Contesting Migrant Precarity in the Global South? Informal Labor Markets, High-Risk Coping Strategies, and Low-Income Filipino Migrants in the United Arab Emirates

Despite extensive host state labor reforms, scholars contend that temporary labor migrants are systematically remain vulnerable to economic precarity under the Gulf states’ kafala sponsorship system. Using the case of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this article posits that, despite legal and financial sanctions, low-income migrants navigate their transnational economic precarity status by strategically engaging with host country informal labor markets through three high-risk coping strategies: accumulating debt, subleasing and enterprising. Ultimately, the study highlights low-income migrants navigate and co-produce precarity while simultaneously weaponizing informal labor markets as a (marginal yet) central "site" of everyday contestation within restrictive migration system in the Global South

Best Practices for Enabling Internal Talent Mobility Across a Large firm with Multiple Business Units

Internal talent mobility is a central measure of how effectively organizations redeploy existing employees to critical roles across business units. Despite its strategic importance, there is no single, industry-standard approach, and many companies face obstacles such as network-based bias, siloed succession planning, limited skills, visibility, and managerial resistance. Research indicates that integrating accountability metrics, structured rotational programs, and enabling technologies yields the strongest results in promoting cross-unit movement. This report synthesizes core challenges, presents a framework of best practices, and delivers actionable recommendations to strengthen leadership mobility at scale

What Should HR do to Help Employees get Ready for GenAI in the Workplace?

As GenAI continues to evolve, it introduces more than just new technology. It represents a fundamental shift in how work is organized, how skills are developed, and how decisions are made. HR leaders are uniquely positioned to manage this transformation. They must ensure employees are prepared, supported, and guided through this change in a way that aligns with business goals and ethical standards. This summary explores what HR should be doing to prepare employees and the strategic approaches it can use to lead GenAI adoption effectively

Mobility, Madness, Modernity: A Hauntology of Insides and Outsides

Delivered as the keynote address of the 27th Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference on March 7, 2025

Resisting in Place: Imagining Disaster Recovery as Long-Term Community Life in Post 3.11 Fukushima

This paper explores how storytelling, sacred ritual, and place-based care shape long-term recovery in Namie and Ishinomaki, Japan, after the 3.11 Triple Disaster. Through ethnographic interviews, field visits, and attention to personal and cultural narratives, the paper examines how residents make sense of loss, not only by rebuilding physically, but by tending to memory and meaning. In Namie, a Buddhist priest and his wife restore their temple while caring for a landscape altered by radiation and displacement. In Ishinomaki, a museum worker anchors her grief in the shared memory of a devastated town. These stories are not simply anecdotes, they are forms of representation that carry emotional truth, offer continuity, and shape the social fabric of recovery. By foregrounding everyday acts of care and narrative practice, this paper suggests that recovery unfolds not only through policy and infrastructure, but through the way people tell, share, and live their stories. It invites planners and scholars to take seriously the representational labor that sustains communities long after the disaster has faded from headlines

Re-evaluating nutrition models to predict calf growth

Written for and presented during 2025 Cornell Nutrition Conferenc

Compound data for User-Friendly, Living Coordination-Insertion Polymerizations with Broad Functional Group Tolerance

Please cite as: Hsu, J. H.; Haynes, C. A.; Macbeth, A. J.; Girbau, R.; Borowski, J. E.; Reilly, M. A.; Taylor, A. L.; Peltier, C. R.; Birch, C.; Noonan, K. J. T.; Coates, G. W.; Fors, B. P. (2025) Compound data for User-Friendly, Living Coordination-Insertion Polymerizations with Broad Functional Group Tolerance. [Dataset] Cornell University eCommons Repository. https://doi.org/10.7298/hte0-qx36These files contain data supporting all results reported in Hsu et. al. User-Friendly, Living Coordination-Insertion Polymerizations with Broad Functional Group Tolerance. In Hsu et. al. we found: The development of new user-friendly polymerizations for the synthesis of advanced functional materials has the ability to significantly accelerate discovery in materials science. However, it is often difficult to develop robust methodologies that overcome the sensitivities of many polymerization types and enable well-controlled polymerizations of diverse functional monomers. Herein, we introduce (Ad3P)Pd(Me)SbF6 as a bench-stable, single-component catalyst that is capable of living coordination-insertion polymerization of substituted norbornenes conducted open to air, at room temperature, and with broad tolerance to over 30 different functional groups. Our studies revealed that the electron-donating phosphine ligand, tri(1- adamantyl)phosphine (Ad3P), and a silver salt activating species were pivotal for maintaining well-controlled polymerizations in the presence of coordinating functionalities. We demonstrated the livingness of this catalytic system, and generated block copolymers, ultra-high molecular weight polymers, and functional polymers from a range of substituted norbornenes. Overall, this work enables coordination-insertion polymerization as a user-friendly technique for the direct synthesis of advanced functional materials.This work was supported by the Center for Alkaline-Based Energy Solutions (CABES), an Energy Frontier Research Center program supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, under Grant DE-SC0019445. This work made use of the Cornell Center for Materials Research Shared Facilities that are supported by the NSF MRSEC program (DMR1719875), and the NMR facility, which is supported, in part, by the NSF through MRI award CHE-1531632

Navigating The Intersection of Policy and Local Priorities: A Reflective Assessment of Transportation Vulnerability in Watertown Jefferson County

This study investigates the broader challenge of conducting vulnerability assessments in transportation planning, particularly in rural regions where balancing federal funding mandates with local infrastructure priorities presents significant complexities. Vulnerability assessments are essential tools for identifying infrastructure risks, yet their effectiveness is often constrained by funding eligibility requirements and policy frameworks that may overlook locally significant assets. This research examines how vulnerability assessments can better integrate data-driven methodologies with community-informed insights to ensure equitable resilience outcomes. Drawing from established frameworks like those employed by the Genesee and Ulster Transportation Councils, this study explores strategies for improving vulnerability assessments in the Watertown Jefferson County Transportation Council (WJCTC) region. The study highlights the need for improved flexible funding models, enhanced local engagement, and tailored assessment frameworks to ensure that critical infrastructure in Watertown is effectively identified and prioritized, particularly for roads and facilities that serve underserved communities or face heightened climate risks.Barton & Loguidic

Community Engagement in Chile: A New Generation, Conditioned Legitimacy, and Academic Capitalism

179 pagesSince the 2011 student social movement erupted, Chile has become an example of resistance to neoliberal policies and inequalities in higher education, leading to a new Higher Education Law in 2018. In 2019, a social uprising shocked the country, inaugurating a “constitutional moment” where two constitutional assemblies created two drafts of national constitutions that were rejected in national referendums between 2020 and 2023. In this convoluted context, Chile is experiencing a new national reform on community engagement that mandates all higher education institutions to be accredited on community engagement (vinculación con el medio) by 2025. The main purpose of this dissertation is to analyze how engaged scholars in Chile are embedded in this socio-political context from a socio-historical approach. The study is presented in three articles that focus on three key areas of this context: the emergence of a new generation of engaged scholars, the struggle to earn and maintain legitimacy, and the entangled relation with academic capitalism. Research methods draw from an interpretivist and critical epistemology and qualitative methodologies. It used ethnographic research methods, participant observation, and interviews with 52 scholars from two universities (one public and one private) in Santiago, Chile. A new generation is observed whose purpose for developing community engagement projects is to promote systemic change, respond to pressing social demands, influence public policy, develop critical thinking, and help those considered in need. The university, governed by the requirements of the world class university project, offers a conditioned legitimacy to engaged scholars’ work, which is responded to by operationalizing the accreditation requirements, negotiating by demonstrating the academic value of their work, and resisting by recovering the Latin American university project. Academic capitalism and community engagement not only co-produce services for a fee but also entrepreneurs, consumers, clients, market niches, and a rationalization process expressed in professionalization and standardization.2026-06-1

Three Essays on Financial Technology

182 pagesThis dissertation makes several contributions to the literature on Financial Technology. In the first two chapters I push the frontier of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in finance by developing a novel Large Language Topic Model and a constrained optimization framework marrying Reinforcement Learning with Natural Language Processing. I demonstrate the value of these algorithms by applying them to mergers and acquisitions and faith-based investing, respectively. In the final chapter I investigate how perpetual contracts, originally proposed by Robert Shiller in 1992 to price illiquid assets, affect microstructure in underlying spot markets using cryptocurrency markets as a sandbox. More specifically, in Chapter 1 I propose a novel Large Language Model to generate time-varying exposure of firms to arbitrary user-defined risks using conference calls. This approach respects language complexity, does not require an expert to generate an extensive list of keywords, produces exposure measures with respect to any query and is directly applicable to any textual input. The model learns from synthetic corpora for the first time in finance research. Leveraging this methodology, I generate firm-level exposures to geopolitical risk, population aging, climate change and demonstrate how exposure to such risks affects M&A activity. Geopolitical risk makes firms more likely to be an acquirer and less a target. It is propagated through supply chains and makes firms acquire targets in the U.S. with higher investment irreversibility driving vertical integration within the U.S. Population aging increases aggregate M&A activity doubling the effect from labor shortage on M&A activity. Finally, I show that managers pay larger premia for low climate change risk targets, while investors react negatively to deal announcements of targets undergoing structural change. Chapter 2 (joint work with Maureen O'Hara) introduces a new approach for Socially Responsible Investing based on techniques from Artificial Intelligence to enhance investor returns. Focusing on faith-based investing, our approach draws on Large Language Models and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to address the challenges posed by moral constraints on portfolio selection. Using the Global X S&P500 CATH ETF (the largest Catholic values fund) as an example, we use textual analysis to identify companies consistent with the values mandate, allowing us to create “synthetic CATH” portfolios of different sizes and with longer time horizons. We further optimize each portfolio using DRL to arrive at an optimal set of portfolio weights that maximize out-of-sample Sharpe ratios. Using the tools of AI, we demonstrate dramatic improvements in risk-adjusted returns closing the performance gap in values-based investing. Finally, Chapter 3 (joint work with Qihong Ruan) examines perpetual futures contracts' impact on cryptocurrency spot market quality. Using high-frequency order book data from 2017 to 2023, we document that spot market quality follows a U-shaped pattern over perpetual contracts' eight-hour funding cycles. Exploiting both the exogenous termination of perpetual trading at Huobi Exchange and 95 staggered contract introductions, we identify a seemingly puzzling liquidity pattern: perpetual contracts increase spot trading volume while widening quoted spreads. To resolve this puzzle, we demonstrate that this pattern reflects increased informed trading, particularly during funding settlement hours and periods of larger funding fee magnitudes. Market makers respond to heightened adverse selection risk by widening quoted spreads.2027-06-1