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A Disciple for All Seasons: Toward a Theology of Performative Accompaniment in the Midst of Tears
Get PDFThesis advisor: Margaret E GuiderThesis advisor: Colleen M. GriffithThesis (STL) — Boston College, 2021.Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry.Discipline: Sacred Theology
Essays in Macroeconomics and Public Finance:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Pablo GuerronThe dissertation examines how fiscal policies adjust to economic states in a growth model where productions are mobile across jurisdictions and the corresponding consequences. In my work, I study the properties of optimal state-level corporate and labor income tax rates and how shocks in the federal tax rates affect the economy; and I endogenize the federal-level fiscal policies in a Stackelberg game setting where the federal government is the leader and the states are the followers. In “Fiscal Competition and Federal Shocks”, I answer such the question of “how a shock to federal tax rate affect the macro-economy”. The innovation is that I take into account the effects of factor mobility, state-federal interaction, and state-state interaction on the transmission mechanism of the federal shocks. By using the U.S. data set, I find the evidence that state-level tax rates will respond to changes in federal tax rates (known as vertical competition) and the neighboring state's policies (known as horizontal competition). To rationalize this finding, I develop a two-region growth model with benevolent state governments, integrated capital market, and sticky migration. My quantitative result indicates that omitting the endogenous responses of state-level policies leads to significant difference in response to a federal shock. This means that the central policy make has to consider the intergovernmental fiscal relations when designing federal fiscal policies. In “Optimal Policies in a Federation”, I examine the optimal federal and state fiscal policies in a dynamic macro model with policy commitment, integrated capital market, and inter-state migration. In modeled governance system, the federal government is the Stackelberg leader, the state governments are the followers and take the leader's policies as given. In the interior-point steady-state, the overall tax rate on corporate income is zero. However, the leader and followers impose different tax rates. The leader levies a positive and high tax rate, the followers levy negative tax rates. The zero (overall) tax rate result holds when the states are heterogeneous in their TFPs. If the federal government has to impose the same labor income tax rate on the states, the federal tax rates are independent of the degree of inequality and each state has a zero overall corporate tax rate. IF the federal labor tax system is nonlinear, the states impose different tax rates. But the tax-base-weighted overall tax rate in the economy is still zero. In addition, I find that increasing the federal corporate tax rate is the optimal response to foreign country's TFP becomes higher.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Economics
Essays in International Macroeconomics:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Peter IrelandThesis advisor: Rosen ValchevThis dissertation consists in three chapters, each making a distinct contribution. Chapter 1 empirically tests classic and new Uncovered Interest Parity puzzle in an innovative way. Findings suggest that government debt is significant and economically relevant for UIP puzzles estimation.Chapter 2 shows that a class of macroeconomic models reproduce the UIP puzzle under a standard parametrization and adding convenience yields exogenous dynamics. Chapter 3 is a theoretical model that links financial crises to the election of populists parties, matching empirical evidence from Europe.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Economics
Microbial Interactions: Prediction, Characterization, and Spatial Context
Get PDFThesis advisor: Babak MomeniMicrobial communities are complex networks comprised of multiple species that are facilitating and inhibiting one another (as well as themselves). Currently, we lack an understanding of what mechanisms drive coexistence within these communities. We aimed to remedy this by studying the dynamics of coexisting communities, focusing on the complexity of their interaction networks, the impact of spatial dynamics, and the interplay of facilitating and inhibiting interactions. These limitations in our understanding prevent the furtherment of designing intentional communities for bioremediation, maintenance of healthy microbiota, and other functional communities. To better understand these microbial dynamics, we chose to address the problem from two fronts: computational modeling and exploring dynamics of cocultures. Through our 1-D model, spatial structure fostering more coexistence – especially when facilitation is present. For the coexistence assays, we determined that contact-dependent growth inhibition is a density dependent mechanism, and the use of a Tn-Seq mutant library to predict species interactions is possible, but needs further optimization to reconcile density dependent effects of interactions.Thesis (MS) — Boston College, 2021.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Biology
ThePersistence Dilemma in Long-duration Creative Projects:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Michael G. PrattPersistence, continuing effort in the face of challenges over time, can have clear benefits for creativity. At the same time, abandonment, stopping effort toward a course of action, is often necessary to help creators move forward towards their best ideas. Creative workers, and the organizations that employ them, thus face a dilemma between forces for persistence and forces for abandonment in developing ideas and projects, what I refer to as the persistence dilemma. Existing theory provides some clues about this dilemma (e.g. theories of motivation or escalation of commitment), but a lack of holistic theorizing leaves many questions outstanding. Through a longitudinal qualitative study of four organizations, I set out to explore how creative workers managed the persistence dilemma. I found that the organizational context shaped how project teams responded to the dilemma. Teams within the startups I studied managed the dilemma with a process focused on commitment. Leaders helped team members transform the ambivalence that resulted from the dilemma into commitment to the organizations core project. Teams in the established organization, by contrast, managed the dilemma with a process focused on balance. The organization focused on balancing forces for abandonment and forces for persistence since both were perceived as necessary and beneficial in their own way. My work has implications for understanding the persistence dilemma, as well as for theories of creativity more generally.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021.Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management.Discipline: Management and Organization
Microbial Community Structure and Function: Implications for Current and Future Respiratory Therapies
Get PDFThesis advisor: Babak MomeniDiseases of the upper respiratory tract encompass a plethora of complex multifaceted etiologies ranging from acute viral and bacterial infections to chronic diseases of the lung and nasal cavity. Due to this inherent complexity, typical treatments often fail in the face of recalcitrant infections and/or severe forms of chronic disease, including asthma. Thus, in order to provide improved standard of care, the mechanisms at play in hard-to-treat etiologies must be better understood. More recently, research has demonstrated a significant association between microbiota and many URT diseases. Previous work has also identified species capable of directly inhibiting standard treatments used to control asthma exacerbations. Despite an exhaustive collection of data characterizing microbiota composition in states of both health and disease, our knowledge of what microbiota profiles are observed in what specific disease etiologies is severely lacking. Yet, gaining these insights is crucial for the translation of such data into application. In this thesis I sought to: 1) identify gut microbiota profiles associated with severe and treatment resistant forms of childhood asthma, and 2) formulate a predictive model to facilitate the restructuring of microbiota for desired therapeutic outcomes. To identify gut microbiota and metabolites enriched in severe and treatment resistant childhood asthma, I looked to an ongoing longitudinal human study on vitamin D and childhood asthma. In this study, I find several fecal bacterial taxa and metabolites associated with more severe (i.e., higher wheeze proportion) and treatment resistant asthma in children at age 3 years. Specifically, several Veillonella species were enriched in children with higher wheeze proportion and in children that responded poorly to inhaled corticosteroid treatment (ICS) (i.e., non-responders). Haemophilus parainfluenzae, a species previously identified as enriched in the airway of adults with ICS-resistant asthma, was also uniquely enriched in children considered ICS non-responders in this study. Several metabolic pathways were also distinctly enriched: histidine metabolism was enriched in children with higher wheeze proportion while sphingolipid metabolism was enriched in ICS non-responders. Both metabolic pathways have been previously identified in association with asthma, further corroborating their role in this disease. Yet, this study is the first to identify these taxa and metabolites in children with preexisting and treatment resistant asthma. In the pursuit of improved treatment outcomes for recalcitrant URT diseases, recent efforts have turned towards microbiota-based therapies. While such treatments have proven successful in the treatment of gastrointestinal infections, these methods have not yet been extended to other conditions. Considering this, I ask whether a predictive model describing microbial interactions can facilitate the restructuring of microbiota for desired therapeutic outcomes. For this, I use a community of nasal microbiota to determine when a simply Lotka-Volterra-like (LV) model is a suitable representation for microbial interactions. I then utilize our LV-like model to examine whether environmental fluctuations have a major influence on community assembly and composition. For this, I looked specifically at pH fluctuations. In this study, I found that LV-like models are most suitable for describing community dynamics in complex low nutrient conditions. I also identified simple in vitro experiments that can reliably predict the suitability of a LV-like model for describing outcomes of a two-species community. When our LV-like model was applied to an in silico community of nasal species to determine the impact of environmental fluctuations, I find that nasal communities are generally robust against pH fluctuations and that, in this condition, facilitative interactions are a stabilizing force, and thus, selected for in in silico enrichment experiments. Overall, this thesis further corroborates the association of microbiota with URT diseases and treatment outcomes while also providing unique insight into their association with specific etiologies in childhood asthma. This thesis also provides a framework for developing models able to facilitate the development of future microbiota-based therapies while also determining how, and when, environmental factors impact community assembly and composition.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Biology
Developing a Framework to Assess the Impacts of Human Health on the Environment Within the Context of COVID-19 as a Global Natural Experiment
Get PDFThesis advisor: Jonathan KronesThe manifold effects of the COVID-19 pandemic include many changes to humanity's impact on the natural environment, including reduced greenhouse gas emissions from air travel and increased personal protective equipment (PPE) waste generation. The pandemic has served as a global natural experiment, revealing interactions between human health and the environment that were not clearly observable before. This research aims to develop a framework for systematically assessing the impacts of human health on the environment. This framework has been structured and populated from a review of the emerging literature on the documented environmental effects of the pandemic in addition to existing literature on environmental impacts of the health care sector in general. The framework tool catalogs observed and expected environmental effects in five stages of a public health crisis (the health issue, the medical response, the public health response, adaptation and rebound, and long-term effects) and five environmental impact categories (water pollution, solid waste, air pollution, global warming, and environmental degradation). The applicability of this framework is examined using two case studies: the 2003 SARS outbreak and the localized experience of COVID-19 in New York City. The application revealed that the framework is both transferable and scalable for use in assessing other human health crises. Overall, many of the beneficial environmental impacts that occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic only came at the expense of widespread human suffering, and over time, many of these benefits were reversed. The goal is that this tool will be useful to understanding both the ways COVID-19 will continue to affect the environment as well as the effects of potential public health campaigns and crises in the future.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2021.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Departmental Honors.Discipline: Environmental Studies
Exploring Differences in School Quality Assurance Measures at Public, Private, and Public-Private Partnership Schools Using PISA Data:
Get PDFThesis advisor: Zhushan LiEducational public private partnerships (PPP), referring to the shared delivery of education services by the government and private providers, have been increasing in recent decades, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Yet to date, there has been limited research on their role in the education landscape, in part due to the difficulty of classifying PPP schools in large-scale datasets, which typically classify schools as either public or private. In addition, few studies have assessed PPPs and school quality assurance indicators typically associated with them. The study had two purposes. First, to explore the possibility of classifying PPP schools in a large-scale dataset using a statistical method. And second, to use these classifications to examine the differences between PPP, public, and private schools on school quality assurance measures, including but not limited to achievement. These analyses were performed using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), with schools from six of the global emerging economy countries: Brazil, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Turkey. Schools were classified using a two-step clustering method using funding and management variables. This revealed three good-quality clusters with a silhouette measure of cohesion and separation of 0.6 (IBM, 2015b; Wendler & Gröttrup, 2016). These were classified as public, private, and PPP based on the characteristics of each school type. With these classifications, the study assessed the relationship between school type and achievement in mathematics, science and reading, and 24 school quality assurance measures from PISA. The analyses controlled for school resources and socio-economic and cultural status. The study found that overall, PPP schools performed better than public schools on three indicators, and better than private schools on five indicators; public schools performed better than PPP schools on one outcome and better than private schools on three outcomes, although with mostly small effect sizes. Private schools did not outperform other school types on any outcome. A country wise analysis showed that these results differed by country. The study highlights the possibility of using two-step clustering to identify PPP schools, the effects of shared funding and management on school performance, and the importance of context in examining countries’ education policies.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Educational Research, Measurement and Evaluation
Exploring the Teacher-Storyline Relationship: Curricular Design and Enactment for Coherence from the Student Perspective
Get PDFThesis advisor: Katherine L. McNeillRecent K-12 science reforms necessitate a shift in curriculum and instruction to support coherence from the students’ perspective. This coherence emerges when students see their science work as addressing and making progress on their questions and problems. Storyline curricular units afford student coherence, but teachers need support to craft coherent instruction from storyline materials. This three-paper dissertation involved research into one teacher’s storyline design work. The first empirical paper explores how one expert teacher interpreted the storyline materials as he planned for enactment. I used interaction and thematic analysis to identify key sources of tension that the teacher engaged with as he made sense of the storyline materials for epistemic agency. Three key sources of tension were: curricular coherence and student coherence-seeking; equitable participation and incremental building of science ideas; and singular or different forms of epistemic agency in discussions. Over time, the teacher grappled more deeply with these tensions and learned to leverage them to share epistemic agency with students. The second empirical paper documents how the same expert teacher designed instruction during enactment as students’ sensemaking diverged from the storyline plans. I engaged in interaction analysis to identify and describe particular episodes of storyline activity where the teacher shared epistemic agency with students in these divergences. The teacher engaged in principled improvisation related to the students’ interactive role, the science ideas they raised, and the experimental errors they experienced. Each episode involved the teacher’s efforts to work with students' divergences with an eye toward leveraging the storyline designs to share epistemic agency. The third paper, which is conceptual, provides an initial image of the Teacher-Storyline relationship. This relationship involves the teacher’s use of storyline materials to design and enact instruction with the goal to be coherent for students. The relationship concerns the teacher, the storyline materials, the participatory interactions between the two, and the subsequent planned and enacted storyline that is an outgrowth of this relationship. It has implications for ‘opening up’ curricular materials and for designing curriculum-based professional learning.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021.Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education.Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction
Method in Legitimation: Exploring Lonergan’s Political Thought
Get PDFThesis advisor: Patrick ByrneThis dissertation proposes to give an expanded reading and interpretation of the work of Bernard Lonergan, SJ, in political theory around the question of political legitimation: What does it mean for a governing entity to exercise coercive power legitimately? To answer this question from Lonergan’s thought requires that we do several things: understand the historical context in which we find ourselves (Chapters 1-2), understand what Lonergan means by authenticity (Chapter 3), and how that relates to legitimate authority, which is an authentically operating matrix of authentic individuals participating in authentic communities governed by and utilizing authentic institutions and institutional sub-communities (Chapters 4-6). We come out at the Conclusion with a method for evaluating governmental legitimacy that expands on Lonergan’s approach.The history of the conversation concerning political legitimation is capacious, complex, confused, and contradictory, and I do not propose to recount it here in full. But with so much already said, what does Lonergan bring to the table distinct from the previous conversation? What is new is his philosophical focus, emphasizing method over concrete content or legislative procedure, which leads to an account of legitimation as authenticity. What matters is how individuals, communities, and institutions, including governments, are operating, not what particular form they take. Granting that his account of legitimation as authenticity is unique, why do we need authenticity to make sense of legitimate political authority? What does it add that the myriad other available accounts of legitimation do not already have?
Available accounts of legitimation meander through the shoals of history, and it’s usually only through trial and error that a navigable passage connecting power to legitimate authority is found. In brief, what Lonergan’s thought provides is a way to skim over the shoals of history so that no matter what new features may form beneath the waves, legitimate authority will always be possible and recognizable. We begin with an extensive but partial mapping of those shoals and pointing to some of the major shipwrecks of previous theories, the better to distinguish Lonergan’s view of legitimation as rooted in authenticity of individual, community, and institution in subsequent chapters. This will also give us examples for practical evaluation to show how Lonergan’s method might work in action.
Lonergan is not a cultural relativist, but he does claim that his understanding of legitimacy will be applicable in all times and for all peoples and that, by extension, legitimate government is always possible, no matter what form it takes. He gives a retrospective evaluation method, looking at the progress or decline of a culture, a nation, a civilization, a people as a proxy for the legitimacy of their leadership. “Inquiry into the legitimacy of authority or authorities is complex, lengthy, tedious, and often inconclusive” because direct evaluation of authenticity is complex, lengthy, tedious, and often inconclusive. (Bernard Lonergan, “Dialectic of Authority,” in A Third Collection, ed. Robert Doran and John Dadosky, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 6) But “[t]he fruit of authenticity is progress” and “[t]he fruit of unauthenticity is decline”, and the meat of this work is to spell out in detail the authentic operations of individuals, communities, and institutions (and institutional sub-communities). (Lonergan, “Dialectic of Authority”, 6, 7) These are what produce the progress or decline, and we conclude by supplementing Lonergan’s method with an approach that concurrently evaluates the operations of individuals, communities, and institutions and their sub-communities to see whether they are operating unauthentically (because unauthenticity is easier to recognize than authenticity in concurrent evaluation) and so, likely to produce either progress or decline. This is not as reliable as the retrospective method because not everything going on at a given time can be known to the contemporaneous observer and evaluator, but it is also more useful for creating concrete critiques of what is, in fact, going forward. (Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Doran and John Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 168)Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Philosophy