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Browsing by Subject "Institutions"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Changing Chapultepec: construction, consumption, and cultural politics in a Mexico City Forest, 1934-1944
    (2013-12) Moerer, Andrea Kristine
    "Changing Chapultepec: Construction, Consumption, and Cultural Politics in a Mexico City Forest, 1934-1944" asks to whom does the forest belong? A study about how Chapultepec Forest in Mexico City became an emblematic space filled with didactic institutions, it argues that actors involved in social stabilization and economic modernization institutionalized the concept of "nature" in the urban environment, propagating social divisions through metaphors of naturalness to shape subjects in an era of heightened concern with both Mexicanness and foreign investment. Thus it documents the shifting understandings of what constituted nature through four thematic chapters looking at a failed international exposition, two foundational museums, an exhibition-, print- and legislative-based crusade against the use of charcoal, and out-of-doors sporting and consumer activities. These chapters detail conflicts among symbolism and materiality, popular access and privatization, and national goals and an effort to appeal to foreigners. Criminals, presidents, elite and working women, foreign businessmen, schoolchildren, entertainers, scientists, and civil servants among others demonstrate that though Chapultepec is considered a public space, its meaning and usage have been highly constructed and restricted.
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    Essays on International Economics
    (2014-08) Perez Reyna, David Alejandro
    This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, Enoch Hill and I present a general equilibrium model where heterogeneous consumers endogenously choose whether to become workers, consumers or entrepreneurs in order to analyze how limits on the leverage of banks affect real output. In our model tighter limits on the leverage of banks cause an increase in the spread between the interest rate that banks charge for loans and the interest rate that banks pay for deposits. A higher spread results in two types of distortions: First, firms with the same productivity will have different size. Second, productive firms will cease to exist, while nonproductive ones will enter. These distortions result in lower production.In the second essay, Enoch Hill and I develop a general equilibrium model of theft, private security and public law enforcement (PLE) which matches both macro and micro empirical evidence. We find a non-monotonic relation between PLE and aggregate production. In particular, for countries with relatively small amounts of PLE, increasing the level can result in a reduction of aggregate production and welfare primarily due to an increase in the incarceration rate. However, for countries with higher levels of PLE, an increase in the level improves production and welfare. We also find the private security causes a negative externality in economies with low levels of PLE.In the third essay, Enoch Hill, Michael Maio and I propose an original model of firm hierarchy which suggests that firm structure is important for understanding the wage structure. In our model, more productive firms choose to employ more levels of management, which requires a higher average level of skill in workers and consequently a higher average skill premium. This is consistent with what we document in the Chilean data and also agrees with the firm size to skill premium relationship commonly documented in the literature. Additionally, our model predicts that skill premium is increasing in the ratio of workers to managers, a fact we also observe in the Chilean data.
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    Fail Epics: Gender, Race, and the Narration of Institutional Failure
    (2016-12) Bashore, Katie
    Everywhere around us we see instances of institutional failure: government malfeasance, fraud and corruption in the banking industry, the collapse of mass access to higher education, home foreclosures, rising rates of poverty and houselessness, swelling prison populations, and failed military endeavors, among other examples. One can argue that the crisis management strategies engineered by various statist and imperialist entities in light of recent disastrous events create the conditions under which institutions face erosive restructuring. While valid, such an analysis does not allow us to explore the complex ways that people grapple with these circumstances. “Fail Epics” is invested in developing a cultural study of institutional failure, the narration of which is integral to how subjects see themselves as part of their political modernity. As such, I argue that the story we tell about institutional failure is just as important as the contexts from which it emerges. My work critiques the rhetorics through which we name and assess institutional failure. It explore how the languages of injury, loss, abandonment, and betrayal, so commonly used to articulate failure, liberalize the themes of precarity that have long animated the lives of the racially and sexually marginalized: the poor, criminalized, undocumented, and unprotected. To broadly attribute the precarious nature of life is not merely to trespass on these histories but to occult them, rendering certain, minoritized experiences of and reactions to institutional failure something wholly unrecognizable, even uncanny, to contemporary formulations of injustice. In turn, I contend that the narration of institutional failure reproduces normative notions of violence and injury that, nevertheless, do not go uncontested. This dissertation illuminates the ways that vernacular representations of institutional failure—in popular political nonfiction, television, and news media—implicitly center particular experiences that do not allow us to more robustly examine the traumatic effects of power or the politics by which lives come to matter.
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    Institution building in an emerging industry: lessons from the carbon offset industry.
    (2012-05) Rawhouser, Hans Nikolas
    Industry creation requires the building of institutions that support and enable economic exchange. Among the many actors involved in building these institutions are firms. The three papers of this dissertation investigate how firms are involved in the process of building these institutions in the context of the global carbon offset industry from 2003 to 2011. In the first paper I draw on the innovation management literature to contrast two ways in which the public and private sector can interact in the rulemaking process. I illustrate these differences by comparing the development of rules in two different carbon offset systems: the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the Climate Action Reserve. In the second paper, I test whether the 152 firms among the population of 1599 firms operating in the CDM benefit from choosing to help build the rules that are needed for all firms to operate in the CDM. I find that, in addition to providing a collective good for the entire industry, these institution-building activities provide firms visibility among potential customers. In the final paper, I find that institution-building actions in the CDM tend to signal the presence of potential competitors, which deters local industry growth among the 91 developing countries which host carbon offset projects. Prior commitment and capabilities of local country governments positively moderate this relationship. Collectively, these findings demonstrate the important role of firms in shaping the institutions that support industry emergence and influence industry evolution.
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    Making Marijuana Medical: Governing Bodies in Minnesota's Medical Cannabis Program
    (2022-06) Steel, Ryan
    For over a century, the defining, distribution, regulation, and punitive control of so-called ‘dangerous drugs’ has been a central feature of State policies and institutional practices in the US (and across the globe). The War on Drugs—which refers to the various punitive drug control-related policies and practices enacted over the last century—has assembled together a vast array of institutions, resources, and practices to authoritatively govern the use of ‘drugs’ (as defined by the State) and drug using bodies. Virtually no social institutions have been untouched by the Drug War, including medicine, criminal justice, the State, corporate manufacturing, the family, labor/employment, and culture, among others. Not only have they all been affected by the Drug War, but I argue they have been deeply shaped by it—that these institutions’ development has emerged in historically specific ways by their constitutive relationships to the Drug War. In that sense, the Drug War can be thought of as a machine made up of a variety of institutions (and the bodies that comprise them) that fit together and are configured in specific ways and, thereby, reconfigure and constitute each of these parts in the process. From this machinery, specific forms of governance are produced, affecting all that comes into contact with it and its apparatuses. This dissertation examines the ways in which the Drug War continues to operate in an era of medicalized drug reform through an in-depth case study of Minnesota’s medical cannabis program, which is one of the most restrictive in the US. By examining legislative hearings, professional position statements, in-depth interviews with medical cannabis patients, institutional and policy analysis, survey data from healthcare professionals, analysis of state-collected program data, and four years of ethnographic observation, this study provides insights into the institutional configurations of the program, the forms of governance it produces, and the consequences for patient bodies in their everyday lives.
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    Power of the President: party competition in presidential regimes
    (2014-01) Williams-Wyche, Shaun
    I argue that party competition in legislative elections is partly a function of presidential elections. Previous research on spatial competition has assumed that parties are competing in parliamentary regimes, where the only election of concern for parties and voters is the legislative election. However, in presidential regimes, presidential elections lead to relatively centrist positioning of candidates, and coattail effects from the presidential elections help shape the legislative elections. Through spatial modeling, I demonstrate how presidentialism gives incentives for parties to take centrist positions in legislative elections. Using cross-national data, I give empirical validation to the spatial models by showing that presidential elections make parties relatively more centrist in legislative elections as compared to parties in parliamentary elections. Further empirical validation is given through case studies on Israel and France, which have both experienced changes regarding the selection of their executive. The evidence in these case studies also show that voters' views of the main parties are affected by these institutional changes.
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    Underutilized Productive Resources and National Institutions of Corporate Governance: Effects on Firm Innovation Strategy
    (2013-07) Malen, Joel Baker
    I investigate the role of underutilized firm resources in motivating firm efforts to innovate. Building on ideas originally articulated by Edith Penrose in The Theory of the Growth of the Firm (1959), I argue that the intensity with which firms engage in innovation development is influenced by heterogeneity in human and physical resource levels within the firm. Moreover, the strength of these relationships is contingent on variation in firm- and country level factors. Penrosian resources motivate firm innovation effort more strongly in firms with more extensive financial slack and during periods of slowing growth. At the national level, I argue that the extent to which Penrosian resources motivate innovation effort is contingent on the strength of national regulatory institutions that shape corporate governance. I test these arguments on a sample of more than 3,000 firms from 18 countries over the 1996 to 2005 time period. Arguments regarding the effects of national corporate governance institutions (NCGIs) are tested using a two-stage estimated dependent variable regression methodology that is novel to International Management research. Empirical tests reveal support for the main arguments. This dissertation contributes to management research by operationalizing Penrosian concepts of underutilized human and physical resources and demonstrating how levels of non-financial resources shape firm innovation strategy. At the same time, I establish links between home-country regulatory institutional structures and firm-level innovation strategy. When the rights of either minority shareholder or employee stakeholders are more protected by NCGIs, firm decision making with regard to the management of underutilized resources is constrained, moderating the strength with which Penrosian resources motivate innovation effort. Implications for managers and policy makers are provided.