UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item EXAMINATION OF THE MANAGEMENT OF SOCIAL MEDIA RECORDS AT A FEDERAL EXECUTIVE AGENCY(2015) Doran, Chad; Bertot, John; Kurtz, Michael; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Maintaining and preserving records has long been regarded as essential to the functioning of federal government and to related open government initiatives in particular. However, the literature identifies specific technology and policy-related challenges of managing social media records. While there exists in the literature a limited examination regarding the management of social media content in the federal agencies, a close analysis is needed to identify how social media records are being managed in practice. As the nature of social media and electronic content are both rapidly evolving, it is important to ensure that current practice guidelines are applicable to new technology and continually re-aligned to policy as requirements and regulations change. In recent years, effective management of social media records has become relevant not only in terms of ongoing compliance but as an essential element of open government and transparency-related initiatives. Additionally, and perhaps even more important, all records management and archive practices, including social media preservation, serve a larger social function of maintaining and documenting our collective memory and experiences. This study provides an in-depth analysis of social media records management within a federal executive agency, utilizing a mixed-methods approach consisting of website review, document review, and follow-up interviews. This study presents theoretical as well as practical implications. On the theoretical level, the study contributes to records management theory, application of information models, and the definition of the record in the social media environment. On the practical level, this research provides recommendations to industry and federal agencies for the development of standards, guidance, and technologies for the management and preservation of social media records.Item From Partisan Banking to Open Access - A Study on the Emergence of Free Banking in Early Nineteenth Century Massachusetts(2014) Lu, Qian; Wallis, John; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines how the financial sector, specifically banks, achieved open entry in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts. The first chapter introduces this question and provides the historical background and conceptual framework necessary for unpacking this question. The second chapter provides new evidence showing how the majority political party, the Federalists, held a monopoly on banks by dominating the state legislature in charge of issuing charters for new banks, effectively prohibiting members of the opposing political party, the Democratic- Republicans, from opening banks. Political turnover in the period between 1810 and 1812 destroyed the Federalist monopoly and allowed for the possibility of open entry in the banking sector. The third chapter provides a new measurement of an elite coalition by collecting original data about bank directors and state legislators in an effort to identify their relationship. The empirical results show how the political composition of the banking sector changed during the Federalist and the Democratic-Republican eras and how the banking sector became less connected to political elites (i.e. the legislators) in the 1830s-1850s. The fourth chapter shows that for people who were ever legislators at some point in their life, they were more likely to be legislators and bankers at the same time in the late 1790s and early 1800s than afterwards. The fifth chapter collects data on private accumulation of wealth from Boston tax rolls and data on bank balance sheets to show that bankers were always richer than other wealthy citizens in the 1830s and 1840s, but their relative wealth inequality remained stable. New banks chartered in the 1840s and 1850s were smaller banks. The sixth chapter provides an explanation of the transition from limited to open access banking based on the idea of intra-elite competition. Taken together, these chapters show that the banking sector moved toward free banking by solving the problem of exclusive party politics. Although intra-elite conflicts did not eliminate elites banking privileges, political elites and banks were still connected and bankers remained the wealthy class, they nevertheless led to de facto free banking.Item ESSAYS ON GRADUATION(2011) Qian, Rong; Reinhart, Carmen M; Vegh, Carlos; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation attempts to address the elusive concept of "graduation", that is the emergence from frequent crisis suffering status. It contains two chapters. The first uses a data set covering over two hundred years of sovereign debt, banking and inflation crises to explore the question of how long does it take a country to "graduate" from the typical pattern of serial crises that most emerging markets experience. We find that for default and inflation crises, twenty years is a significant period, but the distribution of recidivism has extremely fat tails. In the case of banking crises, it is unclear whether countries ever graduate. We also examine the more recent phenomenon of IMF programs, which sometimes result in "near misses" but sometimes end in default even after a program is instituted. The second chapter investigates the impact of countries' institutions on their likelihood of sovereign default from both an empirical and theoretical perspective. By employing a dataset of more than 80 countries, two facts emerge: 1) high institutional quality is associated with a low frequency of sovereign default crisis, and 2) in particular, polarized governments tend to default more often. To explain these facts, we developed a model that establishes a link between institutions, government polarization and sovereign default crises. Countries that lack rules and institutional settings to limit the pressure of powerful groups on a central government's policies default more often than countries that do have good institutions. Given that there are no barriers to limit the influence of powerful groups, a more polarized government defaults more because groups do not coordinate, giving rise to a negative externality. Simulations of the model succeed in matching the cross-country differences in sovereign default frequencies, given their institutional quality and degree of government polarization in the data.