Three Essays on the Impact of Government Assistance Programs on Economic Behaviors of Vulnerable Households.

The overarching theme of the dissertation is to examine the impacts of government assistance programs on the economic behaviors of disadvantaged groups such as low-income or single-headed households in the U.S. It is crucial to expand our understanding of how government assistance has helped them to overcome economic barriers to labor force participation or to expand household resources. My dissertation chapters primarily focus on the two largest government safety net programs: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). I show that public assistance programs play a pivotal role by interacting with economic choices made by vulnerable households, such as labor supply, health, or household expenditures. Exploiting the variation in specific aspects of welfare program or the changes made to program parameters, I study how the policies have altered the life circumstances and opportunities faced by disadvantaged households.PhDEconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113362/1/junekim_1.pd

EXPLORATION OF NATIONAL IMAGE THROUGH YOUTUBE VIDEOS

The purpose of this study is to examine how user-generated content on social media can affect national image. YouTube is a good fit for this study due to its abundant data and influence. This study tries to examine which topics of videos related to a country are famous and being discussed on YouTube; how do viewers react to the videos (e.g., likes, dislikes, and comments); and cultivation or framing effects of depictions (e.g., negative, neutral, and positive) in the videos from viewers’ reactions. To do so, this study uses content analysis and chooses South Korea as the subject country. This study selects and examines 50 YouTube videos related to South Korea sorted by the descending order of views and relevance. Coding categories are made based on the theoretical frameworks of Buhmann and Ingenhoff’s “the 4D model of country image.” The results show that the popularity of topics is related to unique and cultural images (i.e., the aesthetic dimension) of South Korea; a significant influence of Korean popular culture on increasing exposures of the videos; and the discrepancy between depiction tones of topics and overall tones of Korea (or Koreans)

Research on Voyage Navigation S/W Development Architecture Using Open Source Base GIS Modules

Recently, as the number of voyage accident is increasing, massive damage of human life and property is following depends on scale of accident. ECDIS is navigation equipment essential for safe sailing and clean marine environment. However, ECDIS S/W is relatively expensive, and ocean-related international organizations such as IMO and IHO are designing the programs mainly for medium and large ships. OPEN CPN, SeaClear are existing as product based on Open Source Project, however they are lack of functions to use in actual voyage. ECDIS development by making combination with modules based on open source could be an alternative to follow the standards and develop efficiently

Targeting Using Differential Incentives: Evidence from a Field Experiment

In a field experiment in Nepal, we varied the amount of financial incentives provided to health outreach workers by the ethnicity of the client they recruited for a free sugar level assessment. We find that our differential incentive in the ratio of 2.5∶1, geared toward encouraging a disadvantaged referral, raises the chances of such a referral by 11.6 percentage points (95% confidence interval, 1.1–22.1). This effect translates to an incentive elasticity of referral of 0.2. There is no evidence that the outreach workers refer less sick individuals to benefit from higher financial incentives; nor do they target fewer overall referrals

Are Household Food Expenditures Responsive to Entry Into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program?*

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/115937/1/ssqu12197.pd

Public Spending, Public Deficits, and Government Coalitions

The study examines the relationship between types of government and level of public spending. There are two competing perspectives about the consequences of coalition governments on the size of public expenditures. The most common argument is that government spending increases under coalition governments, compared with one-party governments. Another line of thought contends that coalition governments often are stalled in the status quo due to the veto power of each member. Our analysis of public spending in 33 parliamentary democracies between 1972 and 2000 confirms the latter argument that coalition governments have a status quo bias. Particularly, we find that single-party governments are apt to modify the budget according to the current fiscal condition, which enables them to increase or decrease spending more flexibly. On the contrary, coalition governments find it difficult not only to decrease spending under difficult fiscal conditions but also to increase it even under a more favourable context, because each member of the coalition has a veto power. L'étude examine la relation entre les types de gouvernement et le niveau des dépenses publiques. Il existe dans la littérature deux points de vue divergents sur les conséquences des gouvernements de coalition sur la taille des dépenses publiques. L'argument le plus commun est que les augmentations de dépenses publiques des gouvernements de coalition augmentent davantage que les gouvernements à parti unique. Une autre ligne de pensée soutient que les gouvernements de coalition sont souvent installés dans le statu quo en raison du droit de veto de chaque parti de la coalition. Notre analyse des dépenses publiques dans 33 démocraties parlementaires entre 1972 et 2000 confirme que les gouvernements de la coalition ont un biais de statu quo. En particulier, nous constatons que les gouvernements à parti unique sont plus enclins à modifier le budget en fonction de leur solde budgétaire, ce qui leur permet d'augmenter ou de diminuer les dépenses de manière plus souple. Au contraire, les gouvernements de coalition ont non seulement du mal à diminuer les dépenses fiscales dans des conditions difficiles, mais aussi de l'augmenter, même dans un contexte plus favorable, parce que chaque membre de la coalition peut menacer d’utiliser son droit de veto.publics spending, coalition government, single-party, electoral systems, fiscal deficit, panel data, dépenses publiques, gouvernement de coalition, parti unique, systèmes électoraux, solde budgétaire, données de panel

Security management for backhaul-aware 5G-V2X

Security is a primary concern for the networks aiming at the utilization of Cellular (C) services for connecting Vehicles to Everything (V2X). At present, C-V2X is observing a paradigm shift from Long Term Evolution (LTE) - Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN) to Fifth Generation (5G) based functional architecture. However, security and credential management are still concerns to be resolved under 5G-V2X. A sizably voluminous number of key updates and non-availability of sub-functions at the edge cause adscititious overheads and decrement the performance while alarming the possibilities of variants of cyber attacks. In this paper, security management is studied as a principle of sustainability and its tradeoff is evaluated with the number of key-updates required to maintain an authenticated connection of a vehicle to the 5G-terminals keeping intact the security functions at the backhaul. A numerical study is presented to determine the claims and understand the proposed tradeoff.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, Conference on Information Security and Cryptography-Winter (CISC-W), December 8, 2018, Seoul, South Kore

Testing for family influences on obesity: The role of genetic nurture

A large literature has documented strong positive correlations among siblings in health, including body mass index (BMI) and obesity. This paper tests whether that is explained by a specific type of peer effect in obesity: genetic nurture. Specifically, we test whether an individual’s weight is affected by the genes of their sibling, controlling for the individual’s own genes. Using genetic data in Add Health, we find no credible evidence that an individual’s BMI is affected by the polygenic risk score for BMI of their full sibling when controlling for the individual’s own polygenic risk score for BMI. Thus, we find no evidence that the positive correlations in BMI between siblings are attributable to genetic nurture within families.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149721/1/hec3889.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149721/2/hec3889_am.pd

Serially Connected Micro Amorphous Silicon Solar Cells for Compact High-Voltage Sources

We demonstrate a compact amorphous silicon (a-Si) solar module to be used as high-voltage power supply. In comparison with the organic solar module, the main advantages of the a-Si solar module are its compatibility with photolithography techniques and relatively high power conversion efficiency. The open circuit voltage of a-Si solar cells can be easily controlled by serially interconnecting a-Si solar cells. Moreover, the a-Si solar module can be easily patterned by photolithography in any desired shapes with high areal densities. Using the photolithographic technique, we fabricate a compact a-Si solar module with noticeable photovoltaic characteristics as compared with the reported values for high-voltage power supplies