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 PREDICTING POLICY: EXAMINING PERCEPTIONS OF ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, COLOR-EVASIVE RACIAL ATTITUDES, AND BELIEFS ABOUT CAPITALISM(2022) Sharma, Rajni; Kivlighan, Dennis; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how beliefs about capitalism, color-evasive racial attitudes, and perceptions about wealth distribution predict redistributive economic policy preferences. I hypothesized that beliefs about capitalism, perceptions of wealth distribution, and color-evasiveness predict policy preferences when controlling for Satisfaction With Life (SWLS) and that critical consciousness action (CA) will moderate this relationship. Approximately 510 individuals completed the Costs of United States Corporate Capitalism (CCC) scale, Colorblind Racial Attitudes Scale (COBRAS), the Critical Action subscale of the Critical Consciousness Scale, ratings of wealth distribution, and questions about their policy preferences through an online survey distributed through MTurk. Results indicated that the CCC and COBRAS subscales predicted policy preferences, over and above demographic variables. Findings from this project may inform how individuals make decisions about policy preferences and on a broader scale, inform solutions for decreasing inequity in the U.S. Implications for research and clinical practice are discussed.Item INEQUALITY AND THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY(2018) Pepin, Joanna; Sayer, Liana; Cohen, Philip; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Intrahousehold finances offer a window into the crossroads between the market domain’s emphasis on self-reliance and the family domain’s emphasis on interdependence. Modern couples confront tensions between ideals of mutual family interests and values of individualism, a departure from fitting themselves into culturally expected family arrangements of the past. How these social changes impact progress towards gender equality is not well understood. The dissertation aims are to: (1) identify mechanisms associated with different types of money arrangements in families, and (2) examine the association between financial arrangements and gender inequality in families. To meet these aims, I used data from two sources. First, I used multinomial modeling of 2012 International Social Survey Programme data to show cohabiting couples in countries with greater gender equality partially integrated their money instead of keeping it separate. Married couples pooled money regardless of country-level gender equality. Findings suggest that different cultural logics operate in married and cohabiting partnerships across gendered contexts, rather than cohabitation functioning as a weaker form of marriage. Second, I devised a novel survey experiment to collect the first nationally representative sample of U.S. adults’ attitudes about income sharing in families. Results challenge the notion that marriage distinctively encourages support for financial integration in families. Findings also revealed that respondents believed higher-earning partners ought to hold back a greater absolute value of their earnings for personal use, allowing inequality in labor market rewards to perpetuate unequal conditions within families. I also used this data to disentangle the mechanisms associated with perceptions of decision-making authority. Findings indicated higher relative-earners within families were not regarded as entitled to the final word in decisions. Whether respondents considered earnings individually or community owned did not explain the lack of association between relative earnings and decision-making clout. Instead, findings showed a significant association between the fictional decider’s gender and respondents’ perceptions of fairness. Specifically, when women were presented as the decider over monetary family choices, unilateral decision making about monetary items was viewed more favorably. Collectively, these findings suggest gender socialization theories are essential to explaining persistent gender inequality in families.Item The Promise of Access: Hope and Inequality in the Information Economy(2016) Greene, Daniel Marcus; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 2013, a series of posters began appearing in Washington, DC’s Metro system. Each declared “The internet: Your future depends on it” next to a photo of a middle-aged black Washingtonian, and an advertisement for the municipal government’s digital training resources. This hopeful discourse is familiar but where exactly does it come from? And how are our public institutions reorganized to approach the problem of poverty as a problem of technology? The Clinton administration’s ‘digital divide’ policy program popularized this hopeful discourse about personal computing powering social mobility, positioned internet startups as the ‘right’ side of the divide, and charged institutions of social reproduction such as schools and libraries with closing the gap and upgrading themselves in the image of internet startups. After introducing the development regime that builds this idea into the urban landscape through what I call the ‘political economy of hope’, and tracing the origin of the digital divide frame, this dissertation draws on three years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in startups, schools, and libraries to explore how this hope is reproduced in daily life, becoming the common sense that drives our understanding of and interaction with economic inequality and reproduces that inequality in turn. I show that the hope in personal computing to power social mobility becomes a method of securing legitimacy and resources for both white émigré technologists and institutions of social reproduction struggling to understand and manage the persistent poverty of the information economy. I track the movement of this common sense between institutions, showing how the political economy of hope transforms them as part of a larger development project. This dissertation models a new, relational direction for digital divide research that grounds the politics of economic inequality with an empirical focus on technologies of poverty management. It demands a conceptual shift that sees the digital divide not as a bug within the information economy, but a feature of it.Item THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS: PUBLIC HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND INCOME INEQUALITY(2015) McDonald, Michael Kelly; Haufler, Virginia A; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What happens to the welfare of people, especially in developing countries, when their government strengthens intellectual property rights (IPR)? Existing research provides conflicting answers. This project is one of the few to provide large-N analysis of the impact of IPR on social outcomes: specifically health, education, and inequality. Results suggest that stronger IPR are associated with better outcomes on some key indicators of health, education, and inequality, and worse outcomes on other indicators. A detailed case study suggests that the process of IPR reform, the motivations behind IPR reform, and the institutions involved in the adoption and enforcement of IPR partially determine the impact of IPR on each set of outcomes.Item Does Foreign Aid Lead to Armed Civil Conflict? Examining Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnic Exclusion(2014) Kishi, Roudabeh; Wilkenfeld, Jonathan; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The impact of aid flows and ethnic exclusion on civil conflict in Africa is explored. Ethno-politics and informal institutions dictate discriminatory spending allocations (in the form of political patronage flows) in most African states. The unequal allocation of these resources can foster grievances in excluded populations. When states gain access to non-tax revenues (i.e., foreign aid), it is often allocated in a similar fashion. When inequalities in access to resources lie along ethnic lines, the likelihood and intensity of conflict is higher as ethnicity can offer an important mobilizing source in organizing political action. Using newly-available disaggregated data to explore these relationships at the subnational-level, statistical results are found supporting this theory. Additionally, micro-level analysis of these mechanisms bolsters the statistical findings in a country-case study of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the locations of aid projects, ethnic group settlement patterns, and civil conflict sites are mapped using geographic information systems.Item CROSSING THE BORDERS THAT DEFINE DIFFERENCE: THE CULTURE, POLITICS, AND PRACTICE OF SOLIDARITY IN TWO HIGH SCHOOLS(2012) Cohen, Beth Anne Douthirt; Finkelstein, Barbara; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This multi-sited ethnography explores the experiences of high school students in the United States as they enact solidarity across various identity borders including race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, and mental/physical ability. Specifically, the study focuses on relatively privileged young people in two distinctly different schools--an urban coeducational public school and a suburban all-boys private school. The students entered into solidarity across difference in order to protest the marginalization of minority groups. Using observations and in-depth interviews, this study documents the process of how, when, and why these students came to enact solidarity as a tool to alter systems of power and privilege. For these students, their journeys towards enacting solidarity began with a discovery of the borders that maintain inequality. These discoveries included a process of 1) experiencing or witnessing marginalization, 2) questioning the borders that maintain systems of power and privilege, 3) re-imagining identity categories, 4) integrating new ways of interacting across difference into their sense of self and sense of the world, and 5) seeking out opportunities to learn new ways of thinking about "others." In an attempt to alter the borders that maintain inequality, the students took on the roles of helpers, messengers, advocates, and activists. They enacted solidarity in different ways at different moments based on their skills, capacities, perceived risks, and on their own understandings of justice, inequality, power, and social change. Over time, the student's enactments of solidarity became dynamic and fluid, while navigating various pitfalls such as paternalism. They employed various forms of solidarity, including human, social, and civic solidarities, and sought to build what this study calls "cultural solidarity" in their schools and communities in order to achieve social, political, and, perhaps most prominently, cultural change. The findings suggest that the agency of relatively privileged students is an effective tool that educators and scholars can harness in interrupting inequality in schools. Dynamic and less rigid conceptions of solidarity better reflect how young people enact solidarity in their daily lives. Through curricular, philosophical, and pedagogical choices, high schools can enable or limit the manner in which students approach difference across groups.Item Location Choice, Product Choice, and the Human Resource Practices of Firms(2007-05-10) Freedman, Matthew L.; Haltiwanger, John C; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is comprised of three chapters. The first investigates the implications of industrial clustering for labor mobility and earnings dynamics. Motivated by a theoretical model in which geographically clustered firms compete for workers, I exploit establishment-level variation in agglomeration to explore the impact of clustering in the software publishing industry on labor market outcomes. The results show that clustering makes it easier for workers to job hop among establishments within the sector. Further, workers in clusters have relatively steep earnings-tenure profiles, accepting lower wages early in their careers in exchange for stronger earnings growth and higher wages later. These findings underscore the importance of geography in understanding labor market dynamics within industries. While the first chapter reveals striking relationships between the human resource practices and location decisions of high-technology establishments, the second chapter (joint with F. Andersson, J. Haltiwanger, J. Lane, and K. Shaw) draws key connections between the hiring and compensation policies of innovative firms and the nature of their product markets. We show that software firms that operate in product markets with highly skewed returns to innovation pay a premium to attract talented workers. Yet these same firms also reward loyalty; that is, highly skilled workers faithful to their employers enjoy higher earnings in firms with a greater variance in potential payoffs from innovation. These results not only contribute to our knowledge of firm human resource practices and product market strategies, but also shed light on patterns of income inequality within and between industries. Building on this final idea, the last chapter (joint with F. Andersson, E. Davis, J. Lane, B. McCall, and L. Sandusky) examines the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to within-industry changes in earnings inequality. We find that the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers and firms based on worker skills are key determinants of changes in industry earnings distributions over time. However, the importance of these and other factors in driving observed dynamics in earnings inequality varies across sectors, with aggregate shifts often disguising fundamental differences in the underlying forces effecting change.Item INEQUALITY, INSTITUTIONS AND REDISTRIBUTION(2005-07-29) Aysan, Ahmet Faruk; Betancourt, Roger; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the role of efficiency of redistributive institutions (ERI) on redistribution. The first substantive essay proposes a theoretical model to explain the lack of strong empirical evidence in favor of a positive relationship between income inequality and redistribution. This chapter first shows that even exogenously given ERI affects the relationship between income inequality and redistribution. Then, it introduces three specifications to endogenize ERI. In these various specifications, increasing inequality reduces the ERI when (1) ERI is an increasing function of average income or (2) political influence on ERI is positively associated with income or (3) the median voter has some prospect of upward mobility. There is one common element in these various specifications. While income inequality increases the pressure for redistribution it also increases the incentive to reduce the efficiency of redistribution in order to constrain aggregate redistribution. Hence, the main conclusion is that one needs consider these conflicting effects in order to account for the puzzling lack of strong empirical evidence for a positive relationship between income inequality and redistribution. The second substantive essay empirically analyzes the role of efficiency of redistributive institutions on redistribution in the form of social security and welfare spending. When measures of ERI are incorporated into the existing empirical specifications of income inequality and redistribution, cross-sectional and panel data regressions show that the ERI significantly increases redistribution. However, we find weaker evidence for the role of income inequality on redistribution. Income inequality does not appear to be strongly significant in various specifications of the redistribution equation. Based on this evidence, this chapter concludes that ERI plays an important role in redistribution but this effect does not resolve the fiscal policy puzzle that is emphasized in the theoretical chapter. Moreover, this chapter also explores the determinants of ERI. Our empirical results confirm the theoretical model that an increase in GDP per capita and democracy increases ERI. However, there is less convincing evidence for the negative role of income inequality on the ERI. Among the other determinants of ERI, freedom of the press and trade openness improve ERI considerably.