<p> This dissertation examines the conditions that facilitate or impede the transformation of land rights from common to individual property. It does so by focusing on cotton-growing areas of Tajikistan, which exhibit substantial variation in patterns of land tenure arrangement. Specifically, the project addresses the following questions: Why, despite efforts by state and international organizations to support land reform, some, but not other, farmworkers established individual tenure by withdrawing their land shares from collective peasant farms? Why do some cotton-growing areas have more agricultural land held in family farms, whereas other areas in collective peasant farms? Drawing on the distributional theory of property rights, I argue that to understand why land tenure reform has unfolded as it did in Tajikistan, one has to consider the effect of land reform strategy, land allocation formula, observable resources such as off-farm income, and reliability of access to water and its interaction with the level of labor supply. These factors affect the bargaining power of Soviet rural elites-turned-managers of collective peasant farms, who resist land subdivision, and Soviet farmworkers-turned-shareholders, who prefer land individualization, and as a consequence cause much of the variability one observes in patterns of land redistribution. Predicated on qualitative (interviews and participant observations), and quantitative (multilevel linear and logistic models) methods of analysis, the findings of this dissertation have implications for the literature on property rights, decentralization, and the postcommunist literature on land reform, and generate policy implications that might be relevant to government and international organizations involved in promoting land reform in Tajikistan and other developing countries.</p>

<p> In the early 2000s, Chicago emerged as an archetypal city in the broader movement to remake public housing. Chicago&rsquo;s Plan for Transformation committed upwards of $1.5 billion to demolish high-rise buildings, rehabilitate a portion of existing stock, and create 12 new mixed-income developments on the footprint of public housing sites. Policy incentives&mdash;such as financing for capital development, long-term rental subsidies, and public land transfers&mdash;aimed to encourage public-private partnerships. During the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath, however, the promised transformation proved financially difficult&mdash;if not impossible in certain geographic areas&mdash;to complete at the scale intended. That shift in the economic context, along with subsequent political responses, thoroughly altered the policy strategy. To date few empirical investigations have analyzed how these changes restructured the very nature of public housing reforms, and what this restructuring means for policies that require market intervention for the provision of public goods. This dissertation performs just that empirical analysis. </p><p> <i>Privatizing Chicago</i> examines the city&rsquo;s public housing reforms as an example of &ldquo;actually existing&rdquo; (Brenner &amp; Theodore, 2002) neoliberal urbanism and explains how specific political actors, processes, and institutions altered market-based policies intended to reshape urban poor neighborhoods. Viewing Chicago as a neoliberal city requires both recognizing its political landscape as one where the primary aim of municipal government is to promote an entrepreneurial agenda that positions the economic success of the city above all other interests, as well as viewing the potential for progressive movements to contest this agenda. Prior to this study, Chicago&rsquo;s reforms had not been examined across time or geographic areas using critiques of neoliberal urbanism, nor through qualitative methods. This study fills that gap and uses the case of Chicago to improve the empirical understanding of neoliberal urbanism more generally. </p><p> The study accomplishes this through a case study of Chicago&rsquo;s public housing reforms between 2000 to 2016. It shows how government officials, real estate developers, bankers, lawyers, planners, grassroots activists, and others pursued policy strategies favorable to their interests over a 16-year period&mdash;a time marked by the economic recession. My methodological approach is a theory-driven form of ethnography, and my analysis draws from 61 in-depth interviews, field observations over 22 months, archival research of over 500 documents, and the analysis of financial data. This approach brought to light the multiple and contradictory visions at work within the neoliberal framework: competing ideas of the proper partnerships between the public and private sectors, shifting authority among local and national government agencies, and struggles for community redevelopment on the land where high-rises once stood. </p><p> In probing these conflicts and contradictions, I argue that the overall effect of the reforms was to burnish Chicago&rsquo;s status as a &ldquo;global city,&rdquo; but it also contributed to land appropriation, capital accumulation, and the displacement of thousands of low-income African-American residents. The cycle of government intervention into market failure will continue as long as the role of the state remains dominated by an agenda of capital expansion, rather than of equitable urban development that ensures a place for low-income, predominately racial minority communities to live. Theoretical contributions related to neoliberal urbanism align around four themes: (a) political agency and resistance; (b) privatization and financialization; (c) local state control, federal devolution, and global processes; and (d) the relevance of race. A set of policy implications drives towards recommendations regarding affordable housing policy, democratic governance arrangements, collective action focused on social justice, and market-based policy strategies.</p>

<p> Since the end of the Cold War, recurring civil conflicts have been the dominant form of violent armed conflict in the world, accounting for 70% of conflicts active between 2000-2013. Duration and intensity of episodes within recurring conflicts in Africa exhibit four behaviors characteristic of archetypal dynamic system structures. The overarching questions asked in this study are whether these patterns are robustly correlated with fundamental concepts of resiliency in dynamic systems that scale from micro-to macro levels; are they consistent with theoretical risk factors and causal mechanisms; and what are the policy implications. </p><p> Econometric analysis and dynamic systems modeling of 36 conflicts in Africa between 1989 -2014 are combined with process tracing in a case study of Somalia to evaluate correlations between state characteristics, peace operations and foreign aid on the likelihood of observed conflict patterns, test hypothesized causal mechanisms across scales, and develop policy recommendations for increasing human security while decreasing resiliency of belligerents. Findings are that observed conflict patterns scale from micro to macro levels; are strongly correlated with state characteristics that proxy a mix of cooperative (e.g., gender equality) and coercive (e.g., security forces) conflict-balancing mechanisms; and are weakly correlated with UN and regional peace operations and humanitarian aid. Interactions between peace operations and aid interventions that effect conflict persistence at micro levels are not seen in macro level analysis, due to interdependent, micro-level feedback mechanisms, sequencing, and lagged effects. </p><p> This study finds that the dynamic system structures associated with observed conflict patterns contain tipping points between balancing mechanisms at the interface of micro-macro level interactions that are determined as much by factors related to how intervention policies are designed and implemented, as what they are. Policy implications are that reducing risk of conflict persistence requires that peace operations and aid interventions (1) simultaneously increase transparency, promote inclusivity (with emphasis on gender equality), and empower local civilian involvement in accountability measures at the local levels; (2) build bridges to horizontally and vertically integrate across levels; and (3) pave pathways towards conflict transformation mechanisms and justice that scale from the individual, to community, regional, and national levels.</p>

Asthma cannot be cured, but it can be managed. Asthma management is a public health issue that is complex. Medication, asthma triggers, age, and the environment are all factors that impact asthma management. There is a gap in research in terms of what lifestyle characteristics need to be in place in order for adults to manage asthma. Shaw found that posture care is a lifestyle variable that should be explored as it relates to asthma management in older adults. The Life University Clinic (Marietta, GA) sees asthmatic patients daily and teaches them about a posture care routine through a program called Straighten Up. Based on the health belief model, this study explored how the Straighten Up routine exercises impacted asthma management in adult asthmatic patients with severe asthma (n =304 ). Ordinal regression and logistic regression was used to analyze the relationships between using the Straighten Up posture exercises (independent variable) for 3 months with 3 dependent variables: patients' sleep patterns (night time awakenings due to asthma), use of quick relief medication, and hospitalizations (ER Visits) due to asthma. Straighten Up posture exercises reduced night time sleep interruptions, but not hospitalizations due to asthma or the use of quick relief medications. For persons with asthma, Straighten Up could be an additional tool to manage their asthma and reduce the known impacts of sleep deprivation including accidents, memory loss, and heart disease. For organizations who serve asthmatics, Straighten Up could be an additional resource to share with the population they serve. As a result of this study, Straighten Up exercises are recommended for adult asthmatics with severe asthma as part of their asthma management plan.

<p> This thesis will demonstrate the ways in which Mailer treats the <i> Gilmore v. Utah</i> case, the space of the courtroom, and the legal system that Gary Gilmore challenged. <i>The Executioner&rsquo;s Song</i> can be used as a document of sorts, displaying changing attitudes within the traditional American fascination with marginal characters, death-row inmates specifically. This thesis also argues that Mailer presents a man who believes in the law and in upholding the sentences that are given to those who break it. Additionally, Mailer exploits the space of the courtroom and the state of Utah as places in order to establish a discussion regarding capital punishment and criminal figures in the United States. Finally, this thesis will look at the specific way that Mailer presents the legal facts of the case and the liberties he took with these details in order to construct his &ldquo;true-life novel&rdquo; in a very particular way.</p>

This thesis is made of two parts. Part I (Chapter 1 to 3) focuses on the ethical aspects of the current challenges in microfinance. Chapter 1 addresses the question of the place and importance of credit in development policies, through the debate on the right to credit. Chapter 2 and 3 then question the fairness of the interest rates charged by the microfinance institutions. Chapter 2 analyzes whether the fairness criteria depend on more basic principles of justice, such as Rawls’ principles described in A Theory of Justice (Rawsl, 1976). Chapter 3 then reviews some of the implicit and explicit definitions of fair interest rates and proposes an original methodology, with David Gauthiers’ contractuarian theory. It determines what a fair interest rate would be when lending to the poor. Based on the results of the two first chapters, Part II (Chapter 4 to 6) focuses on the role of donors in microfinance. Chapters 4 and 5 use two original databases, of 67 and 100 MFIs respectively to study the impact of subsidies on the MFIs’ management, through their rating evaluation (Chapter 4) and MFIs’ performance and management decisions (Chapter 5). Chapter 4 will analyze the relationship between the quality of management, as rated by a specialized agency, and the amount of subsidies. Chapter 5 will study pricing policy, the clientele and the potential moral hazard of subsidized institutions. Concluding this analysis, Chapter 6 gives some guidelines on the use of donor subsidies, especially in their interaction with the new private commercial actors, such as investment funds.

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No description available.

<p> This dissertation explores how decisions about the forecasting process can affect the evaluation of forecasting performance, in general and in the domain of residential electricity demand estimation. Decisions of interest include those around data sourcing, sampling, clustering, temporal magnification, algorithm selection, testing approach, evaluation metrics, and others. </p><p> Models of the forecasting process and analysis methods are formulated in terms of a three-tier decision taxonomy, by which decision effects are exposed through systematic enumeration of the techniques resulting from those decisions. A computation platform based on the models is implemented to compute and visualize the effects. The methods and computation platform are first demonstrated by applying them to 3,003 benchmark datasets to investigate various decisions, including those that could impact the relationship between data entropy and forecastability. Then, they are used to study over 10,624 week-ahead and day-ahead residential electricity demand forecasting techniques, utilizing fine-resolution electricity usage data collected over 18 months on groups of 782 and 223 households by real smart electric grids in Ireland and Australia, respectively. </p><p> The main finding from this research is that forecasting performance is highly sensitive to the interaction effects of many decisions. Sampling is found to be an especially effective data strategy, clustering not so, temporal magnification mixed. Other relationships between certain decisions and performance are surfaced, too. While these findings are empirical and specific to one practically scoped investigation, they are potentially generalizable, with implications for residential electricity demand estimation, smart electric grid design, and electricity policy.</p>

Esa obra explora las complejidades de la economía y la sociedad cubana ahora, después de las reformas económicas dramáticas de 2012. El fenómeno de la fuga de cerebros refleja un cambio dramático en la economía cubana, en que los salarios públicos y otros subsidios del gobierno ya no están suficientes y los trabajos lucrativos no necesariamente requieren un título avanzado. En un país conocido internacionalmente por su población educado, Cuba tiene una crisis demográfica en que muchas profesionales, particularmente los jóvenes educados, salen del sector público al sector privado o aún emigran del país. El sector privado da una ventaja a algunas personas, también, cuando algunos grupos marginados están desventajados en términos económicos. Para restaurar y proteger la esencia del socialismo cubano, que prometa un nivel de vida básica y la igualdad de oportunidades por las instituciones, el gobierno debe implementar algunas reformas educativas y económicas. El gobierno puede asegurar un futuro para los ideales del socialismo cubano por esas reformas. El crecimiento económico, si es inclusivo, puede lograr los objetivos del socialismo cubano aún mejor que el sistema económico del pasado, y tiene el potencio para mejorar el nivel de vida de todos los cubanos.