Thesis advisor: Robert Murphy / Hysteresis, in an economic context, is the idea that periods when the unemployment rate is greater than the natural rate have the effect of raising the underlying natural rate of unemployment (or, non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, NAIRU) and moving it to a new higher equilibrium state. The existence of hysteresis is still a matter of dispute in modern economics.This study examines the economic and employment situation from 1980 to the present and in particular since the beginning of the most recent recession in December 2007 and demonstrates that there exists evidence of hysteresis. It then aims to predict the economic consequences for the future and offers possible solutions to the problem.Given the scale of unemployment in the present economy and the importance of crafting an appropriate policy response, an examination of unemployment through the perspective of the hysteresis theory is a valuable approach that deserves further exploration. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Carroll School of Management Honors Program. / Discipline: Economics.

A vast literature has identified the importance of childcare for understanding cross-national variation in women’s employment, and has particularly emphasised the role of the state in ensuring the delivery of services. This thesis explores variation within market-based childcare systems in order to understand how systems with less state provision may support or constrain maternal employment. The thesis argues that understanding whether childcare markets ‘work’ or not in supporting maternal employment requires a deep understanding of the interplay between market and state, as the specific policy approach taken can shape the structure of the market in profoundly different ways. This issue is explored via comparative case studies of the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries known for their market-based approach to childcare, but with stark and persistent differences in maternal employment behaviour, especially working time. Drawing on a mix of qualitative (policy documents) and quantitative (national statistics) data, the US and UK systems are compared along a series of dimensions comprising the two key components of the market-based system: the structure of market provision and the policy approach. The similarities and differences of these systems are analysed through the lens of the characteristics of services known to be important for the use of care for employment purposes: availability, cost and quality. The United States and United Kingdom have generally similar childcare systems when compared to other countries which rely more heavily on the state or the family to ensure childcare provision, which is in line with their common characterisation as liberal welfare regimes. However, there are important differences in the structure of their childcare markets which affect their ability to support maternal employment: for example, the US market poses fewer affordability constraints for maternal employment given the availability of relatively low cost care provision (albeit of questionable quality); the UK market in contrast provides care at higher cost, although this is likely of better quality. This variation in market provision is shaped by differences in the policy approach taken by each country: the US approach is primarily designed to soften the rougher edges of the market in what is otherwise considered a private sphere; in contrast the UK approach actively attempts to shape the childcare market into a system in line with policy goals. The consequence of this is that the US approach does not prevent a wide range of market provision from forming to cater to diverse tastes and budgets, but this necessarily includes a substantial degree of lower quality care. The UK approach more actively constrains the types of provision which are available, which on the one hand reduces supply and contributes to higher cost provision, but also sets higher standards for care provision. Together these findings suggest that understanding how market-based care systems do or do not support maternal employment requires not only an appreciation of the broader institutional context in which they are situated, but also the intended and unintended ways that policy-making can shape their structure.

Addressing a perceived absence of critical attention to changes in the war film brought about by the advent of the digital, this thesis aims to construct an original study of contemporary (post-2001) US war cinema by exploring the shifting relationship between embodiment, subjectivity and digital (military-technological) mediation. In order to update the critical framework necessary for comprehending how the war film is altered by the remediation of digitised military interfaces, I draw on a highly diverse set of approaches ranging from journalistic accounts of the wars in Iraq (2003-11) and Afghanistan (2001-present), studies of military technologies from Paul Virilio to Derek Gregory and Pasi Väliaho, as well as film/media studies work on ethics and spectatorship. The corpus is similarly diverse, encompassing mainstream genre films such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012), documentaries, and gallery installations by Omer Fast and Harun Farocki, thus offering a comprehensive and inclusive portrait of contemporary cinematic trends. The thesis begins by identifying the genre's post-Vietnam turn to embodied, subjective experience and explores the continuation of this tendency through films such as The Hurt Locker (2008) and its complicity with phenomena such as journalistic embedding. Subsequently, I trace how drones and simulations radically alter conventional cinematic constructions of subjective perceptual experience through readings of Omer Fast's Five Thousand Feet is the Best (2011) and Harun Farocki's Serious Games (2009-10), noting in particular the emergence of the virtualised yet embodied 'presence' of the drone operator and the conditioning of trans-subjective, cybernetic networks via CG simulations. Finally, I turn to the remediation of various digital interfaces in films such as Redacted (2007), comparing the emergent models of military subjectivity discussed in the previous chapters with the spectatorial positions evoked by this hypermediated aesthetic.

The number of US domiciled initial public offerings (IPOs) has declined since its peak listing year in 1996. The US listing gap has grasped the attention of experts and researchers in the field but there is a lack of agreement among intellectuals regarding the underlying causes. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: 1) to identify and analyze the company characteristics and underlying factors that impact age at time of IPO that has resulted in the US listing gap and 2) to test if these characteristics and factors have fluctuated in impacting company age at IPO over time.

Abstract Annie Heloise Abel (1873–1947) was one of only thirty American women to earn a PhD in history prior to the First World War. She was the first academically trained historian in the United States to consider the development of Indian–white relations and, although her focus was narrowly political and her methodology almost entirely archival-based, in this she was a pioneer. Raised in the bucolic atmosphere of a late-Victorian Sussex village, at the age of twelve she became an actual pioneer when her parents moved to the Kansas frontier in the 1880s. She was the third child and eldest daughter among seven remarkable siblings, children of a Scottish gardener, each of whom obtained a college education and fulfilled the American dream of financial stability and status. Annie Abel’s academic career was one of rare success for a woman of the period and she studied at Kansas, Cornell, Yale, and Johns Hopkins universities. She was the first woman to win a Bulkley scholarship to Yale, where her doctoral thesis won her an American Historical Association award and was published in its annual report. As well as college teaching, for a short time she was historian at the Office (now Bureau) of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, and was also involved in women’s suffrage issues. She reached the peak of her academic teaching career as a history professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, one of the country’s most prestigious women’s institutions of higher learning. She combined her teaching with research and wrote some minor pieces prior to her major work, a three-volume political history of the Indian Territory during the American Civil War, which was published between 1915 and 1925. Her life took an unexpected turn while on a research sabbatical in Australia when, aged nearly fifty, she found romance and then experienced a disastrous, short-lived marriage. Undeterred, she returned to America and continued to pursue her primary professional interest as an independent researcher, winning grants that took her to England and Canada, until her retirement to Aberdeen, Washington, in the 1930s. During this latter period of her life Annie Abel-Henderson (as she now styled herself) produced no original works but continued to publish editions of historically important manuscripts, work she had begun early in her career. Her research interests also covered early North American exploration narratives and, as an extension of her work on Indian–white relations, she had planned an ambitious, comparative study of United States and British Dominion policy towards colonised peoples. As a reviewer, her historical expertise was long sought by the leading academic history journals of the day. Before her death at seventy four from carcinoma, her final years were busy with war relief work and occasional writing. No full-length work has yet appeared on this pioneer historian and this dissertation seeks to evaluate Annie Heloise Abel’s work by a close reading of her textual legacy—original, editorial and commentarial—and to assess her importance in American historiography.

The World Health Organization published in 2004 a bulletin addressing the gap between research, technology, and its implementation in the health systems of different countries (Haines, Kuruvilla, & Borchert, 2004). Among the barriers described for the implementation of new knowledge in the medical practice is the lack of connection between research results and policy makers. This happens in different subfields within the medical field. The focus of this project is to analyze the differences in implementation of radionuclide therapy technology between the EU and the US. The hypothesis is that this technology has been implemented in the EU earlier and more often than in the US, and that this variation can be connected to the differences in the policies relevant to nuclear medicine. Nuclear medicine is a unique field because of the way radioactive material is used to create diagnostic images and treat illnesses (mostly cancer). Although radiation is used every day in radiotherapy and radiology, the main difference between these two fields and nuclear medicine is the type of radiation used. Radiotherapy and radiology use closed sources of radiation, or particle accelerators that produce radiation, while nuclear medicine uses open sources of radiation that are injected into the patient’s body. This is an important difference because the accelerators used in radiotherapy and radiology can be turned on and off unlike the open sources of radiation used for nuclear medicine. If not handled properly, open sources of radiation may cause radiation contamination. Additionally, the radioactive material must be supplied on a daily basis. With nuclear medicine is possible to create diagnostic images of the body, and to record bodily functions all the way down to the molecular level. It is also possible to treat certain illnesses, such as some types of cancer, in a targeted manner. This is possible because the radioactive material is “connected” with a chemical compound (or drug) that carries the radioactive atoms to a desired location in the body; this is called targeted therapy. It is also possible to inject the radioactive material directly into the organ or region of interest. The targeted therapy and injected techniques are two processes that are part of radionuclide therapy technology. In order to check the status of the implementation of radionuclide therapy I used the practice guidelines published on the websites of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) and the Society of Nuclear Medicine (SNM) in the US. Assuming that the practice guidelines are evidence of well-established and implemented techniques in the regions, these documents were evaluated according to their content and publication date. The content analysis was focused on the type of practices described: diagnostic, general, or therapy, as well as the type of radioactive material (or radioactive isotopes) used in such practices. The practice guidelines evaluation was done in Nvivo, a text analysis software. In addition to the analysis of practice guidelines, a bibliometric analysis of four databases (Pubmed, Medline, Biosis, and ISI Web of Science) was conducted in four databases. The keywords used for the search were (“radionuclide therapy” AND case AND report) OR (radioinmunotherapy AND case AND report). Case reports are publications that expose the day-to-day practice of physicians, and allow medical personnel to take a detail look into a specific case. The records from these sources were analyzed in Vantage Point, a bibliometric analysis software. From the policy landscape, three main types of policies were studied in relation to the practice of nuclear medicine: first, the education standards for the different professionals involved; second, the policies related to the approval of radiopharmaceuticals in the different drug administration entities; and finally, the policies concerning the production of radionuclide therapies in the two regions. The main finding of this project is that Europe and US have different policy approaches that affect, directly or indirectly, the nuclear medicine field. The main differences are in the standards of education for nuclear medicine specialist that is divided between radiologist and nuclear medicine specialists in the US; the production of radioactive material, which is commercially supplied by a very few reactors in the world, none of them in the US; and the drug administration institutions, which have very different approaches approving new drugs. Aditionally, Europe has implemented more radionuclide therapy technologies than US. From the practice guidelines analysis, it was evident that the US started publishing guidelines for nuclear medicine several years before Europe. The US published its first guideline in 1994, while the EU’s first guideline was published in 2000. However, as of July 2013, the European association had published more guidelines with 54 unique ones versus 49 from the US. EU also leads in the number of guidelines in regards to therapy, with 13 versus 2 from the US. Additionally, there is more variety in the radioisotopes used in therapy than the ones in diagnostics, and all the radioisotopes are mentioned in the European guidelines, while the US doesn’t have guidelines that mention Lu-177, Re-186, and Y-90 isotopes. From the bilbiometric analysis it was evident that Europe had published case reports for more time and more frequently than the US regarding radionuclide therapy. The first case report record from Europe was published in 1988, almost a decade before the first case report in the US. Additionally, the US has only 10 publications that match the keywords while the EU has 37. In conclusion, the EU has more practice guidelines on radionuclide therapies regarding more types of illnesses and more radioisotopes, and Europeans have published more case reports on these therapies, which indicates that the EU has implemented radionuclide therapy technology more fully than has the US. The differences in the policies and standards in education for Nuclear Medicine may influence this difference, because EU has a more standardized education and a more unified professional field than US. While the EU has a proposed syllabus for nuclear medicine practitioners, medical physicists, and radiopharmacists, in the US the education is neither standardized nor unified. Two different boards can certify physicians specializing in nuclear medicine: the American Board of Radiology and The American Board of Nuclear Medicine. The first one does a Nuclear Radiology certification for which the physicians are not required or allowed to conduct radionuclide therapies, while the American Board of Nuclear Medicine requires more nuclear medicine training and involves diagnostics and therapy. These differences are important in the implementation of radionuclide therapy techniques, because not all the nuclear medicine physicians in the US are trained on this aspect or allowed to practice it. For that reason a fraction of the professionals may not be interested or informed about these techniques, leaving the field of nuclear medicine in the US behind its EU counterpart. The policies that involve the production of radioisotopes and the market for this good deeply affects the status of the field in both regions. Since most of the radionuclide materials for therapies are produced in nuclear reactors, this is a very complex topic. Nuclear reactors are recognized for their capability to produce nuclear energy and not frequently associated with medicine. The precautionary approach that some regions apply to this topic may affect the availability of the radioisotopes in local markets. The EU has more nuclear reactors capable of the production of materials for radionuclide therapies, while the production of radioisotopes in the US is less and it focused on research. Therefore, the EU has a more stable and reliable supply of radioisotopes, which allows them to use the technology in everyday practice. Finally, the drug administration entities seem to differ in the clarity of their procedures for the approval of radiopharmaceuticals. The EU tools for approval are clear and easy to find, which may encourage European researchers to work on new radiopharmaceuticals and to carry their findings to the application level. The European Medicines Agency has a Radiopharmaceutical Drafting Group that supports the creation and approval of radiopharmaceuticals. In addition, one of the practice guidelines from the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) is about the approval of new drugs. This is not replicated in the US; although the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a special group that works with radiation therapies and devices, there are no references to a group that relates to radiopharmaceuticals, or the information is not as easy to find. It also looks like the Society of Nuclear Medicine (SNM) is focusing more on research and approval of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) radiopharmaceuticals than on therapy based ones. This is understandable since the radioactive material for PET images is produced in cyclotrons available at many clinics and hospitals around the world. In conclusion, nuclear medicine is a very diverse field that is capable of important contributions to medicine. However, the radioactive nature of the material needed for the development of new radionuclide therapies presents a barrier to the development of new drugs. The availability of the drug and the personnel trained in these matters are the most important factors for the successful use of this technology. Although the US and the EU have been collaborating more and more in the creation of standardized procedures for nuclear medicine, it is evident that the EU has more experience in the day to day application of the technology, and the technology is also more accessible in the EU by the physicians interested in it. A trained and informed group of professionals can raise awareness in the public and influence the policy making by monitoring agencies to create clearer paths for drug approvals, and pushing for laws that approve the research and production of alternatives for radioisotopes production such as Low Enriched Uranium reactors.

The thesis examines policy making, especially in the shelter sector, from a different perspective: the impact of the macro-level political economy on the micro-level intervention. To establish this relationship more precisely, a conceptual framework which explores the effects of the role and nature of the state, foreign aid (USAID), and economic reform (IMF/World Bank) is utilised. This framework is deployed to investigate the interaction between these three key elements and how they affected shifts and changes in shelter policies in Egypt from the 1950s. By 1952 the government assumed a more central role in service provision with its socialist orientation. On the macro-political level, dramaticc hanges have taken place since then, but, in effect were not mirrored with adequatere form on the structural or organisational levels, with regards to tackling the shelter needs of the country. The core of the thesis explores, from the shelter sector perspective, the role of the state as an interest mediator throughout different periods. This reveals that the shelter sector always formed an important investment priority susceptible to both internal and external determinants. Internal determinants are related to domestic priorities influenced by changes in the social structure, class interests, and resource allocation. External determinants concern the role played by international agencies in promoting development models in which the shelter sector plays an often uncertain role, or direct political pressure as a part of geo-strategic concerns. The state's receptiveness and ability to mediate is constrained by the extent to which external agendas fit or conflict with the state's development ideology, perceptions of equity, social justice and stability. Using an inductive approach, the empirical evidence is drawn from interviews with key figures in policy making as well as independent observers. The thesis argues that in order to provide a refined understanding to the housing question it has to be put in its broader socio-economic and political context. Outcomes have generally been technocratic solutions to a problem that is largely structural in nature. The gap between the political and technocratic levels of policy making and implementation is a central theme in the study. The distinctive responses to the shelter question, from both levels, over four decades in Egypt, and under a highly complex and rapidly changing political environment are reflected in the outcomes. Perceptions, priorities and criteria driving decision making of key actors, and the state's central role in mediating between external and internal interests, as well as its own, were the main themes deployed in the investigation. The findings suggest that policy making is an outcome of the interaction among the needs of the state (especially the autocratic tendencies of the leadership, and the technocrats) and external forces which determine policies according to a different agenda (geo-political): outcomes, therefore, may not be generated by a conscious policy making process, but rather, directly, from political impact. The study also suggests that structural changes in development paradigms do not appear to be the main determinant of policy shifts. A combination of short-term and specific international objectives and national interests of the state appear to be more instrumental in policy shifts and modifications in approaches.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the 'special relationship' between the United States and Great Britain and their ability to work together in the Far East despite widely divergent policies towards the People's Republic of China. The American policy of non-recognition of the PRC and its active support of the Republic of China, in opposition to Britain's early recognition of the PRC, did not hamper British and American efforts to work together to wage or contain the Cold War. In reference to the crises in the area of the Chinese offshore islands of Matsu and Quemoy, I would argue that the US and Britain put their differences aside during tense periods because they agreed generally on over-all policy, to disengage the PRC from the influence of the Soviet Union, but used different means to attain this goal. Both Britain and the US, to different degrees, attempted to establish 'two China's' in order to stabilize the situation in the Far East which left unchecked might trigger a third world war. The skirmishes in the offshore islands in 1954-55 and 1958 highlighted the danger of this situation and affected the related issues of the China seat in the United Nations, the embargo placed on trade with the People's Republic at the time of the Korean war, Hong Kong and the diplomatic relationships in the region. This thesis examines the impact of these issues on Far East policy, particularly, how agreements reached on the United Nations and trade issues affect British policy during the 1958 offshore islands crisis. The change in British policy from 1954 to 1958 is striking, reflecting external issues such as Suez and Harold Macmillan's rise to the office of prime minister. American policy, although less inflexible than is traditionally assumed, shifts slightly over the same period and attempts to normalize the situation by placing tighter controls on its ally, Chiang Kai-shek. As will be seen, British cooperation on Far Eastern issues was an important prerequisite for American manoeuvres in the region.

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