Is tax evasion political? How do fiscal politics change when a substantial share of taxpayers decide to shirk on their fiscal burden? In the economics literature, a well-established tradition of work has investigated the behavioral and institutional determinants of taxpaying, informing polices on how to improve compliance. However, existing work has remained conspicuously silent on the political fallout from tax noncompliance. The projects in this dissertation begin filling this gap. In the first paper, I turn to local tax politics and ask when local officials are better able to handle subnational taxation in a high-evasion environment. Exploring the Italian case, I show that mayors born in the town are better suited for tax governance, increasing enforcement, tax rates, and revenue. In my second project, I move to national tax politics and investigate the impact of information about tax cheating by the rich on public preferences for taxing the rich. Leveraging an original survey experiment conducted in Italy, I document a negative impact of perceived cheating by the rich on demand for tax progressivity. Finally, in the third study, I flip the question and ask whether tax enforcement can impact revealed public preference for redistribution. With three empirical case studies in Italy, Slovakia, and Australia, I argue and provide evidence for a twin dynamic. When enforcement is successful and popular, individuals display greater propensity for redistribution. This is the case in Italy, where an electorally-popular crackdown on property-tax evasion causes increases in donations to local public-benefit non-profit initiatives. By contrast, when enforcement is not perceived as successful or causes backlash by taxpayers, I document opposite reaction. In Slovakia, where enforcement is not perceived as credible, publicized audits against local businesses lead to decreases in local charitable donations. Similarly, in Australia, crackdowns against tax-avoidance schemes in the summer of 1998 caused widespread protests and led to electoral shifts in favor of a regressive tax reform in the October 1998 election. Taken together, the findings of this dissertation conclusively demonstrate that tax evasion is indeed political. Enforcement and noncompliance at both national and subnational level have deep political roots and implications for the broader politics of the fiscal contract, potentially upholding or stymieing the prospects of redistribution.

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Instant Conductors is a collection of poems meant to engage the reader in conversation about the imperfect nature of the world in relation to the imperfect nature of readerly experience. Walt Whitman wrote, “I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop / they seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.” And so the things on these pages are intent on transmitting what one experiences in the minutiae of memory and routine: the sounds that surround a blackwater tidepool, what one imagines happens behind the closed doors of the friendly neighbors, or what's heard in the whispers of an elderly man sitting in a waiting room. These pieces are situated along the spectrum of narrative and lyric, between self and other, around various speakers and listeners. They flow through the sensors of Florida swamp, pray to the train ride of some nebulous god or lack thereof, and comment on the artifice of social media. They visit the transient nature of relationships and interrogate how one comes to know, or not know, the self. These pieces speak to old form and new verse. They touch on place, and time, and timelessness. They attempt to reimagine the negative space of individual, sometimes muddled, histories, into some understandable or at least familiar, organic, whole. Universal truths or no, these are the electric currents of language. They are hazardous. They are harmless. They are instances and instants.

Mercury is a collection of short stories based in the fictional town of Mercury, Georgia. Set over the course of several decades, the stories trace the events that changed individuals, families, and a whole community for decades. Loosely based on the author’s real-life family history, the stories, both humorous and heartbreaking, show characters caught between the past and the present and searching for a way forward. A girl who makes friends with a ghost, a woman who can’t help but run from crying babies, a man forced to face the town’s darkest side—these and other characters respond in surprising ways to circumstances that are both ordinary and extraordinary. Most of the stories in the collection are linked, showing the interconnectedness of the lives in this small town. The pieces work together to present a larger narrative of how the characters and the town struggle to change, survive, hope, and face the future.

Generally, biological samples are collected from crime scenes using swabbing, cutting, or taping techniques. However, these methods are limited in their abilities to recover diluted, masked, or otherwise invisible stains. Additionally, their targeted nature allows only a small portion of a larger stain to be collected at one time. In this study, a sterile wet-vacuum collection system was evaluated in its ability to collect small volume bloodstains from various substrates. Vacuuming was compared to swabbing and taping methods currently used in forensic analysis. Samples were collected from porous and nonporous surfaces; the efficacy of each collection method was evaluated with a colorimetric presumptive blood test. To evaluate each collection method, dilutions containing from 0.25 nl to 25 μl human blood were spotted on common substrate materials, allowed to dry, and recovered. For comparison to the novel method, single-swabbing and tape-lifting techniques were performed in this study to collect samples for presumptive testing. During wet vacuum collection, stains were saturated with sterile buffer and suction was applied to the surrounding area, accumulating buffer in a collection bottle. Collected buffer was then filtered through membranes to capture cellular material, which were then presumptively tested for the presence of blood. Testing was performed with Kastle-Meyer (phenolphthalein) reagents. Each sample was photographed under consistent conditions in order to determine signal intensity. It was shown that the wet-vacuuming technique is able to recover sufficient amounts of blood for presumptive testing from multiple substrates. This method was able to detect similar dilutions of blood as traditional techniques in samples collected from porous surfaces, but was less effective on a nonporous substrate. Presumptive test image analysis shows increased relative intensity in collections from textiles, such as denim, when using the wet-vacuum system. Considering the results of a contemporaneous DNA quantification study, it was shown that in instances where a very weak presumptive result is found, the wet-vacuum technique may be better able to collect genetic material for downstream processing than the traditional methods evaluated. This study demonstrates the potential of wet-vacuuming as a suitable alternative technique to collect adhered cellular material from substrates in forensic investigations.

There is a growing interest in autonomous driving systems that can safely rely on multiple sensors including GNSS, IMU, Radar and LiDAR to navigate with high accuracy, integrity, continuity, and availability in complex urban environments. Many existing data sets, collected with multi-sensor platforms, focus on validating different variations of visual localization algorithms like SLAM, place recognition, object detection and visual odometry that help navigate in sky-obstructed and GNSS-denied environments. However, GNSS still plays a vital role in providing the most assured navigation solution. In this thesis, we develop a robust system intended for collecting data sets that will support the design of tightly integrated navigation algorithms and the analysis of integrity risk using GNSS coupled with IMU, Radar, and LiDAR in challenging automotive environments. GNSS pseudorange, doppler, and carrier phase and IMU acceleration and angular velocities are measurements that the system is specifically designed to collect for sensor-fusion algorithm refinement. In addition, time synchronization between sensors is crucial in data sets validating tightly integrated navigation, especially in applications with high dynamics. However, there is no widely accepted accurate and stable method for synchronizing clocks between different sensor types. We implement a common-clock synchronization and a hardware-trigger clock synchronization between multiple sensors. We then collect a preliminary data set to compare the accuracy and stability of sensor time-tagging using a GNSS-receiver-generated hardware trigger versus using a local-clock ROS-based time stamping. We evaluate the impact of these synchronization methods on mapping accuracy performance. / Master of Science / There is a growing interest in vehicles that can drive themselves without human intervention. Typically, these vehicles must rely on different types of sensors that perceive the environment in different ways and complement each other to navigate complex environments. Many algorithms have been developed to use the measurements from these sensors to accurately determine the vehicle position, velocity and orientation with high accuracy. Many existing data sets intended to validate these algorithms focus on sensors that use visual perception to navigate. In this thesis, we develop a robust data collection system to support (a) the validation of innovative navigation system design that make full use of complementary sensor properties and (b) the quantification of how much trust we can put into the navigation solution. In addition, tight integration of these sensors requires accurate timing of the measurements across multiple sensors. However, there is no widely accepted method of synchronizing clocks between multiple sensor types. We implement a first method in which all sensor information is time-stamped using a common clock, and a second method in which one sensor sends a pulse to another to synchronize their two clocks. To compare the accuracy and stability of these synchronization methods, we collect a preliminary data set.

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