Thesis (J.C.L.)--Catholic University of America, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 44-51).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2005. Graduate Programme in Political Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 261-278). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNR11575

This dissertation examines the contested terrain of family through qualitative analysis of child custody decisions. Legal parenthood was historically based on the heteronormative family ideal of a legally married monogamous heterosexual couple and their biogenetically related children. In the context of diverse family forms of the twenty-first century, however, courts struggle to draw the boundary lines of legal parenthood. Although previous research has examined the role of parental gender or sexual identity on child custody decisions, my research fills an important gap, as I analyze variations in gender, sexual identity, and path to parenthood for heterosexual, gay, lesbian, and bisexual mothers and fathers. Using the universe of state-level child custody decisions from 2003 to 2009, I created a unique data set in which I matched court cases involving gay and lesbian parents to cases in the same court and time period that involved heterosexual parents, resulting in 254 court decisions. This research design enabled me to illuminate how courts construct families and parents in the context of variations in parental gender, sexual identity, and path to parenthood. In addition, qualitative textual analysis demonstrates how the courts struggled to conceptualize family forms outside of heterosexual marriage and biogenetically related children. Indeed, biogenetics continue to remain central to legal constructions of parenthood. This research also reveals the continued legal regulation of family forms that deviate from the heteronormative ideal. Overall, this research elucidates larger questions about inequality, gender, sexuality, and family in the United States.

This dissertation includes three papers on pro-work reforms of the North Korean Defector Settlement Support System (NKDSSS) and the economic adjustment of the North Korean Defectors (NKDs) in South Korea. Paper 1 analyzes changes in benefit levels caused by the pro-work reforms to the NKDSSS and differences in the total benefit levels across groups, classified by the ability to work, employment status, and income level. Paper 2 examines the causal effect of the pro-work reforms on the NKDs’ economic adjustment. Paper 3 evaluates the association between the NKDs’ human capital and welfare receipt.

Preventing healthcare-associated infections (HAI) is a national priority. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one of every 25 hospitalized patients contract a HAI while receiving care. In 2009, the annual cost for HAIs in United States’ hospitals was estimated to be $40 billion, and there were 99,000 HAI-associated deaths. In nursing homes (NH), the situation is more dire; among the 4 million NH residents each year, there are 1-2.6 million serious infections and 1 out of every 3 NH residents is colonized with a multi-drug resistant organism. In addition to the frequent infections, over prescription of antibiotics in NH is significant, and frequently inappropriate. NH residents with HAIs are subjected to burdensome treatments and diagnostic procedures, leading to more complications in an already vulnerable population in which quality of life not life prolongation is often the treatment goal. Policy levers are actions designed to realize health objectives that can be taken by either public or private entities, and by individuals or groups. Health policy levers are deployed at all levels including federal, state, regional, and local levels. Vaccinations, such as polio, are one of the great success stories of how policy levers can prevent infections. However, undermined and eroded policy levers can have negative public health consequences, such as seen with the 2018-2019 rash of measles outbreaks. There is much work left to be done improving quality related to infections across all care settings. For this dissertation, I utilized the three-paper format and conducted studies examining the effectiveness of health policy levers used to improve healthcare quality and prevent infections across care settings. These studies were: 1) a systematic review of the published evidence on state mandatory reporting of HAI in hospitals; 2) an environmental scan cataloging state supported initiatives in NH infection prevention, and; 3) a quantitative analysis on the effect of new federal NH regulations on NH quality and patient outcomes. In the systematic review, I found that mandatory reporting was associated with reduced central line associate bloodstream infection rates. The environmental scan demonstrated that wide variation existed between states’ initiatives to support infection prevention in NH. In the quantitative analysis, I found that new federal regulations were significantly associated in improved NH quality in UTI rates and vaccination rates for influenza and pneumonia infections. Based on these results, clinical providers, administrators, policy makers and researchers can use health policy levers to reduce infections and improve quality.

This dissertation documents a pattern of policy-making in Muslim majority (predominantly authoritarian) countries, whereby incumbents demonstrate higher responsiveness to citizens' economic concerns and expand their distributive policies during the Islamic season of Ramadan. Why do autocratic governments (weakly constrained by formal political institutions) address economic inequalities and expand their distributive policies in religious seasons? I argue that the religious environment imposes normative constraints on governments in Muslim societies, acting as an additional accountability mechanism to formal political institutions. The case of Ramadan exemplifies this claim. Ramadan's religious norms increase the salience of distributive issues and raise the political costs of governments' non-responsiveness to their constituents' economic insecurities. Specifically, governments underperforming on distributive issues could suffer reputational costs and face mobilization threats in Ramadan. Hence, incumbents expand their distributive policies in Ramadan to contain these short-term political threats (i.e., reputational and mobilization threats) arising during the season by delivering to threatening constituencies to co-opt them and buy their political acquiescence. The project integrates multiple methodological approaches to test this argument both cross-nationally and sub-nationally. I first document a systematic increase in the religious salience of distributive matters in Ramadan, by applying text analysis tools to an original cross-national dataset of 32,000 Islamic sermons. I then show that Ramadan imposes two main costs on incumbents that underperform on economic and distributive issues in Muslim societies. First, leveraging quasi-random variation in the timing of existing cross-national surveys using a difference-in-differences design, I find that Ramadan exacerbates Muslims' evaluations of the incumbent's economic performance and their perceived morality/religiosity, proportionally to the incumbent’s performance on distributive policy areas. Second, using machine learning to classify the types of protest activities reported in the ACLED dataset, I report that Ramadan facilitates economic and religious mobilization in economically insecure Muslim societies. A qualitative analysis of five cases reveals that incumbents respond to these pressures by distributing in Ramadan, particularly when facing rising political threats. I then complement these results with a sub-national analysis of Ramadan's distributive policies. Focusing on Egypt (2014-2020), I employ web-scraping to construct a municipality-level dataset of daily reports of the regime's distributive efforts. I find that the regime reports more distributive interventions in Ramadan, particularly in places where political threats to its rule are higher. As a follow-up, I also show that government expenditure on welfare increases in Ramadan after periods of political contention, creating fiscal policy cycles similar to electoral budgetary cycles. This dissertation underlines the role of informal institutions in explaining regularities in policy-making in more traditional and less democratic societies, hence approaching the question of how political accountability and government responsiveness can be attained without democracy. It also specifies conditions under which religion becomes a source of public pressure for government distribution, challenging the Marxist notion of religion as opium.

This dissertation asks how local planners, elected officials and activists have negotiated the recent implementation of inclusionary zoning projects in historically disinvested neighborhoods of New York and the Grand Paris. Instead of focusing on potential issues with the involvement of the private sector in cases of affordable housing provision, I shed the light on the strengths and limitations of the public sector, its land use ideologies and its accountability in terms of affordable housing provision. I look at a policy program that has widely circulated in both countries since the 1970s. Inclusionary zoning was developed as a strategy to leverage market-rate and affordable housing by channeling capital from private real estate developers. It has also always been rooted in a genealogy of initiatives that were attempting to reverse the exclusionary outcomes of zoning. While inclusionary zoning programs have now been widely adopted across North America and Europe, their use seems to be highly incremental and context-specific, and efforts to compare and contrast programs have not succeeded in systematically explaining what works and what does not work. Few studies consider how neighborhood context, local politics and power relations shape inclusionary zoning outcomes. Few studies consider how the implementation of inclusionary zoning programs in historically disinvested neighborhoods is shaped by path dependency and national contexts, which orient so much of our planning traditions, political economies and multi-scale governance structures. This dissertation intends to fill such a gap by contrasting the Fort d’Aubervilliers housing project where local public sector agents secured a more redistributive housing project (more affordable units and deeper affordability levels) because they had more power and were backed by resources, programs, institutions operating at a more macro level, to the East Harlem housing project where local public sector agents did not secure a redistributive housing project (more affordable units and deeper affordability levels), because they had less power and there was a disconnect with resources, programs, institutions operating at a more macro level. My research project goes beyond a standard macro-level comparison of national or metropolitan programs. It proposes a finer-grain “N of Two plus Some” comparative framework, with a single case study for a neighborhood in New York and a single case study for a neighborhood in the Grand Paris, both informed by other secondary cases. I present it as a chronological narrative research which “restories” my findings. I uncover the political mediation and micro-processes behind the implementation of two inclusionary housing projects, Fort d’Aubervilliers in the banlieue of the Grand Paris, and Sendero Verde in New York’s East Harlem. I map the multi-level negotiation processes that unfolded in each case among agents of the public sector, using close to 150 semi-structured interviews and shadowing meetings and hearings across the two cities. Findings follow Jenny Schuetz’s proposal that empowered but not autonomous local actors, subject to regional or federal public governance structures, represent the most just and redistributive model of urban governance when it comes to inclusionary zoning implementation (Schuetz et al. 2009). I contrast the story of an affordable housing project “locked” through the cooperation of the agents that make up the mille-feuille multi-scale public sector in the case of Aubervilliers with a contested public-private project where city agendas overlook a community-led neighborhood plan in the case of East Harlem. I underline how local levels of governance - the intermunicipal Établissements Publics Territoriaux in the case of Paris and the City Council in the case of New York - played a critical role in each case to negotiate the social justice outcomes of inclusionary zoning implementation in these historically disinvested neighborhoods, with more or less success. The investigation of two inclusionary zoning cases in East Harlem and the banlieue of Aubervilliers offers lessons about the social justice and equity aspects of real estate development projects undertaken in the two global cities of New York and the Grand Paris. It uncovers the “mixité de façade” question I ask, whether the social mix component of these two projects is truly achieved, or just a façade. In so doing, I intend to underline that there is a large enough gradient of ways to make the redistribution of economic growth, and goals of social justice, feasible in the two cities I work on. I also hope to reintroduce the type of opportunities the agency of public sector agents in charge of residential landscapes can grant us with, even in historically disinvested neighborhoods. New York and the Grand Paris, two cities which are still respectively at the forefront of securing subsidized housing markets for their residents, allow me to fuel a rich literature on global cities and transatlantic planning. Only this time, I decenter the standard comparative narrative on Paris and New York, and start chronicling the challenges of metropolitan policy making, progressive “New Proceduralism” and “New Public Management” illustrated by programs like inclusionary zoning, by situating the conversation in the historically disinvested neighborhoods of both cities. Eventually, while both contexts differ in several ways, they tell us something valuable. The major takeaway is that a strong public institutional landscape and a solid net of programs and resources available for public agents in charge of neighborhood planning plays a huge role in determining the success or failure of implementation processes for this type of inclusionary zoning-financed housing projects.

Resume Presented dissertation discusses the topic of environment for female employment in the Sultanate of Oman as created by the state. The research is done on two levels. In the first one analysis of public policy and its implementation is presented, the second one examines the laws and legislative process. Besides analysis of the environment for female employment, the dissertation aims to pinpoint the gaps and obstacles in current planning and legal framework, and to offer recommendations for improving the situation. The study uses qualitative research methods, primarily contents and gender analysis, complemented by chronological descriptive method.

This dissertation studies the effects that government spending has on the well-being of individuals and on community-level economic outcomes. The first chapter examines federally funded disaster relief with the aim of explicitly quantifying the role that the government has in propping up labor markets after large storms that damage and destroy communities. The next two chapters are about welfare. The second chapter uses administrative data from the state of Michigan to study one of the largest, and most sudden, changes to a cash welfare program in the country's history. The aim of this piece is to quantify the holistic impact of losing welfare on the financial well-being of the affected mothers. The final chapter revisits one of the most consequential welfare-to-work experiments of the late 20th century with modern empirical tools to determine whether work-first retraining programs or remedial coursework benefit the marginal welfare participant more in the long-run. Together these essays highlight the role that the federal government plays in the lives of its citizens when they are at their most vulnerable. It is the hope of the author that economists and policymakers can use the conclusions herein when considering and drafting future programs that aim to assist those at the margin of society or those who will suffer the consequences of catastrophic climate disasters.

Abstract: The theory of value capture is simple to understand and easy to sell, promising self-fulfilling virtuous cycles of value generation, capture, and redistribution. Countless studies document value creation attributable to public interventions, providing guidance on the type and extent of potential benefits. Scholars too have set forth parameters for optimal value capture conditions and caution against common pitfalls to keep in mind when designing value capture plans. But even when utilizing the best advice, equitable redistribution of benefits rarely occurs in neoliberal economies, leaving municipalities struggling to meet the myriad of social needs and provide basic services for all their inhabitants. Invariably, capitalistic real estate states seek to financialize public assets for private gain. Nowhere is this more apparent in New York City today than in the outcomes thus far of one of the largest public-private developments in New York history at Hudson Yards. This dissertation documents the failure of the value capture scheme put in place at Hudson Yards which neither captured fair market value for the public, nor extracted much public benefit. The scheme aimed to leverage vast tracts of publicly-owned land above operational rail yards at the Far West Side of Manhattan. Instead, public action under the guise of public purpose catalyzed the private financialization of a finite public asset, through the seemingly benign but inherently complex public policy tool of value capture finance. In particular, this dissertation tells the detailed development story of Hudson Yards, where developers reap huge rewards for their risks while the public still waits for what was promised — an all too familiar story.