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Doctoral Dissertation Research: American Mayors: How Voters Choose and How Mayors Shape Policy

Questions about whether and how political leaders influence outcomes are fundamental to the study of politics. If politicians are responsive to constituent opinions, one would expect to observe similar outcomes across different leaders. In reality, though, public policy outcomes tend to vary systematically depending on who serves in elected office. This dissertation examines representation in American cities. New data reveal that American mayors, like politicians at higher levels of government, tend not to be highly representative of their constituents.

Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Politics of Status in International Development

Nations categorized as "lower income countries" or "less developed countries" by international organizations tend to receive generous financial assistance and special treatment from the international community. As countries 'graduate' from these to higher categories, the shift is viewed positively by the international community and, in turn, often results in receiving additional social and material advantages. Faced with this tradeoff, some countries attempt to remain within the developing categories, while others strive to be categorized as developed.

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Legitimizing the State or a Grievance?

This project investigates what happens when individuals gain legal rights. The work seeks to determine whether these individuals exhibit increased trust of the state and therefore increase their political participation, or, alternatively, find that these individuals disengage from the state. This study seeks to understand whether the formal recognition of a right -- in particular, a formal property right to land -- affects an individual's incentives to engage in politics. The PI conducts a cross-national analysis of three rural land-titling programs.

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Dispossession and Agrarian Politics

Does rural modernization inevitably lead to rising average living standards for a minority at the cost of impoverishment of the majority? The research supported by this award investigates the possibility that the answer to this question is "No," that there are alternative scenarios. Historically, rural development has been a mixed blessing. It has increased national incomes and access to modern amenities.

Structural Changes in High Dimensional Factor Models

This project studies structural changes in high dimensional factor models. Structural changes can be the consequence of technical progress, changes in preference, or policy regime shifts. Structural changes imply unstable relationships among economic variables. What underlines factor models is that a few common shocks can explain the co-movement of a large number of economic variables, so that information in a high dimensional data set can be summarized by a small number of common factors.

Doctoral Dissertation Grant: An Ethnography of Chronic Disease Risk and Pre-Diabetes

This project examines how risk is made into an object of biomedical intervention. It will explore how biomedical risk practices and discourses are transforming contemporary social life. To illuminate these processes, the investigators will study the phenomenon of pre-diabetes in an urban environment. Pre-diabetes is a new and rapidly expanding diagnostic category. The use of the term speaks to new methods of surveillance and management of glucose in the bloodstream. It is creating a wide and growing at risk population that is situated between ill and healthy.

Documenting Endangered Languages

This funding partnership between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) supports projects to develop and advance knowledge concerning endangered human languages. Made urgent by the imminent death of roughly half of the approximately 7000 currently used languages, this effort aims to exploit advances in information technology to build computational infrastructure for endangered language research. The program supports projects that contribute to data management and archiving, and to the development of the next generation of researchers.

Deadline: 

Thursday, September 15, 2022
Friday, September 15, 2023

Cultivating Cultures for Ethical STEM (CCE STEM)

Cultivating Cultures for Ethical STEM (CCE STEM) funds research projects that identify factors that are efficacious in the formation of ethical STEM researchers in all the fields of science and engineering that NSF supports.

Deadline: 

Friday, February 15, 2019

Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Urban Transit Infrastructure and the Growth of Cities

This project investigates how the provision of urban transportation infrastructure affect growth within cities and property values. Quantifying the effect of transportation projects on city growth and property values has proven difficult for at least two reasons. First, transportation infrastructure may produce growth and a rise in property values, but the latter may also lead to transportation projects.

A Study Into the Effect of Employment Conditions Upon Judicial Behavior and Performance

In common-law jurisdictions, appellate judges construct legal rules over time by building on previous decisions, using the facts, reasoning, and outcomes described by previous judges to guide their rulings. In this scheme, high-quality appellate decision-making has beneficial spillovers by helping future judges make good decisions. As with all public officials, the performance of appellate judges will depend in part on their conditions of employment.

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