Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Three Essays on Agglomeration and Firm Dynamics(2017) Qiao, Yu; Ding, Chengri; Urban and Regional Planning and Design; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Agglomeration economy has long been proposed to account for an individual firm’s favor for denser environments. Previous strides have linked firm creation and productivity growth to the magnitude of agglomeration. This dissertation addresses three aspects of agglomerative impact on firms’ dynamic that have not been adequately emphasized in the literature. Specifically, the research provides an understanding of how agglomeration affects firms’ decisions on R&D investment, closure and relocation. In Chapter 2, I develop a simple Cournot type, two-stage competition model that reveals firms tend to reduce their R&D investment more in denser locations than in less dense ones with the presence of knowledge spillover. This implies that local agglomeration strengthens the negative relationship between knowledge spillover and R&D efforts. I then use firm-level data from China to test this theoretical prediction. The Tobit model yields estimated results that are consistent with the theoretical prediction. That is, the R&D effort is negatively correlated with knowledge spillover and the magnitude of the negative relationship increases along with localization agglomeration. The impact of geographic concentration on firm survival is studied in Chapter 3. Agglomeration economy encourages firm birth and growth, while agglomeration diseconomy accelerates firm death. The net impact of agglomeration on firm survival depends on the relative strength of agglomeration economy and diseconomy. Drawn upon an establishment-level data from Maryland, the essay finds empirical evidence supporting the claim that urbanization negatively affects survival, while specialization, diversity and employment centers reduce hazards for some industries. The finding indirectly evidences that the firm selection effect contributes to the productivity advantage of big cities. Firms frequently make spatial adjustments to accommodate their change in operation over time. Agglomeration economy could be one essential influence on a firm’s relocation decision-making. Chapter 4 delves into the relocations of service firms within the Baltimore Metropolitan Region. The nested logit model shows a higher probability for firms choosing a location with a high level of agglomeration. The estimates suggest diversity might be more important than specialization at the margin for intra-metropolitan relocation. Also identified is a more prominent localization effect than urbanization effect on firm intra-metropolitan relocation.Item Translating the "Other": A History of Modernist Literature in the American Southwest, 1903-1945(2016) Horton, David Seth; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)William Carlos Williams wrote, “The classic is the local fully realized, words marked by a place.” There are now significant studies celebrating the “classic” regional literatures of Ireland, New England, and the American South. But what if the place is out-of-the way, and what if the words that mark it are difficult if not impossible to translate? The American Southwest is one such place, a literary region only recently coming into view. My dissertation forwards this project by focusing on how cultural work produced in the Southwest might represent the region despite the many difficulties of translation involved. Biographical, literary, historical, and archival materials allow for an interdisciplinary approach positioning Southwestern texts within the broader traditions of European and American modernism. My chapters explore the limits of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural understanding. As with Pound’s approach to translating Chinese poetry, which did not entail learning Chinese, Mary Austin argues that she need not master an indigenous language in order to translate Native American texts. Instead, she claims to mystically comprehend their essential meaning, thereby enabling and limiting her insights into the region. While Espinoza’s El sol de Texas emphasizes the challenges faced by immigrants fleeing the Mexican revolution, Venegas’s Las aventuras de don Chipote offers a model for how to cope with such challenges by a process I term “transnational mimicry.” The lexical switching between English and Spanish provides numerous opportunities to mimic and mock southwestern cultural traditions, a strategy linking the region to other colonized spaces throughout the world. The texts of Luhan and Lawrence constitute spectacularly failed attempts at translating otherness. Luhan romanticized the local cultural geography, whereas Lawrence interpreted it through a Eurocentric point-of-view. Together, their work represents the epistemological limits of a vision dominated by Anglo power structures. I conclude with Cather’s southwestern novels and suggest that while Death Comes for the Archbishop is a novelistic illustration of Benjamin’s argument that all translations are marked by at least some degree of incommunicability, it also illustrates Ricoeur’s contention that a belief in translatability is foundational to any act of interpreting a text produced by an “other” human being.Item Fords of My Dreams: Stories(2014) Dorland Perry, Dawn Chryselle; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Fords of My Dreams: Stories is a literary manuscript-in-progress featuring girls and women rising up from rural poverty. These linked stories bear witness to coming-of-age as a ritual marked by extreme rejection of others and even violence; to the adulthoods shaped by invisible pasts of need and neglect; and to the survivor's guilt that plagues those who sacrificed or abandoned others whose futures weighed less in order to rise. In the tradition of Dorothy Allison's Trash, these stories complicate the assumption that arriving at a higher economic class always outgains the emotional cost. With Fords of My Dreams, the author seeks to open a new set of questions around the American dream of class ascendance.Item Unsheltered Homelessness in Maryland: Impact and Spatial Change during the Foreclosure Crisis(2012) Boston, David L.; Dawkins, Casey J.; Urban Studies and Planning; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research primarily looks at trends in unsheltered homelessness and foreclosures in Maryland between 2005 and 2011 in order to determine what kind of impact the foreclosure crisis has had on homelessness. To complement these quantitative data, qualitative information was gathered through interviews and local Continuum of Care plans. The results of this investigation do not support any direct causal relationship between new foreclosures and homelessness; however, it is possible that foreclosures have pushed higher-income renters into the rental market. Through the combined impacts of the build-up of the housing bubble and the injection of these new higher-income renters, rental costs have continued their upward trend. In this way, it is possible that foreclosures have indirectly led to an increase in homelessness by pushing rental costs upward even after the housing bubble had burst. However, this research also highlighted many shortcomings associated with the homeless point-in-time count methodology that make it difficult to identify causal relationships such as this with any high level of certainty. Several recommendations are provided at the conclusion of this research in order to help alleviate homelessness, improve the available data, and conduct additional research to further our collective knowledge on the nature of homelessness and its causes.