<p> Since 1920, the legal position of undocumented immigrants has devolved from &ldquo;worker&rdquo; to &ldquo;alien&rdquo; to &ldquo;criminal alien&rdquo; to &ldquo;national security threat.&rdquo; As the perceived threat level has increased, so has the use of a prison-like immigrant detention system to manage unwanted populations until they can be removed. This paper examines the ways in which immigration law, current policy, public opinion, detention processes, court procedures, and physical isolation converge to not only expedite that removal, but also to hinder and even deter those under removal orders from adequately presenting a case for relief in immigration court. Because the real, lived consequences of those laws and policies are experienced far from the view of those who make the laws, this thesis seeks to provide a window into the fraught process of preparing an appeal for relief from deportation within the limitations of detention.</p><p>

<p> Due to the usage of the outdated Federal Poverty Level (FPL) guidelines, many older adults are battling with economic insecurity and are not deemed eligible to apply for means-based assistance. The Elder Index has been identified as a tool to help determine poverty level taking into consideration the cost of living of the older adult&rsquo;s particular geographic area. </p><p> Governmental agencies such as AAAs in California are responsible for assisting older adults including low income adults in linking them to supportive community services. AAAs should be using the Index as a reference when making decisions about allocating resources. However, the problem is that the Elder Index is not being used by many AAAs, even though they are mandated to do so. The purpose of this project was to develop a manual to help AAAs in California to better understand the Elder Index. This manual will help target the challenges that AAAs have had in implementing the Elder Index tool.</p><p>

<p> The dissertation analyzes multilevel models to predict mortgage origination and the allocation of subprime credit pre-and-post Great Recession. With representative samples from two full years of mortgage applications filed in the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas, the dissertation uncovers evidence of persistent disparities by race and neighborhood minority concentration despite controls for socioeconomic, demographic, assimilation and housing variables. Mortgage outcomes varied by applicant race, neighborhood racial composition and neighborhood racial change. Findings suggest evidence of Fair Housing Act violations and disparate impacts towards minority homebuyers and minority neighborhoods. Results lend support for spatial assimilation theories in explaining much of the gap white-Asian gap and non-Hispanic white-Hispanic gap. Notable gaps remain between blacks and whites that are better explained by the place stratification model. In both 2004 and 2010 black, Asian and Hispanic prospective homebuyers were less likely to originate their mortgage relative to whites. In the earlier 2004 mortgage sample, black and Hispanic borrowers were much more likely to take out subprime loans relative to whites and Asians less likely. In 2010, the results held that black homebuyers were more likely than whites to take on subprime mortgages and Asian homebuyers less likely. The applicant coefficient for Hispanic was not a significant predictor of subprime in 2010. Asian homebuyers were indeed at a disadvantage relative to white homebuyers, both before and after the Great Recession and the disparity did not change significantly over time. Women were more likely than men to be denied mortgages and also to obtain subprime mortgages. Black neighborhoods were disadvantaged in 2004 and 2010, and increasing numbers of black neighbors reduced the likelihood of mortgage origination in 2004, but not in 2010. In 2004 and 2010, the presence of Asian and Hispanic neighbors increased the likelihood of mortgage origination but neighborhood racial ethnic change was less well received&mdash;with negative impacts for increasing numbers of Asian neighbors in both years and reduced mortgage odds for increasingly Hispanic neighborhoods in 2010. Neighborhoods with concentrated single mother households experienced disinvestment including denied mortgages and higher likelihood of subprime status when lenders infuse mortgage capital, though the effect size was very small. The research overcomes limitations of previous studies by employing advanced methods which account for neighborhood effects and by incorporating dynamic measures such as house-price-to-income ratios and regional credit score averages. The primary novel contribution of the dissertation is that this is the first study to examine the effect of neighborhood racial ethnic change on mortgage outcomes and the allocation of subprime mortgage credit. Explicit Fair Housing Act violations spur recommendations for reducing unequal disbursement of mortgage credit by race and gender, most importantly, by urging American schools to provide compulsory primary school coursework in financial literacy.</p><p>

<p> Federal policies have targeted electric lighting since the 1880s with varying success. This dissertation examines the history of those policies to understand policy makers&rsquo; intent and how their decisions affected the course of events. This qualitative study poses three research questions: How have changes in lamp efficacy affected policy development? How and why have federal policies targeted electric lighting? How have private sector actors adapted public policy to further their own goals? The analysis uses an interdisciplinary approach taking advantage of overlapping methodologies drawn from policy and political sciences, economics, and the history of technology. The concepts of path dependency, context, and actor networks are especially important. </p><p> Adoption of electric lighting spurred the construction of complex and capital intensive infrastructures now considered indispensable, and lighting always consumed a significant fraction of US electric power. Engineers and scientists created many lamps over the decades, in part to meet a growing demand for energy efficient products. Invention and diffusion of those lamps occurred amid changing standards and definitions of efficiency, shifting relations between network actors, and the development of path dependencies that constrained efforts to affect change. Federal actors typically used lighting policy to conserve resources, promote national security, or to symbolically emphasize the onset of a national crisis. </p><p> The study shows that after an initial introductory phase, lighting-specific policies developed during two distinct periods. The earlier period consisted of intermittent, crisis-driven federal interventions of mixed success. The later period featured a sustained engagement between public and private sectors wherein incremental adjustments achieved policy goals. A time of transition occurred between the two main periods during which technical, economic, and political contexts changed, while several core social values remained constant. In both early and later periods, private sector actors used policy opportunities to further commercial goals, a practice that public sector actors in the later period used to promote policy acceptance. Recently enacted energy standards removing ordinary incandescent lamps in favor of high efficiency lamps mark the end of the later period. Apparent success means that policy makers should reconsider how they use lighting to achieve future goals.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation analyzes the complex interrelationship between mass preferences and public policies. Using a range of public policies enacted in the U.S. at both the federal level and in the states we explore two related questions. First, through a comparison of policy outcomes and corresponding preferences we assess the degree to which public policies in U.S. states reflect constituent preferences. Second, using experiments embedded in public opinion surveys we demonstrate how the range of viable policies that are discussed in everyday political discourse feed back to mass preferences. </p><p> In Chapter 1, we introduce a new framework to compare the ideological orientation of public policies to mass preferences both within and across U.S. states. The approaches that have so far been employed in empirical research on this important question fall short for two reasons. First, they fail to quantify the degree to which policies are more or less liberal than preferences. Second, they do not assess the heterogeneity of preferences within jurisdictions, and thus do not consider how the quality of representation depends on the level to which policy decisions are delegated. Here we overcome both of these problems by generating estimates of Americans&rsquo; preferences on the minimum wage, which are measured on a scale that is comparable to observed policies and describe low levels of geographic aggregation. </p><p> Using these estimates, we demonstrate that most people are poorly represented by state minimum wage laws for two reasons. First, in each state, the minimum wage is much lower than the average rate preferred by state residents, leading to a pronounced bias against the preferences of the poor. Second, because preferences vary within states to a great deal, they are difficult to match by a single policy even in the absence of an overall policy bias. While minimum wage laws in the U.S. are typically set by elected officials and cover entire states, our results show that policies brought about by direct democratic institutions and at more local levels reflect preferences substantially better. These findings suggest that standard data and measures yield incomplete evidence about the relationship between public opinion and policy in the U.S. </p><p> Chapter 2, expands this framework to assess representation in issue domains where individual policy outcomes cannot be mapped onto an ideological scale. Following recent advances in the study of dyadic representation, we utilize the technique of joint scaling to simultaneously estimate the ideological content of policy outcomes and issue-specific attitudes underlying individual policy preferences on the same scale. We apply this method to study how well abortion and gun control laws enacted in U.S. states represent corresponding mass preferences. </p><p> We find that in the context of both issue domains policy outcomes are far removed from average preferences in the states for two reasons. First, both abortion and gun control laws exhibit a pronounced nationwide conservative bias leading to overly restrictive abortion laws in nearly all states and overly lax gun laws in every state. Second, while the conservatism of policy outcomes in the case of both issues is strongly associated with corresponding mass preferences across states, this relationship is best described as <i> hyper-responsive</i>. Relatively small preference differences across states are magnified into enormous variation in state laws. We demonstrate that a relatively broad range of <i>nationwide</i> policies would outperform the current status quo in terms of ideological divergence. </p><p> Chapter 3 presents a new theoretical framework to study the formation of policy preferences that accounts for the notion that choices between policies depend on the ideological range of alternatives that are salient in the ideological discourse. In particular, following the psychological literature on range effects, we argue that the introduction of policy alternatives that are far from the political mainstream can re-structure voter perceptions of where alternatives lie in the ideological space. </p><p> We provide strong support for the observable implications of this theory based on six survey experiments using a variety of policy contexts and samples. In particular, we find that the introduction of extreme alternatives into the public discourse makes mainstream policies on the same side of the spectrum look more centrist in the public eye, thus increasing support for these moderate alternatives. We discuss the implications of these findings for both theories of opinion formation and substantive debates on political extremism.</p><p>

<p>The impact of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 on the global banking system raised concerns regarding the capital adequacy of banks. While the banks were already conducting internal stress tests before the financial crisis that was not enough to ensure their capital adequacy in the case of an extremely adverse economic scenario. In 2009, under the Obama administration, large Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) were required to conduct stress tests under the supervision of the Federal Reserve Board (FED). This paper evaluates the impact of stress testing on the systemic risk and marginal expected shortfall of Bank Holding Companies. The objective of this study is to examine if the implementation of stress testing by the FED has affected the systemic risk of Bank Holding Companies. This study considers 55 US Bank Holding Companies with data from 2000 to 2018. The overall sample includes stress test BHCs as well as non-stress test BHCs. I use a variety of techniques including regression discontinuity with kernel triangular approach and OLS regression with fixed effects. The models contain bank-specific control variables including Log of Assets, Pre-Provision Net Revenue to Assets, Loan Loss Provision to Assets Real Estate Loans to Assets, Consumer Loans to Assets, Commercial Loans to Assets, Debt to Capital, Deposits to Assets, as well as capital requirements such as Tier 1 Capital Ratio. The results suggest that after the regulation of the stress test, the systemic risk of the stress test BHCs is significantly higher than the non-stress test BHCs. However, the stress test BHCs decrease their systemic risk more than the non-stress BHCs. The Tier 1 capital ratio, which is a key ratio that determines whether the BHCs pass the stress test, is found to have a negative effect on systemic risk (SRISK). Furthermore, I show that BHCs see an increase in their systemic risk when they run stress testing for the first time. Finally, the stress test BHCs decrease their systemic risk the quarter before the stress test and increase it a quarter after.

<p> Although human trafficking continues to be a growing problem around the world, there are scarce quantitative methodologies for evidence-based research because it is hard to gather reliable and comparable data on human trafficking. It is also difficult to track patterns in human trafficking on a regional or global scale because the victims are a vulnerable population. Using Datta and Bales conceptualization of modern slavery as the theoretical foundation, the primary purpose of this study was to establish a baseline measurement of trafficking predictors in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) as well as understand the statistical relationship between measurements of corruption, democracy, state of peace, and terrorism on the prevalence of contemporary slavery in the MENA region. Data were collected from the 2016 Global Terrorism Index, 2016 Democracy Index, 2016 Corruption Perception Index, 2016 Global Slavery Index, and the 2016 Global Peace Index and analyzed using multiple linear regression. The results of the study showed that corruption (<i>p</i>=.017) and state of peace (<i>p</i>=.039) were significant predictors for contemporary slavery in the MENA region. Whereas, terrorism and democracy were not significant predictors. The positive social change implications of this study include recommendations to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to create a central repository for the archival of human trafficking data. The creation of this archive will promote a more accurate accounting of a vulnerable population such as victims of trafficking, thereby increasing awareness of contemporary slavery among law enforcement, policy makers, and scholars.</p><p>

<p> This paper explores the answers to two questions. The first question is, How and in what ways is Alaska providing adoption recruitment and matching services for children in foster care? The second is, Should Alaska pursue privatization of adoption recruitment and matching services as a means for increasing permanency outcomes for children in foster care? The qualitative study was conducted using both primary and secondary research. I accessed existing privatization studies in other states, Alaska child welfare records and research, and interviewed child welfare professionals. The findings showed that Alaska currently has some private adoption recruitment efforts but there are currently no private adoption matching efforts. The findings also showed that many states have privatized adoption recruitment and matching efforts, and that Alaska should pursue privatization as a means to achieve better permanency outcomes for children waiting in foster care.</p><p>

<p> Over 59 million US residents live in rural areas where they cannot easily access healthcare services. Well-documented disparities between rural and urban healthcare access led the federal government to certify and financially support Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs), which offer rural healthcare services and 24/7 emergency care. Many CAHs are in dire financial distress, and some are looking to increase their patient population volume to improve financial health and ensure continued operations. It is a well-known business truism that satisfied customers are return customers. Today many patients' first encounter with a hospital is with the emergency department (ED). Thus, it is likely that increasing patient satisfaction with their ED visits in a CAH can be expected to increase the chance that they will return for additional care. </p><p> All hospitals engage in quality improvement (QI) activities. Many papers outline efforts by QI teams to implement one or a few predetermined interventions with mixed results. Because patients in an ED are subject to a variety of processes in the ED and other hospital departments, improving patient satisfaction in the ED demands a comprehensive approach. This paper focuses on the QI processes and tools used by the QI team in a CAH that developed a comprehensive list of (56) short- and long-term interventions to take place over five years to improve patient satisfaction in the ED. For this hospital, two aspects of the project deserve mention: </p><p> 1. The use of Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA): The FMEA is a QI tool developed by the military to address complex problems. Although it has been adapted for use in healthcare QI, in the author's experience, it has not always been fully implemented. The QI team completed a traditional, full, two-part FMEA. In completing both parts of a traditional FMEA, the team first identified and individually analyzed each known or potential failure in the care of an ED patient and potential interventions that could prevent each failure. Then, after careful analysis of all potential interventions, the QI team chose those most likely to succeed and began implementing a sequenced schedule of interrelated interventions deemed most likely to improve care and patient satisfaction. </p><p> 2. Learner-Centered Teaching: QI projects typically use learner-centered teaching methods that, according to Social Cognitive Theory, improve participants' general self-efficacy, which is the likelihood of choosing difficult problems to solve and persisting when faced with challenges. The hospital's project team members' self-efficacy scores increased after participating on the team. Post-project interviews with team members indicate they feel better equipped to solve other problems and have begun to plan other QI projects because they understand other areas' processes, they know who should participate on projects, and they better understand QI processes and tools.</p><p>

<p> Disaster risk reduction (DRR) programs seek to reduce loss of property and lives as the result of extreme events. These programs invest significant resources in collecting context-specific, participatory information and developing scientific (forecast) information to help them achieve their goals. This is despite significant evidence that such information does not contribute as easily or as directly to stated DRR goals as is generally assumed. Using the Policy Sciences social and decision process frameworks, this research maps program decision processes that seek to produce and use participatory and climate-related information. I begin by evaluating each program in terms of it stated goals and identifying the primary factors that shape project decision-making, influence the use of information in each program, and shape program outcomes. I conclude that although the two programs seek to produce and use very different kinds of information, they share two fundamental characteristics. First, both programs rely on deficit-model theories of change. Those designing and implementing the programs assume the production and use of information will automatically contribute to better decision-making and hence to desired outcomes. Secondly, these limited understandings of project dynamics allow project stakeholders to neglect the role power, accountability, and the incentives they created in shaping program decision-making and implementation. Although both programs seek to empower users and beneficiaries, they fail to establish monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms that ensure those beneficiaries can influence essential program decisions and outcomes. I conclude that given the structures of accountability common to many development programs, donors will likely have to take responsibility for ensuring downward accountability to the users or beneficiaries they seek to empower. By clarifying the relationship between information and the decision-processes in which its production and use are embedded, this research can help program managers develop and fund more effective programs. In particular, it emphasizes the importance of programs with more detailed, nuanced theories of change and greater attention to incentives and downward accountability.</p><p>