Alliance One Tobacco (Malawi)
Academic Research Repository at the Institute of Developing EconomiesNot a member yet
52305 research outputs found
Sort by
Essays on Consumer Preferences in Health
No full textThis dissertation quantifies consumer preferences in the domain of health, examines the mechanisms underlying these preferences, and develops tools for policymakers and practitioners to incorporate these insights into health policy decision-making. Chapter 1 provides evidence that people's ability to process complicated numerical information influences their willingness to pay for small changes in the risk of dying, potentially biasing economic evaluations of public policies that reduce health risks. To address this challenge, this chapter develops a statistical approach that practitioners can use to correct for bias, improving estimates of the value of public policies. Next, Chapter 2 (co-authored with Angelique Acquatella and Amitabh Chandra) examines whether people's preferences for resource redistribution depend not only on beneficiaries' financial status but also on their health status. It finds that many people base their distributional preferences on both health status and income, and it develops conceptual methods to aggregate these preferences, which can guide the future evaluation of social policies that affect individuals with health conditions. Finally, Chapter 3 documents diverse public views on whether health insurance plans should charge higher prices to specific consumer groups that may have higher resource utilization, highlighting the important role of people's beliefs about personal responsibility for health. Documenting this heterogeneity helps policymakers to create policies that people will perceive as fairer and will be more likely to support. Together, these chapters demonstrate the importance of understanding public perceptions of value and equity in designing and evaluating health policies.Health Polic
Learning to Renew: Optimizing Organizational Learning at Purpose Built Communities for Strategic Renewal
No full textPurpose Built Communities ®, a national nonprofit dedicated to holistic neighborhood revitalization, recognized that its strategic growth and operational effectiveness depended on its ability to optimize and institutionalize learning across the organization. Although Purpose Built Communities had developed a suite of learning approaches over time, the absence of a cohesive learning strategy hindered the organization’s capacity for continuous improvement and strategic renewal. In response, Purpose Built Communities launched a multi-phase Learning Strategy Development Project to assess, refine, and integrate its organizational learning approaches into a unified system capable of supporting adaptation and growth.
This capstone recounts and analyzes the Discovery and Evaluation Phase of that project, which I led during my 10-month residency. By conducting an internal landscape analysis, developing a learning evaluation framework, and providing research-based recommendations, I worked to equip Purpose Built Communities with the structures and evidence necessary to advance toward becoming an effective learning organization. My strategic project was grounded in organizational learning scholarship and drew upon Crossan et al.’s (1999) 4I Organizational Learning Framework and Heifetz et al.’s (2009) Adaptive Leadership Framework to guide project execution and analysis.
The insights gained through this project offer practical implications for organizational learning, nonprofit leadership, and strategic renewal. They provide a model for assessing and strengthening learning practices in mission-driven organizations seeking to sustain strategic relevance and long-term impact.Educatio
Optimal Taxation and Human Capital Policies Across Space
No full textIn this senior thesis, I study how the presence of migration affects the optimal taxation and educational investment policies of competing governments seeking to maximize tax revenue. I develop a model that captures both intensive-margin labor supply decisions and extensive-margin migration decisions. Using this framework, I derive elasticity-based formulas for optimal tax rates and public education investment, with and without migration. I show that migration lowers optimal tax rates and distorts education spending policy in the baseline model, particularly in low-productivity regions. I then extend the model to include features such as intergenerational concerns and remittances, where the presence of remittances offers a counterexample in which migration can actually increase the optimal tax and education spending. I prove that the model exhibits spatial sorting and regional inequality, which motivates a role for distortionary central government intervention. I calibrate the model to U.S. Census data and evaluate the main results numerically. Finally, I conclude and suggest future directions of research.Applied Mathematic
Sustenance: Ag Society's Grounds in 2059
No full textSustenance is the substance of distinct flavors, textures, colors, and nutrients that nourish living beings and allow them to thrive together. Yet, sustenance remains in the periphery of landscape architecture and on Ag Society’s grounds on the island of Noepe, Martha’s Vineyard. Appearance considerations have taken over the physical practices of sustenance.
Sustenance: Ag Society’s Grounds in 2059 proposes communal foraging to address the ongoing fragmentation of relationships between land, people, fauna, and flora. Forest forage expands the existing sustenance on site. Garden forage invites land-based practitioners from Wampanoag communities, landscaping companies, conservation organizations, and farming communities to care, design, and share their abundance. Milkweed forage communes with monarchs and humans.
The aspiration is to integrate sustenance as a “connective tissue.” Shaping space for communal foraging nourishes the connections among the glacial outwash sand, Wampanoag communities, water, seasonal communities, moths, plant communities, working residents and commuters, ground-nesting bees, and more.Department of Landscape Architectur
Essays on the Impact and Effectiveness of Share Repurchase Regulations
No full textThis dissertation contributes evidence on the effectiveness of different share repurchase regulations. Share repurchases, also known as stock buybacks, occur when a firm buys back its own stock, usually on the public market. Over the last three decades, repurchases have emerged as an important, yet controversial, form of shareholder payouts. Compared to dividends, repurchases give managers greater flexibility in the timing and magnitude of their firm's payouts. This allows managers to better manage temporary increases in cash and changes in capital structure, in addition to signaling undervaluation. With that said, critics are concerned that managers may misuse repurchases. Managers may have incentives to forego positive NPV long-term investments to increase stock prices in the short-term, coming at the cost of long-term firm value.
One option to curtail the potential harmful impacts of repurchases is to increase transparency surrounding them. In solo-authored work, the first paper (Chapter 2) considers whether additional share repurchase legalization can reduce the frequency of value-decreasing repurchases. The SEC adopted its Share Repurchase Disclosure Modernization Rule (the ``modernized rule") in 2023. Relative to the previous disclosure rules, the modernized rule required additional disaggregation of quarterly repurchases to better show managerial repurchase intent. The modernized rule became effective in October 2023, but was vacated in December 2023. Due to different quarter start dates, the modernized rule was effective for some firms for nearly two months; other firms were never treated. Using this quasi-exogenous variation, monthly repurchase data and a staggered DiD design, my main tests find that the modernized rule reduces share repurchases amounts, primarily by reducing the number of repurchasing firms. In cross-sectional tests, efficient (``value maximizing") repurchases decline significantly, while opportunistic (``value-decreasing") repurchases do not. The decline in efficient repurchases is consistent with the legal, liquidity and proprietary costs of disclosure outweighing the benefits of reduced information asymmetry. Meanwhile, the limited reduction in opportunistic repurchases suggests that additional disclosure has little to no impact on the manager’s private cost of repurchasing too many shares. Results using event study returns and repurchase prices corroborate these effects. Overall, the findings are consistent with additional repurchase disclosure having real effects on repurchases. It reduces repurchases; however, efficient repurchases decline and opportunistic repurchases are unaffected.
Other critics of repurchases have argued for significant restrictions or even banning repurchases altogether. In co-authored work with Charles Wang, the second paper (chapter 3) evaluates these claims by re-examining the \textit{purported negative impact} of share repurchase legalization on corporate investment using staggered legal changes across 17 countries from the 1980s to 2000s. Considering \textit{all} public firms instead of just \textit{repurchasing} firms, we document increases in investment and firm performance. Cross-sectional tests are consistent with capital from repurchasing firms flowing to smaller, younger, higher-growth, and more cash-needy companies. The third paper (Chapter 4) challenges the robustness of Wang, Yin and Yu's (2021) direct finding that repurchasing firms reduce their investments after repurchase legalization. Employing more robust econometric methods and additional analyses, we find no consistent evidence that legalizing buybacks reduces investment among repurchasing firms. Thus, legalization does not appear to be harmful to repurchasing firms' investments either. These results suggest that legalizing repurchases may facilitate efficient capital reallocation rather than curtail aggregate investment. They contribute to the ongoing debate about the economic effects of share repurchases and have important implications for corporate finance literature and public policy. Policymakers should exercise caution when considering restrictions on share repurchases, as such policies may inadvertently hinder efficient capital allocation.Business Administratio
Learning to Adapt: Representation-Based Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Task Skill Transfer
No full textReinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable success in learning complex control policies, yet its applicability to real-world robotics remains limited due to sample inefficiency and poor generalization across tasks. This thesis explores representation-based reinforcement learning as a means to address these challenges, with a particular focus on multi-task learning and policy adaptation. We begin by conducting a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms, highlighting the evolution from traditional Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) to advanced representation-based methods such as Contrastive Learned Representation Soft Actor-Critic (CTRL-SAC). Motivated by the limitations of existing approaches, we propose a novel multi-skill representation learning framework that builds upon CTRL-SAC, more specifically known as RepMT-SAC, enabling efficient skill transfer by leveraging shared task-independent dynamics. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we conduct extensive empirical studies in order to demonstrate that our approach improves policy adaptation and generalization, reducing the need for task-specific retraining. By combining theoretical insights with rigorous empirical validation, this work contributes to the advancement of reinforcement learning for autonomous control, paving the way for more efficient and versatile robotic systems.Computer Scienc
The Impact of Minority Representation at Mortgage Lenders
No full textWe study links between the labor market for loan officers and access to mortgage credit. Using novel data matching the (near) universe of mortgage applications to loan officers, we find that minorities are significantly underrepresented among loan officers. Minority borrowers are less likely to complete mortgage applications, have completed applications approved, and to ultimately take-up a loan. These disparities are significantly reduced when minority borrowers work with minority loan officers. Minority borrowers working with minority loan officers also have lower default rates. Our results suggest that minority underrepresentation among loan officers has adverse effects on minority borrowers’ access to credit.Author's Origina