The Relevance of Caste in Contemporary India: Reexamining the Affirmative Action Debate

With the changing significance of caste and caste identity, this thesis explores the role of affirmative action or reservations in Indian higher education. Specifically, it aims to reopen the debate on the dominance of a creamy layer among the OBCs in an increasingly nationalist India. Viewing caste through the lens of ethnic identity, this thesis draws comparisons between the identity of OBCs and Scheduled Castes and Tribes, OBCs of the Hindi Belt and OBCs of the South, followed by an analysis of the politicization of caste identity today. The thesis concludes with an evaluation of affirmative action today and possible policy avenues that the State must prioritize

ESSAYS ON THE ROLE OF POLICIES IN MAJOR PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUES

This dissertation explores the role of policy on health outcomes and behaviors that relate to major public health concerns. Essay 1 and Essay 2 investigate the effects of Medicaid expansions on substance-use outcomes. Essay 3 examines the impacts of school reopenings in Texas on COVID-19 and mobility outcomes. Essay 1 studies the effect of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion. Using State Drug Utilization Data 2011-2017, I find that the Medicaid expansion is associated with an increase of 40-60 Medicaid-paid opioid prescriptions per 1,000 people aged 19–64. However, the results suggest that post-expansion prescriptions are, on average, shorter or prescribed in lower doses. Analyses of commonly misused opioids show that hydrocodone is the most affected substance, which makes up more than 50 percent of all Medicaid-paid opioid prescriptions. I do not find evidence that the Medicaid expansion is associated with the fentanyl epidemic. Essay 2 studies the impact of Medicaid expansions on discharge outcomes of substance-use-disorder treatment and racial disparities in treatment completion. Using data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration 2008-2018 and event-study analysis, I do not find evidence that Medicaid expansions affect treatment completion rate in public-funded specialty treatment facilities. Analyses on racial subsamples, however, show some evidence of a negative effect on treatment completion among Black patients, while there is little effect among White and Hispanic patients. Essay 3 examines the effect of fall 2020 school reopenings in Texas on county-level COVID-19 cases and fatalities. Analyses from hand-collected data imply that school reopenings led to at least 43,000 additional COVID-19 cases and 800 additional fatalities within the first two months. Results on mobility, using Safegraph data to provide evidence that spillovers to adults’ behaviors contributed to these large effects. Median time spent outside the home on a typical weekday increased substantially in neighborhoods with large numbers of school-age children, suggesting a return to in-person work or increased outside-of-home leisure activities among parents

The Ambivalence of Power in the Twenty-First Century Economy

The Ambivalence of Power in the Twenty-First Century Economy contributes to the understanding of the ambivalent nature of power, oscillating between conflict and cooperation, public and private, global and local, formal and informal, and does so from an empirical perspective. It offers a collection of country-based cases, as well as critically assesses the existing conceptions of power from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The diverse analyses of power at the macro, meso or micro levels allow the volume to highlight the complexity of political economy in the twenty-first century. Each chapter addresses key elements of that political economy (from the ambivalence of the cases of former communist countries that do not conform with the grand narratives about democracy and markets, to the dual utility of new technologies such as face-recognition), thus providing mounting evidence for the centrality of an understanding of ambivalence in the analysis of power, especially in the modern state power-driven capitalism. Anchored in economic sociology and political economy, this volume aims to make ‘visible’ the dimensions of power embedded in economic practices. The chapters are predominantly based on post-communist practices, but this divergent experience is relevant to comparative studies of how power and economy are interrelated

Modeling Economic Impacts of the Inland Waterway Transportation System

The inland waterway transportation system of the United States (U.S.) handles 11.7 billion tons of freight annually and connects the heartland of the U.S. with the rest of the world by providing a fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly mode of transportation. This dissertation aims to create decision support tools for maritime stakeholders to measure the economic impacts of the inland waterway transportation systems under real world scenarios including disruptions, demand changes, port expansion decisions, and channel deepening investments. Monte Carlo simulation, system dynamics, discrete-event simulation, agent-based modeling, and multiregional input-output modeling techniques are utilized to analyze the complex relationships between inland waterway transportation system components and regional economic impact factors. The first research contribution illustrates that the expected duration of a disruption determines whether decision makers are better off waiting for the waterway system to reopen or switching to an alternative mode of transportation. Moreover, total disruption cost can be reduced by increasing estimation accuracy of disruption duration. The second research contribution shows that without future investment in inland waterway infrastructure, a sustainable system and associate economic impacts cannot be generated in the long-term. The third research contribution illustrates that investing in bottleneck system components results in higher economic impact than investing in non-bottleneck components. The developed models can be adapted to any inland waterway transportation system in the U.S. by utilizing data obtained by publically available sources to measure the economic impacts under various scenarios to inform capital investment decisions and support an economically sustainable inland waterway transportation system

Essentially Doomed: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Has Impacted the American Restaurant Industry

COVID-19 appeared unpredictably in late 2019 and developed into the most catastrophic global outbreak of the last century over the course of the next three years. The highly contagious virus infected hundreds of millions of people worldwide and was responsible for the death of millions. Beyond the devastating health impact the virus had on the world, pandemic related shutdowns resulted in massive economic consequences. Social distancing measures resulted in months long shutdowns and restrictions for businesses throughout the United States, resulting in massive revenue and employment losses. Of specific industries heavily impacted by the pandemic in the United States, the American restaurant industry was devastated by the pandemic and its shutdowns. Despite being among America’s largest industries by employment and being impacted by COVID-19 significantly worse than most other industries, three years later the restaurant industry is still fighting to recover. This paper is intended to answer the question of what the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was on the American restaurant industry. This question will be further examined as 3 sub-questions; these questions are: 1. How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact the American restaurant industry? 2. How were independent restaurants impacted by the pandemic in comparison to restaurant chains? 3. How did the pandemic change the future of the restaurant industry

Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile. Workshop Proceedings, Padova, 7 September 2017

Elena Ferrante is an internationally acclaimed Italian novelist whose real identity has been kept secret by E/O publishing house for more than 25 years. Owing to her popularity, major Italian and foreign newspapers have long tried to discover her real identity. However, only a few attempts have been made to foster a scientific debate on her work. In 2016, Arjuna Tuzzi and Michele Cortelazzo led an Italian research team that conducted a preliminary study and collected a well-founded, large corpus of Italian novels comprising 150 works published in the last 30 years by 40 different authors. Moreover, they shared their data with a select group of international experts on authorship attribution, profiling, and analysis of textual data: Maciej Eder and Jan Rybicki (Poland), Patrick Juola (United States), Vittorio Loreto and his research team, Margherita Lalli and Francesca Tria (Italy), George Mikros (Greece), Pierre Ratinaud (France), and Jacques Savoy (Switzerland). The chapters of this volume report the results of this endeavour that were first presented during the international workshop Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile in Padua on 7 September 2017 as part of the 3rd IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data. The fascinating research findings suggest that Elena Ferrante\u2019s work definitely deserves \u201cmany hands\u201d as well as an extensive effort to understand her distinct writing style and the reasons for her worldwide success

A Thousand Views of the Cathedral: The Law, Politics, and Statistics of Pandemic Dashboards

This Article explores the law, politics, and statistics of communicating data through the thousands of state, county, school district, and higher-education dashboards created in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Using a nationally distributed questionnaire and series of interviews with dashboard managers and stakeholders, we offer a wide-ranging view of data visualization practice in response to COVID-19. We pair this evidence with a survey of almost 3,000 entities responsible for public health communication, which resulted in collection of over 1,100 COVID-19 dashboards from a spectrum of government actors and private parties. We evaluate how legal issues were perceived and acted on, how data were politicized, and what technical challenges dashboard creators faced. We examine factors that led to creation of dashboards along with theory that explores the cognitive perception of dashboard elements. We explore the role of resources, and how those interplayed with specific software choices. We also examine the effect of local characteristics on dashboard creation, such as the presence of a county dashboard on data communication from local schools, the role of broadband access, technical occupations in the area, and so on. We conclude by suggesting a series of policies and practices that can be implemented to prepare for future data-based communication in a future public health crisis. These include practices to prepare for data visualization, enhanced resources devoted to public health communication, and the management of legal and political issues surrounding publicizing health information