The aim of this thesis is to explore the evolving relationship between neighborhood change and public housing in the historically black neighborhood of Rosewood in Austin, Texas. In October 2010, the Housing Authority of the City of Austin was awarded a grant to begin the process of redeveloping one of the nation’s oldest federally funded public housing facilities – Rosewood Courts. As the once segregated public housing complex is slated for redevelopment, community members representing an assortment of interests have engaged in a series of heated exchanges and elevated discourse surrounding the legacy of public housing in Austin, Texas. At the same time, the Rosewood Neighborhood has witnessed a dramatic transformation in recent decades, losing much of its long-standing black community to an ever emergent gentrifying population. This research evaluates the relationship between neighborhood change and public housing (re)development, highlighting the position of Rosewood Courts within larger processes of policy and political economy transformation. / text

With the multiple globalization processes more and deeper Economic Integration in the world is being undertaken. The Asia-Pacific region has become the most dynamic and fast growing region in the world due to the rise of China, changing dramatically the way economic and political relations are conceived across the Pacific Ocean. Beijing’s new economic moves towards integration processes are sustained by the fact that China’s economy has become significantly intertwined with other regional economies over the past two decades. From this fact also arises the motivation of this research, which tries to analyze how China’s strategy regarding economic integration across the Pacific Ocean is being planned and developed, considering not only its economic, but especially its political implications and possible strategic motives. This last aspect constitutes the main purpose of this study. The hypothesis for this paper is based on the assumption that China is using its economic might as a means to enhance and expand its traditional sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific region by achieving different kinds of trade arrangements. The ASEAN plus China FTA, together with the agreements between China and Australia, New Zealand and Chile are taken into account specifically; while some other possible future pacts are outlined as well. The methodological standpoint for the analysis is mainly built upon what is known as Political Economy, particularly its international or global strand, which helps to connect the world of politics and economics. The outcome for the question whether China is taking a leading role in regionalism just because of its growing need to coordinate and cooperate with other economies in order to keep its growth rate, or if it is also doing so because of its desire to enhance and further its traditional sphere of influence as a regional power; contemplates elements of both scenarios. The structure of this thesis consists of five chapters: (1) Scope of the Study, (2) Literature Review and Theoretical Framework, (3) A Political Analysis of an Economic Issue, (4) Main Outcomes and (5) Conclusions.

In many developing countries, the electricity system is too weak to meet growing demand and the availability and reliability of generating capacity is inadequate. Protracted mismanagement, political interference, subsidised pricing, and corruption all undermine the ability of developing electricity supply industries to finance and deliver service or attract new private investment. Power sector reform is an acute need in developing countries where implementation of a top-down liberalisation approach has been pursued without adequately considering the social, political and economic conditions. The conventional response to low levels of electricity sector investment has been from the top-down: aim to create competitive electricity markets by encouraging new entry into the generation sector and by breaking up vertically integrated power companies. Using a case study from Gujarat, India, this thesis argues for an alternative approach—utilise distributed generation (DG) and captive power capacity (self-generation) of industry to reshape the generation and distribution sectors from the bottom-up. The thesis examines the economic viability of distributed generation in a rural setting and captive power for industrial use in Gujarat, India, taking into account the economic, technical and political factors that shape investment decisions. In India, 40 percent of the population still does not have an electricity connection, but an array of new energy technologies for small-scale electricity generation near the site of use may provide a new development path. The bottom-up model enables rapid addition of generation capacity to a system struggling to meet demand while increasing competition in the power market. The thesis concludes that more power from independent and industrial sources will best harness the financial and engineer resources of the Indian electricity supply industry (ESI) and ultimately benefit the economy. The solution proposed is not suggested as an optimal policy programme, but instead is advanced as the best of the feasible options available within current political and economic constraints.

It has long been argued that the organization of the U.S. health care system is shaped by the struggles between capital and labor, and this relationship is of increasing significance today. Transformations from an industrial to a service economy, rising insurance costs, neoliberal social policies, and decreased labor union power have increased the number of Americans with reduced access to health care, especially for service workers and women. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of how workers in two leading unions in the “new” unionism movement, the Retail, Wholesale, and Distribution Service Union (RWDSU) and the United Steelworkers (USW) in urban Central Appalachia, characterize union membership and economic (and benefit) transformations that threaten security for working and middle class families. Using health care as a case study, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which economic transformations are making health care less affordable for working and middle class families. Through a discussion of the importance of union membership that highlights job protection in the face of the expansion and increasing feminization of service work and the decline in work sponsored benefits, this dissertation details how these processes reduce access to and affordability of health care. In so doing, this research highlights individual pragmatic action and broader union activism in seeking economic and health security for their families. More broadly, new unionism tactics are described in the actions of a Central Labor Council as it seeks to renew community alliances and link rank-and-file concerns of job security to current labor issues, including the Employee Free Choice Act and Right-to-Work legislation, on local, state, and national levels. This dissertation links access to health care problems in this community to broader national issues (e.g. job protection, service work, and outsourcing) and highlights how union members, individually and collectively, are participating in “new” unionism tactics to maintain job security and secure resources, including health care, for their families.

<p>My dissertation project is an ethnographic history of "homes of capital," merchant homes located in port-cities of Gujarat in various states of splendor and decrepitude, which continue to mark a long history of Indian Ocean cross-cultural trade and exchange. Located in western South Asia, Gujarat is a terraqueous borderland, connecting the western and eastern arenas of the Indian Ocean at the same time as it connects territorial South Asia to maritime markets. Gujarat's dynamic port-cities, including Rander, Surat and Bombay, were and continue to be home to itinerant merchants, many with origins and investments around the littoral from Arabia to Southeast Asia. I argue that rather than a point of origin or return, Gujarat's merchants--many of whom are themselves itinerants from Arabia, Persia and Northwest India--produce and produced Gujarat as a place of arrival and departure: as a crucible of mobility. Gujarat's merchant homes offer a model of transregional engagement produced through the itineraries of merchants who continue to see the regions bordering the Indian Ocean as an extension of their homes.</p><p>While historians have generally studied these merchants through the bureaucratic archival records of imperial trade-companies, my project examines the yet-unexplored archives that collect around historic merchant homes. Curated by a current generation of merchant families who continue to ply old routes at the same time as they forge new ones, merchant homes offer a way to study oceanic connections from the inside-out and capital in cultural terms. Drawing on a rich array of collective and personal ethnographic and historical materials within homes, including architectural form; material objects; private journals, datebooks and travelogues; visual media; and merchant memory, my project brings into view a mercantile space-time on ocean's edge. Though emerging from concrete ethnographic and historical materials that cast powerful light on Gujarati merchant mobility in the British Empire over the course of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, my account of "homes of capital" pursues mercantile imaginings across long tranches of time routed through the political economic transformations of the period stretching between the tenth and twelfth centuries. I argue that these non-linear imaginings structured by oceanic mobility exist in the interstices of imperial, colonial and post-colonial state space.</p><p> </p><p>Placing merchant imaginings at the center of my analysis, my dissertation argues that the Indian Ocean was and continues to be a key spatial and temporal motivator of mercantile life. My project makes explicit the terms of this intimacy through a "chronotopic" study of merchant homes across Gujarat. Homes of capital in its broadest sense also include mercantile buildings like bridges, libraries, funerary sites, mosques and community centers, which, when linked together, created shaded pathways across the region in the face of an emergent colonial state centered on Bombay. In doing so I also reveal a more capacious mercantile subject, showing how new kinds of nineteenth-century circulations of Gujarati-language texts across merchant libraries, reading rooms and homes were embedded in and shaped a longue durée oceanic topography. My project documents the range of visual, material, textual and affective modes from within this topography through which merchants gave and give form to such a terraqueous region.</p> / Dissertation

The Chinese economy went through significant reforms in the past few decades but remains highly politicized to this day. The financial reporting environment is also predominantly opaque, being correlated with low accounting quality of firms. A key measure to observe is earnings quality. I test and compare the earnings smoothing, managing towards targets, and timely loss recognition earnings management behaviors between politically connected and unconnected firms listed in China. Based on the empirical results, I find that the politically connected firms engage in a higher degree of earnings management and thus have lower earnings quality.

In this paper we analyze the impact of global imports on regional labor markets, and how such impact translates to changes in voting patterns in the U.S. Presidential elections from 2000 to 2016. We find that imports from different U.S. trading partners influence voting patterns in different ways. In particular, we observe an anti-incumbent effect caused by import competition from OECD countries. Such an effect cannot be observed for imports from low-income countries. There is also evidence that suggests high exposure to import competition tends to drive voters toward the Democratic candidate, who typically proposes better social welfare programs and more protectionist policies. For imports from low-income countries, evidence for such effects is less robust, but still significant. Despite the voters’ earlier alignment toward the Democrats, we observe a significant voter realignment toward the Republican candidate in the 2016 election due to sudden changes in the Republicans’ stance on global trade. Taken together, these results paint a picture of how the voters’ sentiment towards global trade evolves throughout time and varies with regards to different U.S. trading partners.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump ran highly controversial campaigns in the 2016 Presidential Election, which then leaves us with the question of what impact is this having on the current economy? Prior analysis of political influence on the stock market tells us that isolating political impact on the stock market is nearly impossible. However, there are clearly defined 4-year cycles in stock prices that seem to correspond with election years. In this paper, I create my own index of stocks in the four major U.S. industries and measure both day-to-day and intraday volatility in stock prices across three comparable time periods: the year leading up to the 2016 election, all election years excluding the 2016, and all non-election years. I found that the 2016 election year was significantly less volatile than both prior election years as well as non-election years, suggesting that the 2015-2016 election year was not a closely contested race.

Why did China choose certain policy over others that would achieve similar impact? Because China has a significant presence in the modern international community, it is difficult yet critical to understand the policy implications of the Chinese government under its unique political and socioeconomic context. This thesis shows the impact of a specific “price floor” policy China chose to employ in its oil and gasoline market, and identifies the factors concerning the Chinese regime that it took into consideration in the decision making process, through analysing data and official statements released by the government. After different parties affected by this policy are recognized, this thesis investigate how those impacts relate back to the Chinese government’s long-term agenda of energy security and environmental protection.

The thesis’s main objective was to determine if Albania was in close proximity to realize the human right to water, plainly by answering the subsequent queries; (i) if water utilization was accessible for all, and (ii) if the accessible water was of good quality (i.e. safe to drink) as well as (iii) if the economic accessibility was affordable without any discrepancy in its distribution. In sequence to answer the aforementioned queries, the thesis utilized a design of a case study since case studies are exceptionally well at endowing the researcher with an understanding of a multifaceted subject matter, i.e. Albania’s political economy of the right to water. The results of the thesis exhibits that water utilization is not accessible for all due to inadequate water amenities, and due to the large wastage of water that does not go into needed utilization. In proceeding, the results also illustrates that Albania is in deficient of water quality observation, which sequentially outcomes in unprotected water and relentless leakage. In conjunction with the findings of the thesis, it is verified that the rural areas of Albania are stricken the most, primarily because Albania does not encompass a righteous distribution of water reforms. Into the bargain, the rural areas are not only struggling with the discrepancy in the distribution of water but also with excessive costs of the diminutive amenities that are available.