The life and legacy of MieczysLaw Munz

Mieczyslaw Munz (1900-1976) was one of the outstanding pianists of the twentieth century as both an acclaimed international concert artist and teacher. With a musical career that spanned over sixty years from his debut at the age of twelve, Munz was a significant link in carrying on the great traditions of the Golden Age of the Virtuoso and nineteenth-century piano playing. This research paper includes a biography of Munz; interviews with his students Faye Bonner, Paula Forrest, Jeffrey Marcus, David Oei, Ann Schein, Robert Swan and Stefan Young; a timeline of important events in the life of Munz; selections of Munz\u27s concert programs, reviews, and other memorabilia; and a list of recordings by Munz

COVID-19 Responses of South Korea as Hybrids of Governance Modes

The countries worldwide have adapted diverse governance approaches to the pandemic to suit their contexts. While the diversity of the country-specific governance responses has been widely discussed, the hybrids nature of those governance practices has been explored less. This study analyses the responses toward COVID-19 in South Korea as responsive dialogues of different modes of governance, i.e., consensus-based hierarchy, state-sponsored market, and principle-based network. This study aims to remind us that pandemic governance needs to enable organic and responsive processes for all actors in society. This conceptual discussion of the governance modes illustrates that the pandemic allowed the emergence of the hybrids of governance modes to cope better with the complex realities of the diverse sectors and actors in South Korea. The characteristic of the responses diverges from the conventional governance classification of or market-based. It is a responsive and evolving dialogue of different modes of governance. It would be productive to think beyond the oversimplified understandings of governance modes and embrace flexible and different hybrids of governance modes to be more responsive, effective, efficient, and equitable

The Role of Actor Values, Practices and Institutional Hardware in Intersectoral Governance For Health Equity Among The Elderly in South Korea

Abstract This dissertation is focused on the governance of intersectoral collaboration because to address complex wicked problems such as health inequity among the elderly requires action across a range of health and non-health sectors and at multiple levels of government. There have been numerous collaborative policy initiatives to improve health equity without much success, and the existing evidence offers little insight into the factors that constrain (or enable) successful intersectoral action. The literature points towards the importance of actors' values in shaping policy collaboration and intersectoral governance, however ways to incorporate values in intersectoral governance for health equity have not been widely investigated. This dissertation is focussed on understanding the role of actor values, practices and institutional factors in shaping intersectoral governance for health equity among the elderly. The thesis employs a value typology from public management literature and the concept of levels of values from organisational cultural theory to operationalise the understanding of values. A software-hardware analogy from health systems governance is incorporated to connect actor values to the rules, regulations, and practices of actors. Two case studies were examined: Korean Senior Employment Program (KSEP) and Housing Pension (HP), are prominent policies of the PCASPP (Presidential Committee for Ageing Society and Population Policy) in South Korea, and address two important social determinants of health among the elderly. The dissertation provides empirical evidence and expands on scholarly knowledge on the role of values and how this influences the intersectoral policy process regarding health equity among the elderly, in the South Korean public systems. The empirical findings of the thesis illustrate that policy actors are constantly employing enabling and constraining practices in their daily tasks, in terms of operationalising health equity in the intersectoral policy process. Some policy actors are habituated with constraining practices which are performance-oriented, compliant to hierarchy, tendencies for interagency competitive, and detached policy process for policy design and policy implementation. Others however, exercised enabling practices, which included voicing inequity, going out of one's given duty to serve the target population, and the commitment to mitigate regional inequity issues. At a societal level, the data shows that the re-morphing the idea of collaboration is necessary to resonate better with existing cultural values, such as ministerial loyalty and the hierarchy, in order to achieve meaningful intersectoral collaboration . At the organizational level, competing framings of the agencies are threatening the achievement of effective collaborations because the idea of health equity is interpreted and supported by the organisational logic or rationale. The lack of intersectoral communication protocol aggravates the ministerial rivalry in the intersectoral policy process. At the individual policy actor-level, 'the cultural fear' of acting against the organizational rationale plays as a burden on individuals, effectively constrain individuals from acting on behalf of their values. In the intersectoral policy process for health equity, this means numerous forgone opportunities that actors are constrained in their actions to promote health equity in every small step of their work.Navigating the policy process is a complex task. This study proposes a shift in focus from performance-driven governance to values-driven governance with longer-term goals and intermediate steps of changing narratives, mind-sets, and enhancing resources, capacity and culture. The proposed value-driven governance model for health equity may enable sectoral actors' need to accommodate a wide variety of apparently inconsistent logics that are grounded in diverse values

Essays on International Macroeconomics

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. August 2019. Major: Economics. Advisors: Manuel Amador, Timothy Kehoe. 1 computer file (PDF); viii, 110 pages.This dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 is a critical survey of the literature on the real exchange rate and welfare. First paper researches on welfare associated with two different productivities and the real exchange rate. The second paper classifies countries by regions and analyzes the effects of the real exchange rate. The emerging Asian countries are more export-intensive, so the real depreciation stimulate their economic growth while other emerging countries grow faster with real appreciation. These results rationalize the different growth patterns in different regions. In Chapter 2, I studied the role of foreign reserves. Some papers have argued that countries accumulate foreign reserves in order to deteriorate terms of trade to increase welfare. On the other hand, the optimal tariff theory argues that tariffs can increase the welfare of a country by improving its terms of trade. This paper provides a plausible explanation for the different foreign reserves policies regarding terms of trade. I build an endogenous growth model of a small open economy with technological spillovers generated from exports. Internalizing the growth effects from these externalities, the government decides whether to accumulate foreign reserves or to borrow from abroad. This paper finds that when the export externalities are large enough, it is optimal to hold positive foreign reserves to achieve faster growth through terms of trade deterioration. However, when the export externalities are small, the government holds negative foreign reserves. In Chapter 3, Jorge Mondragon and I propose a stochastic general equilibrium model of sovereign default with endogenous default risk in order to explain the interest rate behavior in emerging economies. We incorporate two types of shocks to cover foreign and domestic uncertainty. We define GDP and terms of trade shock as the domestic and the foreign uncertainty respectively. The model is able to successfully increase the dispersion of sovereign interest rates when GDP shocks are above the trend. This result seems to suggest that terms of trade is a good candidate to explain the volatility of interest rates in small open economies when they are not under recessions or crises

How Spokesperson Rank and Selected Media Channels Impact Perceptions in Crisis Communication

This study examined the impact of spokesperson’s rank and selected media channels in crisis communication by employing different ranks (i.e., CEO and communication director spokespersons) and media channels (blogs, websites, and newspapers). Findings indicated that CEO spokespersons were more effective in terms of lowering publics’ crisis responsibility attributions than communication director spokespersons and that blogs were more effective in lowering crisis responsibility attributions than websites and newspapers

News Representation and Sense of Belonging Among Multicultural Audiences

This study seeks to understand the role of representation in news media, trust in news, and participation in multicultural audiences' sense of belonging to society. A multimodal survey combining online, CATI, and CAPI methods was conducted in Australia at the end of 2021 and early 2022 (N = 1,084). The top five non-English language communities in Australia (Arabic, Cantonese, Italian, Mandarin, and Vietnamese) were included in the survey, of which n = 851 were born overseas. The findings reveal a significant link between the perception of sufficient representation in Australian news media, trust in news, confidence to participate in society, and sense of belonging. When multicultural audiences see themselves fairly and adequately represented in the news, they are more likely to trust the news and participate in the community by discussing the news and current affairs. This, in turn, leads to a stronger sense of belonging to society. We also found confidence in English and time spent in Australia were important factors contributing to perceptions of representation. While the length of stay has a positive impact on the perception of representation among those with high confidence in English, this perception is significantly lower among those who have lower confidence. This result confirms the significant role language proficiency plays in migrants' experiences in the host country