The ongoing debate over welfare in the United States is rooted in the long-standing tension between the nation’s commitment to providing for its most vulnerable and a deep-seated belief that such support can corrupt its recipients. Social Security has struck this balance and appeals to the masses with its pay-as-you-go system and universally distributed benefits. Yet, the solvency of Social Security is threatening the program that has attempted to guard against old age and disability for the last eighty years. This paper examines how the perception of poverty in the United States is a hindrance when tackling social welfare policies. Further, the failure of the Supreme Court to recognize economic security as a fundamental constitutional right and a lack of public support to contribute funds are added challenges in the implementation of social insurance and public assistance programs. The most promising solution to restore the short and long-term solvency of Social Security ultimately involves relaxing immigration laws to highly skilled workers and raising the retirement age for the rising generation.

In an attempt to achieve energy independence, rural economic development, and greenhouse gas emissions reduction, the United States has turned to fuels derived from agriculture. The U.S. Congress and Environmental Protection Agency mandated the blending of biofuels into conventional gasoline until 2022 under the Renewable Fuel Standard. However, largely missing from the discussion of biofuels is their feasibility regarding environmental protection and end-use marketing to consumers. This thesis investigates the motive for biofuel mandates in the U.S., the irony in the EPA’s decision to back a resource-exhaustive fuel source, and the questionable ability of the U.S. to supply and consume greater volumes of biofuels in the transportation sector. Barriers to consumption are outlined as increased production costs and high market fuel prices, strong political backing of traditional energy sources, and environmental implications of production on ecosystems in certain regions of the United States. By analyzing Iowa and Texas as two biofuel-producing states held in high regards for biofuel production capacity—yet varying degrees of consumption—the feasibility of reaching federal biofuel mandates and promoting this alternative fuel is determined.

This thesis is a collection of three essays on inflation expectations, forecasting uncertainty, and the role of uncertainty in sequential auctions, all using experimental approach. Chapter 1 studies how individuals forecast inflation in fictitious macroeconomic setup and analyzes the effect of monetary policy rules on their decisions. Results display heterogeneity in inflation forecasting rules and demonstrate the importance of adaptive learning forecasting if model switching is assumed. Chapter 2 extends the analysis from Chapter 1 by analyzing individual inflation forecasting uncertainty. Results show that confidence intervals depend on inflation variance and business cycle phase, have a strong inertia, and are often asymmetric. Finally, Chapter 3 analyzes the role of uncertainty about the number of bidders for the behavior of subjects in a sequential auction experiment. Uncertainty does not aggravate price decline, but it changes individual bidding strategies and auction efficiency. / Esta tesis consta de tres ensayos sobre las expectativas de inflación, la incertidumbre de la predicción, y la importancia de la incertidumbre en subastas secuenciales. Todos ellos utilizan un método experimental. El capítulo 1 estudia cómo los individuos predicen la inflación en la economía ficticia y analiza el efecto de las reglas de política monetaria en sus decisiones. Los resultados revelan la heterogeneidad en las reglas de predicción de la inflación y demuestran la importancia del mecanismo de aprendizaje adaptivo si el cambio entre los modelos se supone. Capítulo 2 continúa el análisis del capítulo 1, analiza la incertidumbre individual de las expectativas de inflación. Los resultados muestran que los intervalos de confianza dependen de varianza de la inflación y la fase del ciclo económico, tienen una fuerte inercia, y son frecuentemente asimétricos. Por último, el capítulo 3 analiza la influencia de la incertidumbre sobre el número de oferentes en el comportamiento de los individuos en un experimento de la subasta secuencial. La incertidumbre no agrava la caída de los precios, pero cambia las estrategias de los oferentes y la eficiencia de la subasta.

Organizations play key roles in modern societies. The importance of organizations for a society requires an understanding of organizations. In order to fully understand public organizations, it is necessary to recognize how organizational settings affect subjects of organizations and organizing. Although public and private organizations interrelate with each other, the two types are not identical. In this dissertation, I attempt to describe public organizations in their own setting by discussing three important topics in public organization theory: (1) innovation adoption in the public sector; (2) representative bureaucracy; and (3) decline and death of public organizations. In Chapter II, I scrutinize early adoption of innovations at the organizational level and explore which public organizations become early adopters in the diffusion process. The adoption of an innovation is directly related to the motivation to innovate. That is, organizations performing poorly will have a motivation to seek new solutions. I estimate the strength of the motivation by observing prior performance. The main finding of the second chapter is that performance-based motivation has a twofold impact on early innovation adoption: negative for organizations with low performance, but positive for those with very high performance. This study estimates top 3.8% as the turning point defining which organizations attain outstanding performance and show the positive relationship between performance and innovation adoption. In Chapter III, develop a theoretical framework for predicting and explaining active representation in bureaucracy and test two hypotheses from the framework to test its validity. First, active representation requires the loss of organizational rewards. Second, a minority group mobilizes external support to minimize the cost of active representation. These findings support that active representation is a political activity in which bargaining between formal and informal roles occurs. In addition, I add evidence to the literature demonstrating that the two prerequisites – policy discretion and a critical mass – must be satisfied for active representation to occur. In Chapter IV, I argue that organizational change is a result of a relationship between an organization and the environment. And, I suggest and advance the theory of organizational ecology for examining environment effect on organizational decline and death. The theory has been extensively studies in the business sector, so I advance the theory to be applicable to the public sector. First, I add political variables, such as change in the executive branch and the legislature, unified government, and hypothesize that (1) an organization established by a party other than the one in the executive branch in any given year will be more likely to be terminated or decline; that (2) an organization established by a party other than the one in the legislature in any given year will be more likely to be terminated or decline; and that (3) if an unfriendly party controls both the executive branch and the legislature, organizations established by other parties are more likely to be terminated or decline. Second, the effect of the economic environment on the life cycle of public organizations is not as straightforward and simple as their effect on business firms.

This empirical study analyzes the political implications for presidential election outcomes that stem from varying felon disenfranchisement laws within the United States. In the past decade incarceration rates have drastically increased, consequently augmenting the disenfranchised population. This paper focuses on presidential election outcomes and state political party majorities in the election years 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012. I use demographic characteristics to calibrate assumptions for voter turnout and political party choice among the disenfranchised populations within each state. I then apply these voting populations to historical election outcomes and find that three state political party outcomes change, as well as the potential for a reversal in the 2000 presidential election. I also apply the estimated voting populations by state to an entirely Republican turnout and then to an entirely Democratic turnout to analyze the scope of the disenfranchised population and find that under these assumptions several states’ political party majorities and several election outcomes are reversed.

This senior thesis in environmental analysis explores the promise of sustainability of the sharing economy, its shortcomings from this positive potential, and possible policy solutions to help it reach its fullest, positive potential. At its core, the sharing economy enables shared access to goods and services that would otherwise sit in idle or underutilized capacity – popular platforms such as Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and craigslist all fall within the sharing economy. By enabling affordable and convenient access to goods that would otherwise sit idle, the sharing economy encourages maximal use of a good that already exists rather than seeking out the production of new goods to meet demand. Unfortunately, as it grows, the sharing economy moves away from this key environmental promise because of two central challenges: first, a shift away from maximal resource use, the central pillar of its promise of sustainability, and second, negative side effects that arise from a lack of regulation of the decentralized economy. Therefore, appropriate public policy is needed to both regulate the decentralized economy to minimize negative behaviors and to encourage the positive behaviors of the sharing economy.

This thesis is serves to examine the refugee policies in Tanzania and Uganda and how they have affected refugee participation in their labor market economies. I focused on two developing nations because much of refugee discourse revolves around the global north, leaving developing nations out of the conversation. This gap in discourse inspired this topic in hopes of encouraging more scholarly contributions. Considering the economic impact of refugees provides an empirical approach to humanitarian issues exposing the overlap between politics, economics, and humanity.

This thesis investigates achievements in human development outcomes on health, education, and poverty indicators across Indian states, in order to discern what factors might influence a state’s better orientation toward social policies. After conducting data analysis, the study explains differences in outcomes, as achieved by Kerala and Uttar Pradesh, by building an argument of subnational solidarity and its impact on determining the state’s policy agendas.

When delivered well, education is key to addressing a host of individual and societal ills, from poverty and disease to crime and poor voter engagement. India has demonstrated considerable progress in improving various aspects of its primary education system, including infrastructure and buildings, teacher-student ratios, and school enrollment. However, student learning outcomes remain consistently low across the country. A review of the literature surrounding learning outcomes has highlighted gaps in school instruction and has shown the dire need for innovations in pedagogy and curriculum to improve student learning. This paper assesses the long-term impact of one such pedagogy, called Teaching at the Right Level (or TaRL), in the districts of five states of India via an ordered probit model and linear regressions. The quantitative model shows a positive and significant effect of TaRL exposure on learning levels and income, as hypothesized throughout this paper. Additionally, case studies of two students exposed to TaRL are explored to illustrate individual effects of the pedagogy.

The interdependence between the economy and the environment necessitates integrated policymaking that recognizes the biological limits of our world and the scarcity of these natural resources. At the 1992 Earth Summit, countries agreed to adopt a National Sustainable Development Strategy (NSDS) which should comprise the integration of economic, social, and environmental policies across sectors, territories, and generations; country ownership and commitment; broad participation and effective partnerships; development of the necessary capacity and enabling environment; and focus on outcomes and implementation. Working from these key factors and based on decades of international research and peer reviews of these policies, this study hypothesizes four relationships to test the influence of these principles on the successful execution of an NSDS. Offering the first formal framework which theorizes and evaluates connections between these dimensions, this qualitative approach is applied to two case studies, South Africa and Germany, by the use of documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews. The present study finds that embedding NSDS programs and institutions within existing policy agendas and organizations is extremely difficult, especially in countries with a solid history of environmental policy. Also, the significant role of subnational governments and entities in all aspects of policymaking must be taken into account for the effective implementation of a National Strategy. The present research examines the necessity of specific policymaking processes and implementation mechanisms for an effective National Sustainable Development Strategy, ascertains common implementation challenges, and offers recommendations for the improved implementation of National Sustainable Development Strategies.