This paper focuses on policies and regulations on open economies to achieve financial stability and social welfare. In the first chapter, I develop a dynamic model to study optimal liquidity regulations for multiple assets with differing levels of liquidity. I show that optimal macroprudential policies are affected by both asset liquidity and the multi-asset structure. Lower asset liquidity amplifies drops in asset prices and tightens the collateral constraint during financial crises, thus raising macroprudential taxes to discourage holding. With multiple assets, the marginal benefit of investing in one asset is affected by the future cross-price elasticities of all assets. Quantitatively, optimal macroprudential policies increases welfare by introducing a portfolio with more liquid assets and less borrowing. However, the Basel III reform deteriorates welfare, as agents overaccumulate liquid assets. In the next chapter, I focuses on the welfare analysis of currency depreciation through endogenous R&D where the economy faces a trade-off between the gain from export and disinvestment of technology. I show that real depreciation decreases welfare when productivity is endogenous, as the long-term bust due to sluggish productivity dominates the short-term boom in consumption and output. In the final chapter, I study the optimal monetary policy in this framework. The optimal policy is a targeting rule of inflation, output gap, and the terms of trade, considering the trade-off between the international purchasing power and the cost of importing R&D. The variation of the optimal monetary policy is larger than the standard Taylor rule and the optimal monetary policy under exogenous productivity.

Bureaucrats are hired to produce public goods. Yet, despite the distributive implications of this canonical rationale, bureaucrats are generally absent from theories of "who gets what." The three papers in this dissertation advance a role for bureaucrats in the distribution of public goods and services premised on their work in policy implementation. I provide new theory and evidence to answer three questions. The first paper asks the question: under what conditions do bureaucrats’ actions generate inequalities in the provision of public services? The second paper inquires: how does the design of bureaucratic oversight institutions influence a state's capacity to implement policy and citizen access to services? The third essay asks: how does the co-production of public goods by politicians and bureaucrats influence voters' ability to hold politicians to account? In the first paper, I study the conditions under which bureaucratic bias (discrimination) in the allocation of services generates inequality in access. I argue that citizens' principal mechanism of control over bureaucrats is to complain to a politician. When politicians respond to complaints by tightening oversight of bureaucrats, differences in citizens' access to complain induce bureaucrats to devote more effort to groups with the loudest voices. I test this theory using a national-scale factorial audit experiment of Colombia's two largest national social welfare programs to measure bureaucratic effort behaviorally. I find that bureaucrats provide less information about social welfare programs to poor citizens and internal migrants. Consistent with the theory, such bias manifests most strongly in places with greater inequalities in citizens' ability to access the state and on tasks where oversight from politicians is most likely. These results are unlikely to reflect taste-based discrimination or screening. This paper shows that inequality in access to public goods and services can emerge even when politicians' budget allocations to public goods are equitable. In the second paper, I examine the distributional consequences of the use of citizen complaints in bureaucratic oversight. I study the adoption and consequences of bureaucratic oversight institutions in the context of service provision. Specifically, I consider a politician's choice to use (or ignore) information generated by complaints when monitoring a bureaucrat. Complaints generate information that direct a politicians' remediation of bureaucratic decisions and may increase bureaucratic effort. However, when costs of complaint vary across the population, the use of this information generates inequality in the distribution of service outputs, improving the access of citizens that can complain while reducing the access of citizens that cannot. Further, relying on citizen information can build or erode a state's capacity to accurately implement public policies, depending on the distribution of these costs across the population. This paper introduces citizen complaint systems as an institution that shapes both policy implementation capacity and distributional outcomes in comparative perspective. In the final paper, I start from the observation that in many theories of electoral accountability, voters learn about an incumbent’s quality through the observation of public goods outcomes. However, politicians rely on bureaucracies to produce public goods. Across contexts, politicians work with bureaucracies of markedly different qualities. In this paper, I argue that accountability relations between voters and politicians yield different empirical implications at different levels of bureaucratic quality. I introduce a model of electoral accountability with a voter, a politician, and a bureaucrat. The model identifies observational equivalencies between (i.) the implications of pooling equilibria that emerge at high and low levels of bureaucratic quality (with informed, rational voters) and (ii.) the findings of existing studies that are interpreted to indicate a lack of accountability due to uninformed or irrational voters. I demonstrate the plausibility of the model by introducing and validating an original measure of bureaucratic quality in Brazilian municipalities. I use this measure to extend four studies on corruption and accountability. I conclude with implications for the comparative study of accountability across the world's democracies.

This dissertation studies the history of philanthropy in the San Francisco Bay Area between the 1940s to the 2010s through the experiences of the foundation managers, professors, and attorneys, who collectively oversaw the distribution of philanthropic wealth for the region’s donors. This dissertation argues that foundation managers and a range of other non-donor professionals were critical to the formation of organized philanthropy in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1940s, which in limited but vital ways redistributed wealth to organizations that provided social welfare services. In the austere decades of the late 20th century, however, philanthropic intermediaries created new models of giving that, in appealing to affluent people, narrowed the purpose and reach of foundations, while expanding the ability of donors to set conditions on their giving. In tandem with larger political and economic changes, the disruption of philanthropy in the San Francisco Bay Area—the creation of donor-centric modes of giving that appealed to the norms of high-tech and financial moguls—helped produce a local nonprofit sector more reflective of the interests of wealthy donors rather than those in need.

The concept of interorganizational field refers to the pattern of relationships or the context within which organizations negotiate or compete to accomplish their goals. This paper examines the proposition that the type of interorganizational field shapes and· influences interactions between organizations. To explore the nature of any contextual effects, a hypothesis is extracted to represent each of four subareas of the literature: the transaction or exchange, the resource dependency, the communication, and the division of labor subareas. Non-verification of the hypotheses indicates the extent and the manner in which interorganizational fields can affect relations between organizations. A case study of these hypotheses is presented for one type of interorganizational field, a federation of social service agencies. The federation includes eight organizations which delivered services and an administrative component to facilitate interagency coordination. The data, which were gathered from project documents, monthly records, and a series of interviews of representatives from each of these organizations, permit analysis of the federation's two-year tenure. Analysis of these data leave three of the four hypotheses not verified, with only the hypothesis on communication between organizations being upheld. These findings suggest that the ''norms of rationality” alleged to govern organizational decision-making are actually assessed according to characteristics of the interorganizational context. More generally, the conclusion is that the interorganizational field level of analysis merits further examination as a causal context. By specifying the nature of this context, it ultimately is possible to theorize whether the effects of variables across fields are linear or curvilinear, and whether interaction effects exist.

This work is an attempt to critically evaluate the way men and masculinity have been portrayed in and through social work journals and to develop an annotated bibliography of the professional periodical literature as it relates to the masculine gender role. It is also an analysis of authorship in order to determine differential participation by the sexes in social work journals. These analyses will be used to assess the current status of “masculinity” and gender role issues in the profession and to suggest areas of future growth.

Volunteerism has been the subject of much controversy in the last few years inasmuch as it is so often identified as a women's issue. Many areas, previously considered the rightful domain of women, have come under scrutiny as women question the value of their participation in “feminine activities.” As stereotypes are examined, fictions are explored and facts determined so that these former stereotypes can be reviewed in a new light. Many persons are becoming familiar via the popular media with these stereotyped roles (i.e., woman as “Good Mother”) , and learn that, for example, “good mothering” is not a monolithic behavior, but that a complex set of attitudes and skills enter into the caregiving process. “Good Mother” Is no longer a term that really means anything, except as a stereotype. Just so, women have of late been looking at the stereotype of the volunteer. Who is she? Like the “Good Mother,” expected to attend selflessly to her young while foregoing personal achievement, the woman volunteer has often been pictured in limited ways as either a little old lady pouring coffee for blood donors or perhaps as a bored, well-to-do housewife aspiring to social status, raising funds for charity at a fashion show. Women like these undoubtedly appear in the ranks of volunteers, to be sure, just as there is some truth in all stereotypes. It is the intention of this study to examine the facts behind the myths, however, and to obtain a clearer description of the women who do so much of society’s caretaking work without pay. In doing so, it is important to know who these women volunteers are, what they do as volunteers, and how they feel about themselves as volunteers and about volunteerism in general. In exploring these three areas, this study will concentrate specifically on volunteers in agencies whose goals can be described as “altruistic” or public-service oriented.

The central thesis of this paper is that the social work profession needs to know much more about menopause and its concomitants in order to enhance diagnosis and treatment. Unfortunately, the woeful lack of research and consequent paucity of data on the subject require a heavy reliance upon intuitively plausible statements in support of larger propositions about many of the strategic relationships advanced in the course of the argument. When these propositions and statements are taken as a whole, the paper is also an outline of essential research topics.

In a diverse society, social work practitioners must be able to work with and respect people from a wide variety of cultures and ethnicities and with different value systems and ideological perspectives, including spiritual or religious beliefs. Accordingly, social work education has begun to incorporate the topic of spirituality. This study builds upon previous studies by Dudley and Helfgott (1990) and Sheridan et al. (1994) which focused on views of faculty members regarding spirituality in social work education and support for a course on spirituality in the social work curriculum. This study goes on to examine inclusion of spirituality in general social work courses. The study involved a survey of social work faculty members who teach courses in direct practice, human development, and diversity, with a response rate of 52% (N = 222). The 40-item web survey replicated items regarding faculty views about spirituality and social work, and measures of personal experience with spirituality from Sheridan's (1994) survey. Items regarding faculty and student inclusion of spirituality, classroom management strategies, and discussion outcomes were original to this study.Results showed that in addition to 9 faculty who teach courses in spirituality, 75.1% of faculty members surveyed report a moderate or substantial discussion of spirituality in half of the courses they teach. Multiple regression analyses showed an association of faculty inclusion of spirituality to student inclusion and constructive discussions of spirituality, the school offering a separate course on spirituality, female gender, and full time status (p < .001). Faculty-reported student inclusion of spirituality was associated with faculty inclusion, conflictual discussions, constructive discussions, and use of classroom rules (p < .001). Constructive discussions of spirituality were associated with use of modeling and facilitation, faculty inclusion, and student inclusion of spirituality (p < .001). Several path models were compared using AMOS software. Results suggest that when faculty members include spirituality, students are more likely to discuss the topic. Faculty members report frequently including the topic of spirituality in the content of general social work courses. Classroom rules are related to increased student participation, and modeling and facilitation promote constructive discussion of spirituality.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This study investigated choices made by fundraisers when crafting appeals to unknown potential donors. Specifically, it asked if and how fundraisers’ choices vary depending on whether they were raising money for a population that faced societal stigma. Research on fundraising often focuses on donor behavior, without considering the type of the beneficiary and the discretionary decisions made by fundraisers. This study drew on literature about stigma and literature about fundraising communication. It employed mixed methodologies to explore this research question. The first part of the study used an online experimental survey, in which 76 practicing fundraisers wrote an acquisition appeal letter for a nonprofit after random assignment to benefit either clients with mental illness (stigmatized population) or older adults (non-stigmatized population), then answered attitudinal questions about the beneficiary population. Participants believed individuals with mental illness were more stigmatized than older adults. Analysis of the letters using linguistic software showed that fundraisers used more humanizing language when writing about the non-stigmatized population, compared to the stigmatized population. Several aspects of the appeal letters, identified through existing theory, were examined but did not vary at statistically significant levels between the groups. Exploratory factor analysis showed several patterns of elements recurring within the letters. One of these patterns, addressing social expectations, varied significantly by client group. In the second part of the study, semi-structured interviews with fifteen participants showed that writing for the stigmatized client population raised special concerns in communicating with potential donors: many interviewees described identifying client stories and evidence to justify helping stigmatized clients in a way that wasn’t thought as necessary for non-stigmatized clients. They also attempted to mitigate threatening stereotypes to maintain readers’ comfort levels. Fundraisers regularly evaluated how readers were likely to think of different kinds of clients. Fundraisers’ own implicit assumptions also came into play.

The aim of this study was to examine social workers' experiences of internal collaboration in the work with women who are exposed to domestic violence, in order to get more knowledge about conditions for internal collaboration in organizations that are specialized. The study was conducted by qualitative research through semi-structured interviews in two middle-sized and two small-sized municipalities. Seven social workers were interviewed. Three of them are working with drug abuse, two of them are working with domestic violence and one of them is working with financial aid. The results show that the internal collaboration between social workers are working fairly well but there exists both obstacles and opportunities in the work with women who are victims of violence. The social workers describe that collaboration is very important in the work with women who are exposed to violence since they are in need of help from different social workers in the same organization. Result shows that social workers often cooperate in three different ways; daily/informal collaboration, formalized collaboration and shared efforts. Economy/budget, lack of understanding, different approaches, ”downpipes thoughts' ' and different assessments were described as obstacles in internal collaboration. Opportunities that have been identified are a good relationship, consensus and geographical closeness. The result also shows that the descriptions about internal collaboration can be understood in relation to New Public Management (NPM) and Street-Level bureaucracy. Result shows that NPM has brought several obstacles like ”downpipes thoughts”, geographical distance and separated budgets. The municipalities require collaboration which can be related to NPM in the shape of goal accomplishment since there are no clearly formalized routines for what the collaboration should look like. In conclusion this study shows that social workers are in need of discretion to find individual solutions to women's problems which can be understood in relation to Street-Level bureaucracy.