Higher education institutions (HEIs) have faced unprecedented challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic. This dissertation draws on the comparative case study design to examine the institutional response to the Covid-19 pandemic across seventeen HEIs in three urban contexts: Hong Kong, Johannesburg, and New York. Due to the limited knowledge base about the novel coronavirus and its rapid spread, the institutional response to the Covid-19 pandemic was premised on uncertainty and presented a unique challenge to decision-makers. This study is informed by the systems approach in the three strands of literature I draw from – disaster studies, sociology of risk, and higher education governance. The evidence from this study supports the conceptualization of the Covid-19 response as a by-product of social design and socially constructed events. I take a qualitative approach to study the institutional response through semi-structured interviews, documents, and recruitment survey responses. Guided by organized risk sensemaking, I put forth the following research questions: (1) What policies, if any, have been adopted to mitigate the risk of Covid-19? (2) What decision-making structures, if any, have been mobilized to mitigate the risk of Covid-19? (3) How, if at all, institutional managers have rationalized the decisions adopted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic? and (4) How, if at all, has the external environment impacted the institutional response to Covid-19? In the first findings chapter, I examine the Covid-19 policies adopted during the pandemic and conclude that the measures taken to mitigate risks associated with the pandemic have counter-intuitive consequences. The Covid-19 response has strengthened HEIs’ place-based identity and underscored the role universities and colleges play in their immediate communities as anchor institutions. The second analytical chapter shows how decision-making structures were established and mobilized during the Covid-19 pandemic within different HEIs. It typifies decision making structures by their focus (general vs. specific) and temporality (permanent vs. temporary). This chapter discusses the challenges and benefits of different decision-making approaches, including the involvement of faculty and staff, the elimination of organizational silos, and the funneling of decisions to higher levels of authority. Furthermore, I interrogate the institutional managers’ rationalizations of challenges and ethical dilemmas brought on by the pandemic. In this chapter, I present the four emerging attitudes toward the Covid-19 pandemic as a sensemaking framework, illuminating the institutional response as a temporally dynamic phenomenon. Lastly, I focus on the external environment and specifically, the non-state sectoral actors that have played a crucial role in informing and shaping HEIs' responses. The relationships with these actors serve advisory, brokerage, coordination, data collection, material support, lobbying, and translation functions for HEIs. The study contributes to the literature on comparative education by providing empirical evidence on the role of non-state sectoral actors, the decision-making processes of HEIs, and the impact of Covid-19 on higher education. It also highlights the importance of universities and colleges as anchor institutions within their communities.

This three-paper dissertation aims to contribute to the study of the Mexican presidency, in particular, to the understanding of the origins and use of presidential polling, its role in the policy activity of the president, and the dynamics of presidential approval between 1989 and 2011. The dissertation draws upon the presidential polling, opinion-policy and approval research done in the United States. The first paper explores a topic that has not received much attention in Mexico, the origins and use of the presidential polling unit (PPU). The second paper focuses on presidential approval in Mexico, and the third analyzes, yet another understudied topic, the relationship between government spending (used as proxy for policy) and public opinion (collected by the PPU). The first paper relies on crosstabulations, text analysis, wordclouds and cluster analysis. Additionally, to offer an insider's view, I conducted a series of interviews to seven presidential staffers during the administrations of Presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari (Dec/1988-Nov/1994), Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (Dec/1994-Nov/2000), and Vicente Fox Quezada (Dec/2000-Nov/2006). The second and third papers made use of vector autoregression models to account for feedback effects among the spending and opinion variables, controlling, at the same time, for a possible `backwards' process in the opinion variables. The main assumption is that the variables are connected: all variables depend and/or explain each other.The first paper entitled "Origins and Use of Presidential Polling in Mexico" addresses the questions of what caused the creation of a government office dedicated to gauge public opinion, what poll information the presidents collected, and how it was used. I will argue that the institutionalization of public opinion within the presidency responded to the dynamics of the political system, in particular, to the changes in the electoral system and the outcome of the presidential election of 1988. The election of 1988 changed Mexico's electoral map and reconfigured the party loyalties against the ruling party PRI. Aware of this new political context, President Salinas used polling not only to study the political behavior of the Mexican voters but also as an alternative to verify electoral results. In fact, the first mandate of the presidential polling unit was to track political preferences. Eventually the use of public opinion polls expanded to other issues and became part of the presidential policy toolkit. As Jacobs and Shapiro (1995) pointed out in the case of the Kennedy administration, the Mexican presidency had now an office with "routinized procedures" to research and collect public opinion data. To identify the type of polling information collected by the presidents, in addition to interviews to presidential staffers, I applied text analysis on titles of all presidential polls conducted between 1989 and 2006. While all presidents collected opinion data on their approval ratings and customized their polling operations according to their own policy agenda, there were some overall differences. President Salinas centered his field polling operations around policy, and his phone polls for elections and presidential image. President Zedillo used field polls mostly for electoral issues and phone polls for image and communications. President Fox focused the field polls for government evaluation and customer satisfaction, and his phone polls for image and evaluation of political figures. How public opinion information was used remains an open chapter. All presidential insiders mentioned that information from public opinion polls was not specifically used to design policy but rather to test it, and to see what worked and what did not work. Polling was used to find ways to convince the public of the benefits of the presidential policies and actions. From this analysis, the conclusion is similar to what Jacobs (1992) argued in his paper on recoil effect. The presidents did use polling to try to move public opinion to their side, but also polling was used to understand what was in the mind of the public. Eventually, these efforts, I believe, made a significant contribution to the development of political public opinion and, most importantly, to the development of democratic values among the political elites.The second paper entitled "Presidential Approval in Mexico" looks at the factors that influence presidential approval using as reference research done in the United States and Mexico. I am looking for evidence that presidential approval in Mexico depends on factors directly connected to policy outcomes (Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson 2002). The risk of manipulation is at the center of this connection. The president may create the illusion of meeting the public's expectations (Kernel 1997) and/or opinion elites may misled the public against the president (MacKuen, Erikson and Stimson 1992). The argument here is that as long as presidential popularity is rooted in objective measures related to policy or economic outcomes, approval may actually be a reliable indicator of citizen's response to government actions and, therefore, a reliable measure of the president's political capital. Thus, the research question is whether approval depends on objective measures of the economy (and the overall situation of the country) or relies on the public's perceptions about the current conditions of the country. Furthermore, are those perceptions retrospective or prospective? Do they rely on what has been done or what is expected to be done? The findings presented in this paper confirm the expectations that the popularity of the Mexican president depends mostly on how the economy is doing and how the president deals with current salient issues like public safety (Buendia 1996; Gómez-Vilchis 2012). At the level of perceptions, prospective evaluations of personal well-being have a positive impact on approval but only among the richer segments of the population. It is important to notice that these perceptions are strongly influenced by the unemployment rates. The overall conclusion is that presidential approval in Mexico is rooted in macroeconomic, salient and subjective measures that are also connected to the dynamics of leading economic indicators. Presidential approval in Mexico depends, so far, on the president's capacity to solve problems.The third paper entitled "Government spending and public opinion in Mexico" explores the relationship between policy and public opinion. While this paper draws upon the opinion-policy research done in the United States, it departs from the policy preference approach to a perspective centered on policy outcomes. The main opinion variables included in the models refer to retrospective and prospective evaluations of personal well-being. These are generic and, in the question wording, do not refer to any issue in particular. One of the goals is to find whether these opinion variables are directly connected to trends in leading economic indicators (like growth of GDP percapita, unemployment, inflation). If such connection exists, then they may represent citizen's responses to current state of affairs of which the president and the government in general are perceived as responsible. This is, the opinion variables can be taken as responding to policy outcomes. The main underlying logic follows the Mood and Thermostatic models suggested by Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson (2002) and Soroka and Welzien (2010) respectively. If people started to feel that things are getting worse, then I would expect the government to increase spending, for example to stimulate the economy. Conversely, if people feel things are getting better, then I would expect the president to scale back on spending. The models show feedback in the economic but not in the public safety models (this is, the reciprocal effect between opinion and spending). In the models where economic spending is the contemporaneous outcome variable, positive prospective evaluations of personal well-being and perceptions that the economy is the most important problem (MIP) facing the nation show significant effects on spending. In the case of spending on public safety, negative prospective evaluation of personal well-being and the perceptions that public safety is the most important problem in the country play a significant role (but there is no feedback). An important finding is that the public attentiveness to economic issues (MIP) does explain a significant portion of the variance in spending on the economy. Regarding the impact of opinions by socioeconomic status, there is not enough evidence to conclude that the President listens more to a particular segment of the population. The results, however, seem to indicate a marginal difference in favor of the public with lower income and education levels. Overall, the findings presented here show a connection between presidential spending activity and public opinion. This suggests some responsiveness towards public opinion. Regardless of their own personal agendas, presidents have worked to improve the conditions of the citizens and responded to their perceptions of the general situation of the country. The fact that most of the population is still poor combined with the fact that polling is here to stay (along with the new impact of social media), has forced politicians to be responsive to the needs and wants of the public. As long as the public remains connected to its economic reality and pay attention to their immediate environment, any attempt of manipulation will not last long. The Mexican public is wise and, repeatedly in electoral processes, it has demonstrated strong and reasonable political culture. Mexican politicians are catching up with the public and this is a good thing. However, as democracy consolidates in Mexico, it may be possible to see the nature of responsiveness changing as the influence of traditional political elites fades and other forms of influence start taking over. Mexico is still in a democratic honeymoon.

During the 2000s U.S. mortgage borrowing experienced its most volatile cycle in the postwar record, with mortgage debt more than doubling between 2000 and 2008 before declining by more than 10% over the next five years. The consequences of the boom and bust for both borrowers and the wider macroeconomy were significant, with millions losing their homes to foreclosure or their jobs to the ensuing deleveraging-driven recession. Recent research has focused on variations in credit supply as a primary determinant of both the boom in mortgage borrowing and subsequent collapse, as well as the concurrent rise and fall of residential real estate prices and employment. In the wake of the Great Recession many have called for countercyclical policy intervention in the mortgage market, both to restrain over-leveraging during booms and to provide additional access to refinancing credit during busts. Moreover some analysis has placed the blame for the volatile U.S. credit cycle on the policies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest government-sponsored enterprises, which have been labeled as excessively risky, actively destabilizing, and regressive. Nevertheless, though many have called for their reform these two agencies appear to be a continuing feature of the U.S. housing finance system and are currently well-positioned to implement countercyclical credit supply policies. In my dissertation I propose a novel countercyclical policy intervention by the government-sponsored enterprises and analyze its impact on mortgage borrowers.

Few sectors of the economy are as influential to the environment and are as susceptible to the influence of environmental changes as agriculture. This dissertation contains three chapters that examine agriculture as the primary interface at which human and nature interact. Primarily, I explore how policy support for financial risk management tools can have substantial impact on agricultural production choices via moral hazard and selection problems. While mitigating agricultural production risk, these supports also impact the environment via induced change in production choices. This dissertation contributes to U.S. agriculture policy and pollution management literature and insurance literature on moral hazard and selection problems. By examining the case of Federal Crop Insurance Program in the United States, this dissertation explores input choice changes caused by changes in government support for crop insurance. I proposed theoretical mechanism through which increasing use of financial risk management strategy can influence input decisions with risk implications, and tested these theories empirically with county-level panel data. Empirical tests showed that there were substantial decreases in irrigation investment and fertilizer application due to crop insurance offering. Policy implications on water scarcity and non-point source pollution management and on federal support to crop insurance market are discussed.

Submitted by Fernanda Ciolfi (fernanda.ciolfi@puc-campinas.edu.br) on 2016-05-10T18:21:59Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Marcus Ven?cius de Brito Coelho.pdf: 2953095 bytes, checksum: fe524280cf5ddaefcbc93892ab4f2d39 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-05-10T18:21:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marcus Ven?cius de Brito Coelho.pdf: 2953095 bytes, checksum: fe524280cf5ddaefcbc93892ab4f2d39 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-12-11 / This study set out the concerns of the author referring to the difficulties faced in the implementation and enforcement of the law 10.639 / 2003 in schools, especially regarding the following questions: What kind of difficulties have been encountered in the implementation of this law? How has been the participation of schools and its professionals? What relationship can be established between the implementation of the law and the critical theory of the Struggle for Recognition proposed by Axel Honneth? Thus, this work describes and analyze the Identity Memory of Promotion of Equality Diversity program (Mipid, from the Portuguese name) and its implementation in the Municipal Center for Child Education, CEMEI Margarida Maria Alves concerning the effectiveness of the law 10.639/2003. Such intent has the following specific goals: to study as the implementation of bill 10.639/2003 proceeded regarding the SME/PMC in kindergarten; study the program annual reports and educational projects of the surveyed school; to map and describe the Mipid Program and Projects involving the ethnic-racial theme of the surveyed school. As for the object of the research, it was bounded by the annual reports of Mipid Program and the pedagogical projects and minutes of pedagogical meetings of the school researched and blog. These sources were outlined and criticized by the methodological framework by Adalberto Marson (s / d), and the theoretical references of Stuart Hall (year), Axel Honneth (1992) and M?rio Vieira de Mello (1963). This research started from the hypothesis of the existence of aestheticism (a term by de Mello) in Mipid and its developments in the municipal school units of Campinas. It was concluded that, despite the existence of aestheticism in Mipid, in the school culture present at CEMEI Margarida Maria Alves the effectiveness of Law 10.639/2003 was carried out through ethical culture. / O presente estudo partiu das inquieta??es do autor referente ?s dificuldades enfrentadas para a implementa??o e cumprimento da Lei 10.639/2003 no ?mbito escolar, que redundaram, sobretudo com as seguintes quest?es: Que tipos de dificuldades foram encontrados para a implementa??o desta lei? Como foi a participa??o das escolas e de seus profissionais? Qual a rela??o que se pode estabelecer entre a implementa??o da lei e a teoria cr?tica da luta por reconhecimento de Axel Honneth? Assim, foi descrito e analisado o Programa Mem?ria Identidade Promo??o da Igualdade na Diversidade (Mipid) e sua implementa??o no Centro Municipal de Educa??o Infantil, Cemei Margarida Maria Alves na efetividade da Lei 10.639/2003. Tal intento apresenta os seguintes objetivos espec?ficos: estudar como se procedeu a implementa??o da lei 10.639/2003 na SME/PMC na Educa??o Infantil; estudar relat?rios anuais do programa e os projetos pedag?gicos da escola pesquisada; mapear e descrever o Programa Mipid e Projetos que envolvem a tem?tica ?tnico-racial da escola pesquisada. Quanto ao objeto da pesquisa, ele foi delimitado pelos Relat?rios anuais do Programa Mipid e pelos Projetos Pedag?gicos e livros atas de reuni?es pedag?gicas da escola pesquisada e blog. Essas fontes foram delimitadas e criticadas por meio do referencial metodol?gico de Adalberto Marson, e dos referenciais te?ricos de Stuart Hall, de Axel Honneth e de M?rio Vieira de Mello. Esta pesquisa partiu da hip?tese da exist?ncia do esteticismo (termos este, de Mello) no Programa Mem?ria Identidade Promo??o da Igualdade na Diversidade (Mipid) com seus desdobramentos nas unidades escolares municipais de Campinas. Concluiu-se que, a despeito da exist?ncia do estetismo no Mipid, na cultura escolar presente no Cemei Margarida Maria Alves a efetividade da Lei 10.639/2003 foi realizada por meio de cultura ?tica.

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

This dissertation examines three health insurance eligibility policies and their impact on reproductive health outcomes for low-income women of reproductive age. The first paper examines the effects of expanded eligibility for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), on fertility among low-income women of childbearing age. The second paper explores the effect of presumptive eligibility policies in Medicaid for pregnant women on access to prenatal care and health insurance coverage. Finally, the third paper exploits state-level differences in eligibility for public versus private insurance under the ACA, and the effects on perinatal coverage patterns, childbirth outcomes, and access to care.

This dissertation is composed of three chapters, each applying different quantitative methods to study a specific early childhood education policy or program. Chapter One explores whether expanding preschool education in low- and middle-income countries with public resources would be a viable policy option, using a benefit-cost analysis. Chapter Two examines economic costs of an emergent literacy program that places paid community tutors into pre-K classrooms in Minnesota using the ingredients method of cost analysis. Chapter Three investigates the effectiveness of a school-based attendance intervention at public preschools in high poverty communities of Chile by using student level observational data. The three chapters each highlight different policy problems: global inequalities on access to preschool education, reading gaps among American PK-12 students, and high student absenteeism at publicly funded preschool programs. Together, these studies advance our knowledge about ways to address existing early childhood education policy problems. These studies also help shed light on gaps in our current knowledge and lay out future research agenda.

This dissertation includes three papers that examine the role of child care policy in promoting early childhood education and care and parental labor supply. Paper one investigates the effects of universal pre-kindergarten on center-based early education and care enrollment and child care expenditures by household income with a focus on middle-income children. Paper two considers how the generosity of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) benefits is associated with child care utilization and maternal labor supply. Paper three assesses the role of coresident grandparents in parental labor supply during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This dissertation consists of three essays in public economics. The three chapters focus on interactions between public and private economic decisions. The first two chapters focus on unemployment insurance (UI) policy in the United States. The third discusses public-private interactions in the education market. The first chapter, a joint work with Arindrajit Dube, Calvin Jahnke, Raymond Kluender, Suresh Naidu, and Michael Stepner estimates the labor supply and spending responses to a large change in UI benefits during the pandemic. We examine the effects of the sudden withdrawal of expanded pandemic unemployment benefits in June 2021 using anonymized bank transaction data for 16,548 individuals receiving UI in April 2021. Comparing the difference in differences between states withdrawing and retaining expanded UI, we find that UI receipt falls 35 p.p. while employment rises by only 4.4 p.p. by early August. Average cumulative UI benefits fall by $1,385 while average cumulative earnings increase by only $93. Heterogeneity by unemployment duration implies that these effects are primarily driven by extensive margin expiration of benefits, rather than intensive margin reductions in the benefit level. The second chapter examines the role of gifts and loans from friends and family during unemployment. These transfers play a largely unstudied informal insurance role in high-income countries, making it difficult to assess their implications for social insurance policy. I present new results on informal insurance paid via person-to-person (P2P) payment platforms using a survey-linked administrative bank transaction dataset covering 130,502 low-income users from the US who were unemployed at least once between July 2019 and September 2020. Event study estimates show average monthly inflows from all P2P platforms increase by $30, or 2% of lost earnings, one month after job loss before returning to baseline over 10 months. Single mothers and the long-term unemployed receive the largest increases, as do those living in high-income areas. I exploit three plausibly exogenous changes to federal pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) policy to estimate that UI benefits crowd out at most $0.04 of informal P2P transfers. Using the social insurance framework introduced in Chetty & Saz (2010), my crowd-out estimates indicate negligible welfare consequences for an additional dollar of benefits. Altogether these results imply that public UI benefits can raise welfare by pooling risk across networks without reducing within-network targeting of informal insurance. The third chapter asks whether public school services fill in gaps left by private school failures. Specifically, it explores what type of schools enter the market and experience an increase in enrollment after reports of abuse by Catholic priests lead to Catholic Schools closures. I use a two-way fixed effects event study method to estimate a change in enrollments and number of different types of schools after a report of priest abuse within the same zip code, school district, or county. I find there are 0.2 fewer Catholic schools and Catholic school enrollment falls by 75 students after six years, which are offset by a 0.2 and 50-student increase in charter school counts and enrollments on average. These increases are unique to charter schools and is not observed in other public or non-Catholic private schools. Altogether, these results suggest that former Catholic schooled families show a preference for charter schools over other public schools, which may be due to the low-cost and similar emphasis on discipline and academic achievement.