The Philippines is a food extractive enclave in the bust stage of export-oriented aquaculture, and this globalization agenda has had several negative impacts. Aquaculture has not expanded fish and marine foods but threatens national food security by integrating Philippine aquatic resources into the globalized food chain. Following structural adjustment policies imposed beginning in the 1980s, the Philippines shipped massive levels of animal protein to world markets, but this country has grown less food self-sufficient. During the decades that shrimp aquaculture has boomed and busted in the Philippines, the living conditions of Filipino families have steadily worsened. This study of three Panguil Bay fishing communities of Northern Mindanao demonstrates that the survival of subsistent artisan fisher households is now threatened because export-oriented producers have severely degraded the ecosystem upon which they rely. Moreover, women and children are inequitably threatened by the ecological and economic changes that have accompanied the Philippine global aquaculture agenda. In reality, capitalist commodity chains of export-oriented aquaculture externalize to households and to nature much of the true cost of producers and of ecological degradation. As a result, malnourished and impoverished Philippine fishing households subsidize global aquaculture commodity chains. While Filipino fisher households can no longer afford local food costs, their hidden inputs into capitalist commodity chains keep prices of luxury seafoods cheap in rich core countries. / Ph. D.

This project deals with exploring 1) travel-related health risk perception, and 2) actions taken to mitigate that health risk. Ordered logistic regression models were used to identify factors associated with the perceived risk of contracting influenza at work, school, daycare, stores, restaurants, libraries, hospitals, doctor’s offices, public transportation, and family or friends’ homes. Based on the models, factors influencing risk perception of contracting influenza in public places for discretionary activities (stores, restaurants, and libraries) are consistent but differ from models of discretionary social visits to someone’s home. Mandatory activities (work, school, daycare) seem to have a few unique factors (e.g., age, gender, work exposure), as do different types of health-related visits (hospitals, doctors’ offices). Across all of the models, recent experience with the virus, of either an individual or a household member, was the most consistent set of factors increasing risk perception. Using such factors in examining transportation implications will require tracking virus outbreaks for use in conjunction with other factors. Subsequently, social-health risk mitigation strategies were studied with the objective of understanding how risk perception influences an individual’s protective behavior. For this objective, this study analyzes travel-actions associated with two scenarios during an outbreak of influenza: 1) A sick person avoiding spreading the disease and 2) A healthy person avoiding getting in contact with the disease. Ordered logistic regression models were used to identify factors associated with mitigation behavior in the first scenario: visiting a doctor’s office, avoiding public places, avoiding public transit, staying at home; and in the second scenario: avoiding public places, avoiding public transit, staying at home. Based on the models for Scenario 1, the factors affecting the decision of avoiding public places, avoiding public transit, and staying at home were fairly consistent but differ for visiting a doctor’s office. However, Scenario 2 models were consistent with their counterpart mitigation models in Scenario 1 except for two factors: gender and household characteristics. Across all the models from Scenario 1, gender was the most significant factor, and for Scenario 2, the most significant factor was the ratio of household income to the household size. / Master of Science

Food waste is a global concern with significant environmental, economic, and social implications. Despite efforts to address the issue, household-level food waste remains substantial, contributing to food insecurity and environmental degradation. This study aims to explore factors triggering food waste behavior within households and examines how grocery retailers can nudge consumers toward environmentally sustainable food waste practices. A qualitative research design was used, involving semi-structured interviews with 20 participants in Sweden responsible for food management. Thematic analysis of interview recordings revealed key findings. Participants' food waste awareness centered on economic concerns, with limited consideration for environmental and social impacts. Planning emerged as a crucial aspect of food waste reduction, highlighting the need for tools like shopping lists. Additionally, conscious shopping habits were associated with reduced food waste, regardless of frequency or bulk purchasing tendencies. The practical implications for retailers include raising awareness through educational campaigns, integrating waste reduction messages into marketing materials, and providing inventory management tools and personalized shopping lists. Retailers can further support sustainable food waste behavior by offering recipe suggestions and workshops on food disposal or repurposing. Implementing these strategies can contribute to more sustainable food waste practices.

Deforestation of tropical forests is one of the most pressing environmental problems of the twenty-first century, leading to the loss of environmental services such as climate regulation and biodiversity. The expansion of the agricultural frontier by small landholder farmers continues to be one of the major drivers of land use change in the Amazon region. Much of the recent research in the Brazilian Amazon has been focused on modeling their behavior in order to prescribe policies that can curb current deforestation rates and promote more sustainable land use practices. The availability of more sophisticated remote sensing and economic modeling tools has led to the proliferation of agricultural household level models that attempt to explain land use change processes at the farm level. This dissertation tests the household life cycle theory in one of the oldest colonization fronts in the Brazilian Amazon: Rondônia, now a post-frontier. The study examines household and farm level changes over time for specific aspects of the frontier process that can be tested using the household life cycle theory. This study introduces important additions to the life cycle theory in order to consider the more dynamic and complex set of factors that characterize modern frontier processes. Specifically the study examines: (1) property fragmentation and expansion processes, (2) property ownership, turnover and change, and (3) land use change processes at the property level. These are linked to changes in the social and economic features of the smallholder farmer as it moves along its life cycle. The central hypothesis is that these changes in property and land use dynamics can be explained by the corresponding changes in the life cycle of the household as the frontier evolves over time into a post-frontier. It was found that the household life cycle theory did not adequately explain land use change processes over time. As the frontier evolved into the modern post-frontier, the labor and drudgery constraints associated with the initial frontier processes, as exemplified in the household life cycle theory, became less relevant. The Sauerian concept of cultural successions and the concept of scale from hierarchical ecology are used in order to explain the apparent inconsistencies found between the household life cycle theory and land use change processes over time and at different scales of analysis. The household life cycle theory is a useful theoretical framework from which to examine the effects of household level factors on land use; however, this must be embedded within concepts of time and scale that determine their differentiated impact and behavior. Existing plans to expand road infrastructure into the Amazon region will open-up previously inaccessible rainforest regions to agricultural frontier expansion at a scale unprecedented since the mid-eighties. Findings from this study reveal that policies based on household life cycle postulates will have limited impacts in reducing deforestation rates and promoting sustainable land use practices. Appropriate accounting of the social and environmental costs of future infrastructure development projects should consider associated frontier agricultural expansion costs to discourage further deforestation. / Ph. D.

Although many workers have a private household as their workplace, many household employers are unaware of or fail to meet their state and federal payroll tax obligations, thus undermining the workers’ retirement income security. This dissertation uses sixty interviews with household employers and employees in the Washington, DC, area to investigate the causes and conditions of nanny tax evasion. Ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews indicate that lack of awareness, tax complexity, social norms of noncompliance, and poor personal ethics diminish payroll tax payment; concern over one’s job, personal ethics and altruistic concern for the employee motivate compliance. An analysis of limited IRS data on audits as well as data on Schedule H household employment payroll tax returns reveal that although some unpaid tax was discovered, almost as much tax paid in error was refunded, confirming the importance of complexity as a determinant of compliance. Analysis of results using Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and force field analysis of motives provides insight into employers’ decisions to pay or evade their nanny taxes. Policy recommendations emphasize increasing public awareness, tax simplification, and enforcement.

The Financial Supervisory Authority has introduced the amortization requirement in an attempt to reduce household indebtedness and prevent a speculative economy. However, the introduction of the requirement may lead to the emergence of a new banking market due to the developed rules. Its impact on banks has been in the spotlight in recent years, sparking debate over whether it poses a risk to financial stability. In such an uncertain process of change, banks' behavior and market competition can be questioned as higher demands are placed on banks. The requirement can cause recessions and a deterioration in the condition of the banks. Banks are also more vulnerable to bankruptcy. Such regulation can thus lead to less flexibility and efficiency in the banking market due to the challenges and uncertainties it creates. The reason why it became of interest to conduct a study in the subject is because of the growing criticism of the amortization requirement and the high level of indebtedness among Swedes that has gained momentum in the recent period. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine possible changes in the behavior of selected mortgage banks and whether higher demands are placed on risk management after the acquisition of the amortization requirement. The research is based on an abductive approach and was conducted by using a qualitative method including telephone interviews with qualified respondents. The interviews concluded that the requirement has not negatively impacted banks' financial positions, while making it more difficult for them to manage risk in order to prevent problems and future complications. This is mostly done internally using new workflows to ensure bank compliance.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home (JWRMH), located in Indianapolis, Indiana, is best known for interpreting the life of the famous Hoosier poet who resided at the home for the latter part of his life. The JWRMH has the opportunity to more fully incorporate the domestic staff – Katie Kindell, Dennis Ewing, and Nannie Ewing – who worked at 528 Lockerbie Street during Riley’s residence, into the story told today at the home. The JWRMH has preserved Katie Kindell’s room on the second floor of the home and the butler’s pantry next to the kitchen, places in which interpretation about the domestic staff have long been presented to visitors. Yet archival research shows that there is much more to the lives of the domestic staff than what is currently presented at the house. While Katie Kindell, the only white domestic staff member at the home, has been fairly well documented, much less was known about the home’s two Black domestic staff, Dennis Ewing and Nannie Ewing. Since Dennis Ewing and Nannie Ewing were married, a story about them being married to each other while they worked at the home has long been perpetuated. This study of the documentary record, however, has revealed that their marriage to each other occurred long after they left their employment at 528 Lockerbie Street. This study explores where this myth might have originated, why it has been perpetuated, and how Dennis Ewing and Nannie Ewing’s work and marriage history situates them into the larger story of Black Indianapolis in the early twentieth century. Additionally, exploring the ways in which architecture during the nineteenth and twentieth century isolated the domestic staff and the ways in which this has been reproduced in the site’s interpretive strategies reveals how the lives and stories of the domestic staff have been devalued. This study demonstrates that there is a great opportunity for historic institutions to expand their interpretive narratives and hopes to inspire them to be curious about all the people whose lives shaped their sites.

Esta tesis doctoral tiene por objetivo principal la caracterización de las comunidades humanas que habitaron el archipiélago balear entre los siglos VI y II a.C., durante el conocido como periodo postalayótico en las islas de Mallorca y Menorca, y la fase púnica de la ciudad-estado de Ybshm en la actual Ibiza. Los grupos domésticos son la unidad principal de análisis de este trabajo, interpretados mediante una posición teórica donde la cotidianidad es eje fundamental, y una metodología basada en el estudio de las viviendas, los escenarios más elocuentes de la vida cotidiana. El análisis de las formas constructivas, sus articulaciones espaciales y funcionalidades derivadas de las áreas de actividad identificadas permite trascender la materialidad doméstica y alcanzar una interpretación histórica íntegra de estos grupos. Dentro de esta lectura social y económica, se presta especial atención al papel que tuvo la relación entre las comunidades autóctonas de las islas orientales del archipiélago con la sociedad púnica mediterránea.

Performing health surveys in developing countries and humanitarian emergencies can be challenging work because the resources in these settings are often quite limited and information needs to be gathered quickly. The Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) sampling method provides one way of selecting subjects for a survey. It involves having field workers proceed on a random walk guided by a path of nearest household neighbours until they have met their quota for interviews. Due to its simplicity, the EPI sampling method has been utilized by many surveys. However, some concerns have been raised over the quality of estimates resulting from such samples because of possible selection bias inherent to the sampling procedure. We present an algorithm for obtaining the probability of selecting a household from a cluster under several variations of the EPI sampling plan. These probabilities are used to assess the sampling plans and compute estimator properties. In addition to the typical estimator for a proportion, we also investigate the Horvitz-Thompson (HT) estimator, an estimator that assigns weights to individual responses. We conduct our study on computer-generated populations having different settlement types, different prevalence rates for the characteristic of interest and different spatial distributions of the characteristic of interest. Our results indicate that within a cluster, selection probabilities can vary largely from household to household. The largest probability was over 10 times greater than the smallest probability in 78% of the scenarios that were tested. Despite this, the properties of the estimator with equally weighted observations (EQW) were similar to what would be expected from simple random sampling (SRS) given that cases of the characteristic of interest were evenly distributed throughout the cluster area. When this was not true, we found absolute biases as large as 0.20. While the HT estimator was always unbiased, the trade off was a substantial increase in the variability of the estimator where the design effect relative to SRS reached a high of 92. Overall, the HT estimator did not perform better than the EQW estimator under EPI sampling, and it involves calculations that may be difficult to do for actual surveys. Although we recommend continuing to use the EQW estimator, caution should be taken when cases of the characteristic of interest are potentially concentrated in certain regions of the cluster. In these situations, alternative sampling methods should be sought. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

The research project intends to investigate the responses of households to economic uncertainty and natural shocks and the coping strategies developed both in terms of growing migration rates and remittance inflows and of increasing labour supply. In the first Chapter, we employ household survey data from the Indian State of Kerala to evaluate how transfers of remittances sent from overseas respond to heterogeneous sectoral employment shocks experienced by migrants in the host country during the 2008 crisis. In the second chapter, migration and remittances have been investigated as coping strategies adopted by households after a dramatic flood that hit Bangladesh in August-September 2014. The combination of high-resolution satellite data to precisely measure our treatment variable and the difference-in-difference estimations allow us to causally identify the impact of the dramatic flooding on internal and international migration. The same robust estimation technique is then applied to evaluate the effect of the 2014 flood in Bangladesh on female labour force participation rate and on the probability for unemployed women to enter the labour force. In addition, correcting for selection into employment, we estimate how the flood affects the probability for women working in the household farm to engage in independent wage-earning activities, evaluatiing whether the expected rise in female labour force participation - instrumented by the shock intensity they face - would help to increase their bargaining power within the households.