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"Innocent" and "Guilty" AIDS Victims: A Review of The Life and Times of Ryan White by Paul M. Renfro
No full text"Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal" was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Its mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing ... as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres
Managing Relationships through Boundaries: A Library Publishing Conversation
No full text“Boundaries are good for everyone.” Veronica Arrellano Douglas
This session, facilitated by librarians and library staff supporting digital publishing programs within academic libraries, discussed the role of labor, relationships, and care in the provisioning of services to our academic communities through the frameworks of Human-Centered Leadership (HCL) and Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT). By their nature, library publishing programs may be small, run by staff supporting many other library programs, and are often competing for inter-libraries development resources and technical support. Boundaries are an essential communication mechanism and management tool used to maintain healthy relationships, safeguard against staff burnout, and protect space needed for program and service growth.
The session facilitators reflected on the importance of boundaries, defined within RCT as “a place of growth and productivity rather than restriction and separation,” for establishing and maintaining manageable publishing programs with respectful constraints that center the needs of the people involved: academic staff, students (graduate and undergraduate), and faculty. (Schwartz 39)
Works Cited
Arrellano, Veronica. “Boundaries as Meeting Places.” Presentation. CALM 2023 Conference.
Schwartz, Harriet. Connected Teaching: Relationship, Power, and Mattering in Higher Education Routledge: New York. (2019)
Marone, Mark. (2024) “How Human-Centered Leadership Helps People Adapt to Change,” Harvard Business Publishin
Essays in Environmental Economics
No full textThis dissertation examines environmental questions related to difficult-to-measure populations and pollutants.
The three chapters combine novel sources and applications of data with econometric and machine learning tools to investigate interactions between the environment and society for understudied segments of the labor force and complex pollutants. Leveraging large consumer transaction data and both public and original surveys, the first chapter shows that gig economy platforms enable consumers to adapt to climate change while shifting climate-related damages to the rapidly expanding yet hard-to-measure population of gig economy workers.
The following two chapters develop alternative ways of measuring plastics in the environment that allow robust causal inference related to the origins and regulation of plastic pollution. Using citizen science data from shoreline cleanups, the second chapter demonstrates that plastic bag bans and taxes in the US reduce plastic bag litter in the environment.
Finally, the third chapter proposes a new method that combines crowdsourced data collection, machine learning on satellite data, and sampling to create an unbiased measure of the area of open-air plastic waste sites. Together, these chapters study the externalities of consumption related to previously difficult-to-measure populations and pollutants
Essays in Financial Economics
No full textThis dissertation includes three essays in financial economics, with a particular focus on banking and monetary policy. In the first chapter, Bank Regulation and Interest Rates: Reduced Form Evidence, I empirically study the implementation of bank regulation and trace out its effects on banks' holdings of government bonds.
In particular, exploiting the rollout of bank capital regulation in the 2010s, I uncover the effect of capital requirements on banks' holdings of longer maturity government bonds like Treasuries and MBS. I find in a triple difference specification that this treatment effect is particularly concentrated among regulated banks that entered the regulatory period with lower levels of capitalization, reinforcing the main finding in the baseline result. In the second part of the first chapter, I present a methodology to estimate the impact of banks' purchases of long term bonds on long term interest rates.
In the second chapter, Bank Regulation and Interest Rates: Aggregate Effects, I develop a bank portfolio choice model to rationalize and quantify the reduced form findings from the first chapter. The model includes heterogeneous banks, random short term interest rates, and inelasticity in deposit, loan, and bond markets. The key economic force in the model is that capital regulation incentivizes banks to increase their long maturity bond holdings in order to stay away from their capital requirement in low interest rate states when the rest of the balance sheet produces less income. I quantify the model to match key moments in the banking sector and I validate the model by matching the reduced form effect of bank capital requirements on banks' holdings of long term bonds from the reduced form section. The model quantifies significant aggregate effects of bank regulation on long term interest rates. I use the model study counterfactual policy designs that crowd-in banks' original portfolios while also allowing for greater capitalization in normal times. Overall, the paper highlights the role of bank regulation in affecting interest rates directly and its implicit role as part of the monetary policy toolkit.
In the third chapter, How Does the Fed Affect Corporate Credit Costs? Default Risk, Creditor Segmentation and the Post-FOMC Drift, I explore the persistence of the impact of monetary policy shocks on measures of corporate credit costs. After documenting that sudden changes in monetary policy have significant and lagged impact on corporate credit costs, I use a rich cross-sectional dataset to decompose the firm and creditor specific factors that drive the baseline finding. I find that the repricing position of firms, in particular the amount of assets that are due to reprice at new interest rate levels, significantly drives the response at both short and longer horizons, supporting a cash flow effect. Next, exploiting the fact that firms have multiple bonds outstanding at any given time, I find that the cross-section of credit holders matters only at a tight horizon and fails to explain the drift component.
Last, I provide suggestive evidence that aggregate broker dealer capital levels significantly amplify the response only after several days. The paper highlights the need to incorporate longer horizons in studying the link between monetary policy and financial markets
Essays in Macroeconomics
No full textThis qualitative study examines the influence of Korean media (K-media) on the ongoing identitiesconstruction of Korean American high school students. Drawing on dialogical self theory (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010) and Holland et al.’s (1998) concept of figured worlds, the research reveals how these students actively construct their identities through dynamic negotiation of multiple cultural influences.
Through my analysis, I identified four distinct visualizations of how Korean American youth navigate bicultural spaces, which I term “Identities-in-Dialogue Realms”: (1) Balanced Integrated Identities, characterized by seamless cultural integration; (2) Cultivating Calibrated Cultural Identities, featuring controlled cultural engagement with permeable boundaries; (3) Constrained Identity, marked by significant barriers to cultural integration.
This dissertation consists on three essays on macroeconomic topics, with a special focus onpolicymaking and international macroeconomics. Methodologically, they also reflect my interest in using microdata to answer macroeconomic questions. In the first chapter I show that firm heterogeneity introduces quantitatively significant costs to macroprudential regulation. In the second chapter, part of joint work with Andrés Drenik and Andrés Blanco, we document heterogeneity in labor income outcomes following nominal devaluations and explore the underlying mechanisms using employer-employee matched data from Argentina. The third chapter, which is joint work with Jesse Schreger and Pierre Yared, explores non-trivial interactions between monetary and fiscal policy that can arise as a result of limited commitment.
In the first chapter, I study the optimal design of capital controls when its effects on investment and productivity are taken into account. Capital controls, policies that restrict the movement of capital across countries, have become popular in recent years as a way of curbing excessive finan- cial flows that can threaten financial stability. At the same time, a mostly empirical literature has shown that these restrictions can have heterogeneous effects on firms, leading to capital misallocation, but these findings have not been incorporated into the models used in the field. To address this gap, I introduce a tractable way of modeling misallocation that generates a link between investment and productivity and can be easily taken to the data. Because capital controls affect investment, they lead to productivity losses. I show that, when the policymaker is constrained in their available instruments, this generates a policy trade-off between financial stability and productivity growth. I derive a sufficient statistic formula for the second-best policy, including its productivity costs. I leverage the tractability of my model to get a range of estimates for the latter using rich firm-level microdata for several European countries. The trade-off is quantitatively relevant: For baseline crisis probabilities, productivity losses switch optimal policy from a capital control to a foreign borrowing subsidy.
In the second chapter, we study the distribution of labor income during large devaluations. Across countries, inequality falls after large devaluations within the context of a surge in inflation and a fall and subsequent recovery of real labor income. To better understand inequality dynamics, we use a novel administrative dataset covering the 2002 Argentinean devaluation. We show that following a homogeneous fall in real labor income across workers, the bottom of the income distribution recovers faster than the top. Low labor mobility and lack of union coverage among high-income workers explain their slow recovery.
In the third chapter, we consider a New Keynesian model with strategic monetary and fiscal interactions. The fiscal authority maximizes social welfare. Monetary policy is delegated to a central bank with an anti-inflation bias that suffers from a lack of commitment. The impact of central bank hawkishness on debt issuance is non-monotonic because increased hawkishness reduces the benefit from fiscal stimulus while simultaneously increasing real debt capacity. Starting from high levels of hawkishness (dovishness), a marginal increase in the central bank’s anti-inflation bias decreases (increases) debt issuance
A "White Death": The First World War in the Dolomites and the Genesis of Modern Warfare, 1915-1918
No full textThis thesis examines how the First World War unfolded in the Dolomites, a mountain range in the eastern Alps where Italy and Austria-Hungary fought from 1915 to 1918. It argues this front, traditionally marginalized and portrayed as an amusing anomaly of minimal significance, played a critical role in a much broader evolution in European military theory. Drawing on a wealth of official documentation, it traces how the extreme and unprecedented conditions of mountain warfare exposed the obsolescence of a prewar military model grounded in mass, in turn demanding a shift to a new theory of war grounded in qualitative questions of force employment. The thesis shows how the ability to effect this shift determined the course of the war between Italy and Austria-Hungary, as well as the spectacular downfall of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918
Middle Income Housing and Urban Equity in New York City
No full textNew York City’s housing crisis is often framed around low-income affordability, but middle-income households increasingly face severe housing challenges. This thesis examines the state of middle-income housing in NYC through a mixed-methods analysis encompassing policy review, quantitative needs assessment, spatial analysis of housing conditions, and a case study of the Mitchell-Lama program.
The findings reveal a significant mismatch between middle-income housing demand and supply – hundreds of thousands of additional units would be needed to close the gap (cbcny.org). Quantitative analysis shows that roughly one-third of “middle-income” renter households (earning ~60–120% of Area Median Income) are now cost-burdened by rent (jchs.harvard.edu). Housing maintenance data indicate that code violations are rising and heavily clustered in specific neighborhoods, underscoring pockets of substandard housing (citylimits.org). Spatial statistics (Moran’s I, Geary’s C, Local Indicators of Spatial Association, and Getis-Ord Gi*) confirm non-random geographic patterns in housing stress, identifying distinct “hotspots” of affordability gaps and deteriorating housing.
The case study of the Mitchell-Lama program – a centerpiece of NYC’s middle-income housing policy in the mid-20th century – illustrates both the potential of public-private partnerships to create affordable homes at scale and the vulnerability of these units to loss through privatization. These insights point to critical policy gaps: NYC lacks sufficient tools today to serve households who earn too much for traditional subsidies yet cannot afford market-rate housing. The thesis concludes by proposing a suite of policy reforms, including reviving production programs for moderate-income housing, strengthening preservation of existing units, zoning changes to enable more “missing middle” development, and new financing mechanisms. Taken together, these strategies chart a path toward a more inclusive housing policy that addresses the full spectrum of urban housing need
Journalism Zero: How Platforms and Publishers are Navigating AI
No full textEarly in our first interview, a veteran news executive began the story of their interactions with technology companies over the past decade by taking a deep breath.
“You know,” the executive said, “it’s been a long, strange trip.”
It’s fitting that these were among the first words we heard in our study of the relationship between journalism and generative AI, the latest turbulent phase of the purportedly “post-platform era.” Failed products, misguided strategies, and an incompatibility with the demands of truth-based publishing have characterized many tech companies’ efforts to engage with news organizations, along with inadequate financial support that arrived sporadically and was tied to conditions. The most promising “innovations” in news have instead come from journalists and newsrooms finding strategies that protected them from the business models of platform companies. Nonprofit newsrooms have been forced into existence by Alphabet and Meta’s duopolistic grip on advertising revenue, while direct-to-consumer routes such as newsletters and podcasts have come into their own as social media and search platforms have deprioritized or even removed news.
The Tow Center for Digital Journalism has been researching the evolving relationship between platforms and publishers since 2015. Our 2019 report, “The End of an Era,” documented a period when publishers were coming to accept that the core premise of the social media era — that the future of journalism lay in targeting audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Apple News, Google, and other platforms — was wrong
Methodologies for Identifying and Understanding Cross-timescale Interference & The Exposure, Use, and Trust of Climate Information in Colombia
No full textThe research presented here is driven by the fundamental question, how does cross-timescale interference impact climate and society? The topic of cross-timescale interference is still relatively new in the literature and identifying new methods for evaluating such interferences will contribute to a deeper understanding of climate physics and allow for the improvement of climate models, enabling better prediction of the climate. Additionally, as new climate tools and more accurate forecasts are produced and becoming available to farmers, there is an ever-growing need to understand what tools are used or needed by communities to help identify changes in climate, such as cross-timescale interference.
This dissertation comprises four chapters assessing these two knowledge gaps and contributes to the frontier of creating methodologies to understand cross-timescale interference.The first chapter analyzes the cross-timescale interference observed between ENSO and the MJO and compares the resulting rainfall composites to the 2015-2016 and 1997-1998 El Niño events, with the goal to identify if cross-timescale interference is visible in these two particular events. Results from Chapter 1 conclude that it is possible to identify cross-timescale interference between ENSO and the MJO through the use of compositing techniques and find that the contribution of cross-timescale interference varies based on ENSO event.
The second chapter follows closely to the first, utilizing the same compositing techniques to produce rainfall composites, but focuses on the question of if and where the cross-timescale interference is linear or nonlinear. Adding to the conclusions of Chapter 1, Chapter 2 finds that it is possible to tease apart the linear and nonlinear contributions of cross-timescale interference, showing greater nonlinear interference during the 2015-2016 El Niño event than the 1997-1998 El Niño event.
The third chapter is a case study of the 2020-2023 La Niña event that identifies whether or not climate driver interaction played a role in the formation and persistence of the three year long La Niña event. Chapter 3 concludes that the MJO interacted with the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) in late April and early June of 2019 to trigger a strong positive IOD event, which contributed to the onset of the three year-long La Niña event experienced from 2020-2023.
The fourth chapter of this dissertation underscores the importance of field work to contextualize the work of climate scientists. Specifically, the research focused on the specific needs, trust in, and uses of climate information and services by farmers in rural Columbia. Chapter 4 concludes that farmers in Colombia still do not use or trust many of the climate services available to them, especially small farmers and coffee growers. However, through the use of local round table discussions (MTAs), rice farmers in northern Colombia have better utilized and incorporated climate information into their farming practices
Nature and Justice in Plato's Republic and Antiphon's On Truth
No full textThis dissertation makes two proposals. First, that the aims of the central ethical argument of Plato’s Republic include showing that the just life is better than the unjust by nature for the individual human being who lives it. Second, that a major motivation for this project is the need to combat notable immoralist arguments for the opposite position: that injustice or the unjust life is by nature better than justice for the individual human being.
The clearest expression of this immoralist framework in the surviving literature is found in the fragments from Antiphon’s On Truth, which lay out an ethical position that combines rational egoism (the view that one should maximize one’s self interest, in the sense that it is rational to do so) with the view that the fundamental human good consists in physiological flourishing, the specifics of which are determined by human nature.
On such a view, justice is not a value, but a hindrance to one’s pursuit of a good life. Plato rejects Antiphon’s conclusions, but accepts the importance of the challenge as well as the legitimacy of human nature as the criterion. He thus takes it upon himself to show that justice is good for the individual human being by nature