This dissertation is motivated by the study of economic development and inequality within and across nations. Spanning topics in labor and public economics, this collection of papers speaks to two overarching themes: (i) how the distribution of power affects economic outcomes, and (ii) how governments can mobilize resources and spend them effectively. In Chapter 1, I study how the allocation of ownership and control rights within firms affect responses to economic shocks. To shed light on this issue, I study the heterogeneous effects of a pro-competitive reform on cooperative manufacturing firms and their non-cooperative counterparts in India. The reform removed firm-size restrictions on the production of “reserved” items, increasing competition for incumbents in “de-reserved” product markets. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I find that supplier cooperatives (SCs), owned and controlled by producer-members who supply material inputs, are resilient to the shock in terms of total revenue and move away from the production of de-reserved items. SCs increase their share of income spent on materials relative to similarly sized non-cooperatives in the same industry and location, with some evidence of downward adjustments in labor spending. These cooperatives are able to withstand competitive pressure from entrants while broadly catering to the interests of their membership. On the other hand, worker cooperatives (WCs), owned and controlled by worker-members employed at the firm, face a sharp decline in revenue due to de-reservation, unlike their non-cooperative counterparts. A potential channel behind these results is that WCs are less likely to respond by picking up items that are not directly affected by the reform. Spending on labor does not fall as much as revenue for WCs, which is in line with the immediate interests of membership, but adjustments to labor inputs vary sigificantly across employment categories. In the following chapter, my co-author, Utkarsh Kumar, and I study the equilibrium effects of subsidizing public services in the presence of vertically differentiated public and private suppliers. We evaluate one of India’s largest welfare schemes, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which subsidized childbirth at public health institutions. JSY did not improve health outcomes despite a substantial increase in take-up of institutional care. We document three equilibrium responses that explain this policy failure. First, JSY led to a mismatch in patient risk across health facilities. High-risk mothers sorted out of the highest-quality care at private facilities and into lower-quality public facilities. Second, in response to congestion and deterioration of care at public hospitals, only mothers with high socio-economic status sorted out of congested public facilities into more expensive private facilities. Third, private hospitals increased prices without improvements in healthcare quality in a specific subset of states, further crowding out high-risk and poor mothers. These findings point to the need for complementary public policies in addition to JSY. In Chapter 3, I, along with my co-authors, Alexander Klemm and Li Liu, explore the increasingly prominent position of services in international trade and their potential to facilitate tax-driven reporting and reallocation of economic activity. Given their potential in countering this form of base erosion, withholding taxes (WHTs) on payments for services have featured extensively in ongoing reforms of the international tax architecture. The rationale behind WHTs is to preserve some taxation rights in the source country given their straightforward application, which is particularly important for low-income countries in the absence of more effective rules. We build a simple model of reporting decisions when firms have economic activities in one country and affiliates in others. We then test the predictions of this model using newly compiled data on treaty and non-treaty rates for 120+ countries over 2009-2021. Our findings indicate that while there is no significant relationship between WHTs and services trade in general, these taxes do have a strong negative impact on services imports from known low-tax jurisdictions, when base erosion is a particular concern.

Over the last four decades, there has been a significant increase in public-private education partnerships (PPPs). However, rather than reflecting the traditional PPP model where the private sector contributes resources to fulfill public policy agendas, businesses and philanthropies are partnering with urban schools to pursue their goals for reforming public education policy. With billions of dollars being spent by organizations like Microsoft, Meta, the Broad Foundation, and Bloomberg philanthropies on major initiatives to reform public education through teacher training and core curricular Changes, there has been surprisingly little research on the public-private partnership model itself and its impact on education policy. This dissertation intends to address this research gap by considering how public-private partnerships have been traditionally defined and explained in public policy and political science; what has Changed in the structure and purpose of public-private partnerships in education; how do we define and understand an educational public-private partnership in the current context; how do we determine what makes public-private partnerships successful; and based on this new definition, how do we understand their impact on educational public policy priorities? The dissertation aims to accomplish the following: 1) Discuss the existing public policy and political science literature on public-private partnerships. 2) Use anecdotal evidence, research literature, and news reporting to propose a framework for what public-private partnerships in education entail now and what their outcomes appear to be. 3) Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) of success from that literature and test their relevance to the success of current educational PPPs – towards formalizing a new theoretical definition and future guide for applied research. 4) Use both quantitative and qualitative research methods on a sample of partnerships which have already been documented either through original research or third party analytical and narrative reports to analyze and define those key performance indicators which are relevant to current educational PPPs. 5) Through analysis of the intended and actual outcomes of those PPP cases used in previous analysis, demonstrate how current educational PPPs are now both formulating and implementing policy. The importance of this finding is related to debates about the purpose of public education, the definition of public goods, and democratic accountability. 6) Identify the gap between the existing theoretical definition of PPPs and the derived newly proposed framework and the implications for theory, practice and policy. 7) Through a synthesis of the above items, construct an original method and tool for how to form and assess these partnerships for successful outcomes, as well as effective policy.  Applied Qualitative Research The third paper utilizes data from the quantitative research of paper 2 and builds and expands on the findings by using a qualitative methodology to analyze cases which have a more robust narrative. The cases I consider are Bloomberg philanthropies Global Scholars and Mark Zuckerberg’s Newark public schools. I document the functional, political, and financial differences between the cases, as well as how the PPPs were implemented. This applied research considers the indicators which proved relevant in the prior quantitative research through a qualitative analysis of materials, reports, and interviews. Applied Quantitative Research This second paper is applied quantitative research and serves as the bridge between the literature and theory to current applications and directs the focus of the subsequent applied qualitative research in this dissertation. I take the elements identified as standard KPIs from literature and prior research studies and using the documentation from the united way portfolio I test the relevance of those existing KPIs to the current theoretical framework. The Detroit cases are ideal for this portion of the research as those cases were created as PPPs and concluded (at least as far as an initial MOU agreement) within a specific timeframe. I collected all the documentation on those partnerships and their elements using a measurement system I developed. I use a quantitative method of binary logic regression to consider, given the documented outcomes of those cases, whether there is simple significance of an indicator as it relates to a quantitative definition of success. My metric is whether more than 50% of the objectives outlined in the MOUs were successfully completed. The quantitative methodology is important, because it allows us to determine which indicators remain relevant and warrant further study. At the end of this paper the advantages and limitations of quantitative analysis will be discussed, as well as thoughts about how qualitative analysis may help further the research going forward. This serves as a bridge to the next section/chapter. The purpose of this paper is to move beyond simply identifying components of the PPPs, as was done in the second paper, to more fully articulate and define them. I also identify the variance in PPP outcomes which may come from leadership structure, organizational occupation (for profit, nonprofit, public) and other operational and political variables. This section draws heavily on my research which uses a qualitative comparative frame to analyze the BP and Zuckerberg cases. The importance of these findings, as well as the advantages and limitations of this methodology are also be discussed. Toward a Theoretical Framework for PPPs & a New Tool for Evaluation Research The third paper of the dissertation synthesizes the analysis from the previous two papers in order to integrate both sets of findings and limitations in order to better define and understand current educational PPPs. This will lead to a new proposed theory of PPPs in education, to be followed by an analytic discussion, which will rely on research I have already done. The new proposed theory will be compared to the existing theory. The empirical evidence will make clear that new forms of PPPs have been implemented that are not accounted for in the existing theory. The implications of these findings will be important for both public and private actors who will need to think about and formulate PPPs in different ways than they have been doing. Once this is explicated, I consider the implications of substituting PPPs for the traditional policymaking process, and what can reasonably be anticipated as outcomes for public goods and democratic accountability. PPPs must be understood as an alternative pathway to policymaking which most often will not include traditional policy makers, and by virtue of financial and operational conditions, will fast track educational reforms. This increase in speed and coherence of reform is likely to be accompanied by a decline in democratic accountability, which particularly as it concerns public K-12 education, may fundamentally change the nature of that specific public good, and may even extend to a larger reconceptualization in the country of the concept of public goods. The last section of the third paper moves from the theoretical to the applied. This section discusses how the research gathered and synthesized in the previous two papers contributes to an applied framework for formulating and assessing educational PPPs for rates of success. This is especially important as we can expect that there will not be a decline in educational PPPs, but rather an ever-growing prevalence of them in American public education systems. I then make the case specifically for the use of comparative-qualitative analysis as an appropriate analytic frame for an evaluation tool. The section then goes on to detail the development of this tool, which relies on the methods and findings of the previous applied research sections in the dissertation. I provide a methodology for documenting the qualitative elements to be observed through an interview protocol, as well as the methodology by which that qualitative data can be converted to a quantitative value using previously discussed key variables and then cross-assessed with other related variables, weighted, and inputted into a prescribed algorithm (using analytics frames from educational performance evaluations, quantitative regression, and machine learning prediction principles). This will produce a predictive outcome of success and a meta frame to compare and contrast different educational PPPs going forward. This aspect of the research is important, as it provides practitioners, educators, policymakers, and public and private leadership a better understanding of what in fact they are doing when attempting to formulate and implement a public private partnership; what elements they should seek to build into their partnership in order to create increased conditions for successful outcomes; and finally how as researchers, we might, in the future, have a tool to observe, track, and evaluate these partnerships to further our theoretical and applied understanding of educational policy.

This dissertation analyzes how redistricting, minority representation, and perceived polarization— three topics regularly studied at the national level—function at the level of local government. The first two chapters focus on city council redistricting. In the first chapter, I used a new approach, a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm, to simulate city council district plans. By simulating tens of thousands of plans for each city, I was able to compare the plans that are actually implemented to a representative sample of all plausible plans. This analysis represents the first large-N geospatial analysis of city council redistricting. I found that the city council maps that are actually implemented feature more majority-minority districts than the median simulation. This implies that somewhere in the redistricting process, a conscious effort is made to foster minority representation. In the second chapter, I merged city council map data with the results of city council elections. I then analyzed the relationship between the composition of districts and who runs and who wins in city council elections. I found that district-level demographic makeup continues to be the dominant factor in the supply of minority candidates. I also found that, comparing two cities that are otherwise demographically and politically similar, cities that fall under the Voting Rights Act (VRA) pre-clearance had more minorities run for office and win election on average. In the third chapter, I conducted an original survey experiment to determine if respondents’ perceptions of partisan polarization differed in local contexts relative to the national political landscape. I did not find measurable differences in the perceived prevalence of support for different issues. However, I did find that respondents were slightly less willing to endorse generic language about partisans’ issue support when cued to think about ordinary voters in their local area. All together, these studies probe three different aspects of local electoral politics. In doing so, they help reconcile our understanding of electoral politics nationally with areas of local politics that still have many open questions.

This dissertation consists of three essays in the field of environmental economics and sustainable finance. The first chapter investigates the impact of localized exposure to heat waves and floods on the pricing of U.S. municipal bonds. I identify a significant relationship between the vulnerability of cities to heat waves and flood-related damages and municipal bond yield spreads. In particular, the effects are more pronounced in the case of municipal bonds with extended maturity periods. Cities demonstrating heightened capacities for adaptation exhibit a discernible mitigating impact on the yield spreads of these bonds. Moreover, my paper underscores the variations in political affiliations, climate attitudes, and risk perceptions across different cities, shaping this dynamic relationship. The second chapter presents empirical insights into the economic and financial effects of natural disasters, focusing on wildfires in California. Integrating financial data with historical wildfire records from 2016 to 2020, the study quantifies how wildfire risks influence municipal tax policies, revealing that local governments adjust tax rates in response to these risks. Furthermore, the study examines how municipalities enhance expenditures on public safety, particularly in fire and disaster preparedness, reflecting proactive measures to mitigate wildfire impacts and ensure community resilience. The third chapter, co-authored with Christina Laskaridis, analyzes sovereign green, social, sustainability, and sustainability-linked (GSS+) bonds in emerging and developing countries. This study maps out trends and characteristics of sovereign GSS+ bond issuances, assessing their potential to finance the energy transition and achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The research evaluates the risks and limitations of GSS+ bonds, emphasizing the need for longer maturities, longer costs of capital, and increased funding scales to effectively contribute to sustainable development financing. Overall, these essays contribute multifaceted perspectives on the intersection of climate risks, fiscal policies, and sustainable finance, offering valuable implications for policymakers, investors, and stakeholders aiming to navigate the complexities of climate economics.

El règim de la Restauració (1875-1898) no va ser pas, com en ocasions s’ha afirmat, un període de pau, estabilitat i consens social. El seu caràcter oligàrquic i no democràtic, la seva voluntat de marginar del sistema les forces polítiques dissidents (carlins i republicans), i la voluntat de no atendre les aspiracions de les classes subordinades, es va traduir en una multiplicació dels conflictes i dels desordres públics, l’anàlisi dels quals ha estat un dels principals eixos del meu treball. Altre eix important ha estat l’anàlisi de la resposta governamental davant aquests conflictes, constatant-se que aquesta es va dur a terme tant a través de pràctiques extremes de control social, com a través d’una política d’ordre públic dirigida a reprimir violentament qualsevol acció contraria al règim. Aquesta repressió es va veure emparada per tot un arsenal legal que li va donar cobertura i va pretendre legitimar les accions de les forces d’ordre, permetent pràctiques com la suspensió abusiva de les garanties constitucionals o la declaració directa de l’estat de guerra. Davant la multiplicació dels conflictes no es va optar per un model de seguretat basat en unes forces d’ordre públic de caire civil, sinó que es va optar per un model de seguretat militaritzat, situació gens aliena al fet que l’Exèrcit mostrés en tot moment la intenció de mantenir la seva preeminència com a garant de l’ordre públic, tal i com venia succeint amb anterioritat al període restauracionista, i certificant, en definitiva, que les suposades pretensions civilistes de la Restauració no van ser més que un miratge que la realitat va acabar diluint. L’opció pel militarisme quedaria palesada en la decisió que l’Exèrcit i la Guàrdia Civil, un cos militaritzat, fossin els principals agents de la repressió, emprant sovint una violència indiscriminada davant de qualsevol revolta, aldarull, motí, protesta o vaga, amb actuacions no sempre legítimes i, en ocasions, il•legals, posant també en evidència la manca d’accions preventives i dissuasòries eficaces. Aquesta militarització de la política de l’ordre públic es va intensificar durant l’última dècada del període davant l’augment de les demandes més organitzades de les classes subordinades, a través de vagues, revoltes, mítings polítics, l’esclat d’artefactes contra interessos patronals i mobilitzacions com les del Primer de Maig, fins arribar a la màxima expressió del conflicte contra l’Estat i les oligarquies dominants amb fenòmens com el terrorisme anarquista de la propaganda pel fet. Atemptats com el patit pel general Martínez Campos, el del teatre del Liceu barceloní i el de Canvis Nous van tenir la seva resposta més contundent en l’elaboració de lleis especials contra l’anarquisme, que certificaven la militarització de l’ordre públic i el predomini de la jurisdicció militar sobre l’ordinària. A més, van proliferar les actuacions governamentals fora de la legalitat, com les detencions indiscriminades, l’aplicació de tortures als detinguts i els judicis sense garanties, com el tristament famós procés de Montjuïc, contestat, per una banda, amb una intensa campanya de denúncies de les tortures patides pels processats i, d’altra banda, amb l’assassinat del president Cánovas del Castillo. / PUBLIC ORDER POLICY AND REPRESSION DURING THE RESTORATION PERIOD (1875-1898) The Restoration period (1875-1898) had never been, as it has sometimes been stated, a period of peaceful consensual stability. The oligarchic and non-democratic nature of the regime, its tendency to marginalise the opposing political forces (the carlists and the republicans) and not to attend the subordinate classes’ aspirations resulted in an increase of struggles and public disorders. The analysis of the latter forms one of the principal elements of this thesis. Another important element in my work has been the analysis of the government’s response facing these conflicts. It has been demonstrated that its actions were carried out not only through extreme social control but also by public order policies that led to violent repression of any action against the regime. This repression was covered by a number of laws which intended to legitimate the Public Forces’ actions such as outrageous suspension of constitutional rights or direct declaration of the state of war. Facing an increase in the number of conflicts, the regime did not opt for a security model based on civilian forces; instead chose to follow a model based on military order. This choice was not strange considering that, at that time, the Army was showing a clear intention of holding to a preeminent role as guarantor of the public order, as it had been before the Restoration period. This demonstrated that the supposed civilian intentions of the Restoration period were no more than an illusion blurred by the reality. The militarization option was evidenced by the decision of making the Army and the Guardia Civil, a militarized institution, the main agents of repression. They often used indiscriminate violence when facing any uprising, disturbance, riot, protest or strike. Their actions were not always legitimate and, on occasions, they were illegal, demonstrating the lack of preventive and deterrent measures of the regime. The militarization of the public order policy was intensified as a consequence of the increase of more organized subordinate social classes’ claims during the last decade of the period. These would manifest in strikes, organized riots, political meetings, setting off explosive devices against the employers’ interests and demonstrations such as the one of the 1st May. The struggle against the State and dominant oligarchies reached its climax putting into practice the propaganda by the deed of anarchist terrorism.