The purpose of this thesis is to analyze current housing and supplemental income programs on a national level to measure success and failures of different programs like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, Earned Income Tax Credit, and Housing Vouchers. Furthermore, this thesis attempt to discuss questions of ethics and precedent in determining to what degree the United States should engage in social safety net policies. This paper analyzes contemporary American social safety net policies on the basis of their cost to American taxpayers as well as how well it benefits those in poverty.

Throughout the International Monetary Fund's history it has been criticized for failing to address the negative impact its adjustment programs have on the poor in borrowing countries. This study examines the Fund's declared intention and actions regarding the construction of a social safety net in Indonesia from October 1997 until May 1998. A historical narrative using Constructivism as a theoretical framework is used to explain the relationship between the IMF, Suharto and the effect their interaction had on social safety net construction. This historical perspective reveals that rather than working towards building a social safety net, the Fund's main priority was the decentralization of Indonesian political and economic structures. / Master of Arts

Yes

This study examines the worsening position of jobless blue-collar workers in an increasingly meritocratic economy, and uses an innovative crossnational comparative approach to gauge how much the social safety net improves their well-being. I take pairs of unemployed autoworkers who did the same job in the same or similar firms—with the only difference being the country they live in—and compare their outcomes to measure policy effects. My analysis is based on in-depth interviews with seventy-one former autoworkers (divided among American and Canadian workers, and Detroit Three and parts factories) and thirty-six industry and community experts in Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, two metropolitan areas right across the river from one another. It also draws from ethnographic observation within households and the larger Detroit and Windsor areas, which allowed me to put my interviews in context and assemble a rich narrative portrait of unemployment and economic distress. Whereas one school of thought stresses the powerlessness of government in the face of globalization and related economic shifts, and another tends to see an expanded welfare state as a panacea for social ills, I stake out a view somewhere in the middle, arguing that the stronger supports in Canada help unemployed workers cope better with job retraining challenges, health problems, financial difficulties, and fragile family structures, but are limited in their ability to overcome relative inequalities: large gaps in education, family stability, and resources that exist between blue-collar workers and other segments of the labor force. I offer a theoretical and historical framework for understanding the evolution of the labor market and its consequences for less-educated workers, conceiving of the current iteration of capitalism as meritocratic in its focus on human capital as the just arbiter of status, and differentiating this meritocratic orientation from other egalitarian and fraternal approaches to policy and morality in past historical periods. Finally, I examine the meritocratic ideology that blunts political responses to rising inequality, finding that such views, long associated with white-collar professionals, have come to affect the thinking of even unionized blue-collar workers. / Sociology

During the course of human evolution, being a member of a group has been more beneficial for survival than being alone. Food gathering, protection from predators, cooperation, and care for offspring are distributed among group members, increasing the likelihood for survival. It is as if there is an interplay between agent and environment that interprets being socially cooperative as pleasurable and being left out as painful. Studies have been dedicated to examine how our social life is one of the most important aspects of health and well-being, particularly social relationships. Since this link has been demonstrated, it would be interesting to incorporate the field of neuroscience to understand the involvement of the human brain in our social experiences, specifically the experience of social connection. The current state of neuroscience does not allow researchers to examine this kind of subjective experiences, simply because of the lack of proper tools and knowledge. Research in this field has come a long way since the early stages, and studies have indicated on significant results regarding the involved neural regions. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the anterior insula (AI) are active when threats to social connection is experienced. They are also active in situations were survival is threatened. An experience of social connection evokes a feeling of (social) safety, in part because it activates regions of the brain associated with physical safety, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). In similar fashion, a sense of social closeness ("warmth") activates the ventral striatum (VS), which is associated with physical warmth and studies have shown that social and physical warmth share overlapping neural activity in VS. Finally, Mu-opioids have been shown to be responsible for social bonding; while using an opioid antagonist such as naltrexone, decreases the feeling of social connection. Studies in this field are few; one should take their results with caution. The field continues to grow, and the studies that have been done to date give exciting hints of the influence of social relationships on physical health and mental well-being.

Political and historical literature largely attributes the political development of the Southern Strategy to the 1964 Barry Goldwater and 1968 Richard Nixon presidential campaigns. The Southern Strategy is commonly explained as the Republican Party’s 1964 campaign decision to abandon Black voters in the North to expand its national political base of support by seeking White voters outside of the South who were angry with the political advancements of the Civil Rights Movement (Aistrup 1996, 5; Bass and DeVries 1976, 27). Discussions of Ronald Reagan’s role in the development of the Southern Strategy describe him more as a beneficiary rather than a significant influence in the Republican Party’s efforts to nationalize Southern racial politics (Aistrup 1996, 12; Black and Black 2002, 4). However, his speeches equated social spending with racial stigmas and pathological behavior. The fusion of economic issues and racial stereotypes has influenced future presidential politics since 1964 with Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech (Reagan 1964). The racialized language used by Reagan in his speech has influenced the rhetorical frame of the Southern Strategy in the last six decades. This qualitative study utilizes content analysis to examine the impact of racially coded language of Democratic and Republican presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, when they argue the legitimacy of the social safety net. The study seeks to expand the knowledge of the prevalence of the politics of pathology, which is defined as the belief that social spending encourages individuals to engage in immoral behavior and is used by presidents to mitigate or cultivate racial resentment.

This qualitative study sought insights into forced migrant youths’ sense of belonging. The study was part of the Youth Migration Project, an ongoing investigation of how young forced migrants construct their identities, sense of belonging, and future aspirations while perched on the edge of mainstream society – without normative entitlements or a voice in decision-making about their futures. Through purposive and snowball recruitment methods, the project gathered narratives of 52 forced migrant youth aged 11 to 17 who were born in conflict areas of Asia and Africa, primarily in Myanmar, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, and Somalia. In the present study, I focused on the experiences of eight forced migrant female participants living in prolonged displacement in Malaysia. My guiding research question was: How do the processes and experiences of forced migration shape migrant youths’ sense of belonging? Through a mixed-method approach, including a novel, arts-based peer-mediated storyboard narrative method, now known as Storyboard Peers, and follow-up interviews, youth shared their migration narratives, the challenges they faced while living in Malaysia, and their expectations and aspirations for their futures. The theme of safety figured prominently in the girls’ accounts and I constructed the themes of physical safety and social safety to represent the data the girls contributed. The girls’ sense of belonging and feeling at home had a direct relationship with feeling safe, valued, and loved. I also found that their physical and social environments informed their sense of belonging. Sense of belonging is neither a static nor a fixed concept; rather it is a flexible, everchanging, and reconstructed with ongoing, everyday experiences, reflections on the past, and anticipations of what the future could hold. The girls’ accounts conveyed that feelings of “belongingness” and “at home” shifted from tangible places and familiar faces to abstract concepts such as love, peace, and family. Overall, feeling safe and “at home” were rooted in basic needs being met. My findings lead me to call for governments and nongovernmental organizations to significantly reduce the length of time that youth spend in transit, promote safety, combat discrimination, fulfill basic needs, and ensure access to education and healthcare. / Graduate

This thesis consists of three essays that explore incentives and disincentives in the U.S. social safety net. In the first essay, my coauthors and I measure the size and impact of U.S. marriage taxation. Our marriage tax measure incorporates all major federal and state taxes and transfer programs. The measure is calculated as the expected percentage loss in lifetime spending from marriage, controlling for partner choice. We find an average marriage tax of 2.69 percent that is substantially higher for low-income individuals. Exploiting state-level variation, we find that the marriage taxes strongly disincentivize marriage. Among females with children, a one percentage point increase in the marriage tax rate decreases the probability of marrying by 3.69 percentage points. The second essay evaluates the effects of free pre-kindergarten (Pre-K) programs on maternal labor force participation (LFP). Pre-K rules vary across U.S. states, and most states have income eligibility requirements. To estimate the causal effects of access to Pre-K on labor supply, we examine the change in the LFP of mothers whose child becomes age-eligible for Pre-K controlling for individual factors. We find that access to Pre-K increases overall maternal LFP by 2.3 percentage points. However, the effect is significant only for mothers with certain demographic characteristics. Our results are robust across a series of placebo tests and alternative specifications and sample restrictions. In the third essay I estimate how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) changed the returns to work and affected labor supply decisions. First, I identify three natural experiments where the ACA changed work incentives. I find that depending on the experiment and affected population, the ACA changed weekly hours worked by between -3 and +2. Next, I use an exogenous shock to effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs) introduced by the ACA as an instrument to estimate the overall labor supply elasticity. I find it to be 0.1. Using this elasticity, I estimate the aggregate effect of the ACA on work effort. I find that, in the aggregate, the ACA did not affect US labor supply. However, for some groups the effect was economically and statistically significant.

No description available.

This thesis uses cross-country panel regressions to identify the effects of fossil-fuel subsidies for both oil importers and oil exporters on GDP growth, industry growth, crowding out of government expenditures in education, health, and infrastructure, government debt, carbon dioxide emissions, inequality and poverty. Fossil-fuel subsidies are found to be associated with lower levels of growth and industry growth, less government expenditure on health and education, poorer infrastructure quality, more government debt, and higher rates of carbon dioxide emissions. No relationship is found between fossil fuel subsidies and poverty and inequality. These results confirm the arguments of those that argue that fossil-fuel subsidies should be rationalized. However, removing subsidies is politically challenging. In order to identify strategies for fossil fuel reform, the successful reform efforts of Indonesia and Turkey are examined. These cases are then used to draw lessons for governments undertaking subsidy reform. The key strategies used were to exempt some regions, groups, or fuels from reform, use funds from subsidy removal for social safety nets and other poverty alleviation programs, time the reforms strategically, and communicate clearly to the public the reason for reform and how the funds will be used. These lessons are applied to countries in the developing Middle East and North Africa, including Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco.