The Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015 with grand ambitions for ending poverty, protecting the planet, and ensuring prosperity for all, with 'no one left behind'. However, these goals will be impossible to achieve without addressing inequity, inequality, margina…
The financial crisis was much more than the result of an excess of risk. It is essential to understand that the same policies that created each subsequent bust are the same ones that have been implemented in the past years, through Quantitative Easing (QE) to allegedly "solve" t…
The financial crisis was much more than the result of an excess of risk. It is essential to understand that the same policies that created each subsequent bust are the same ones that have been implemented in the past years, through Quantitative Easing (QE) to allegedly "solve" t…
Simon Pirani investigates the interaction of power, money and people in Russia during the presidencies of Vladimir Putin and his successor Dmitry Medvedev. Profiling the Putin team, including contingents from the security services and pro-market economic 'reformers', Pirani argu…
This research contributes to the gender and medical sociology literature with two explorations: 1) a comparison of how men and women perceive the institution of academic medicine as a meritocracy and 2) linking these perceptions with a gendered comparison of academic physician’s…
Economic inequality is associated with a host of social ills, and it harms the majority of those within an unequal society. In the U.S., however, the existence and persistence of racial inequality privileges White Americans as a group. I argue that White Americans are thus motiv…
This dissertation views the economic development process as evolving in two dimensions: increasing skill stratification and expanding the necessity set. The first dimension is illustrated by an OLG model in the background of the 1800-2000 Swedish fertility transition. The result…
In this dissertation, I explore inequalities in higher education and at the intersection of higher education and the labor market.
This dissertation examines neighborhood-level factors that influence disparities in neighborhood-level homeownership rates and mortgage denial rates in Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. It also examines how present-day Latino neighborhoods have been impacted by histori…
In the midst of growing inequality and persistent marginalization in the U.S., this project investigates the role of one institution, religion, in combatting or perpetuating inequality. I investigate religious rhetoric on race and homosexuality using qualitative coding methods o…
America has a long history of placing a disproportionate number of minorities in the criminal justice system. Disproportionate incarceration/placement rates occur in both the adult and juvenile justice systems. This study investigates minority juvenile placement rates compared t…
What explains racial disparities in incarceration in North America? I examined a total of seven ethnic groups from the United States or Canada, with five non-white groups. I compared groups' share of the incarcerated population to their share of the total population in the state…
Over the thirty years preceding 2008, the United States has experienced increasing income inequality while transitioning to a consumption-led economy. This dissertation investigates the foundations of the 2008 recession and offers an explanation for the slow growth recovery. Thr…
This dissertation seeks to understand the role of public policies in shaping long-run neighborhood outcomes, with a specific focus on understanding the relationship between private markets, government, and race at key points in American history. In particular, this dissertation …
The theory of value capture is simple to understand and easy to sell, promising self-fulfilling virtuous cycles of value generation, capture, and redistribution. Countless studies document value creation attributable to public interventions, providing guidance on the type and ex…
Climate change is a politically fraught policy domain. It is beset by complications including a long-term time frame, increasing severity, time-inconsistent preferences resulting in irrational economic discounting, low incentives for responsible parties to act, and more. Moreove…
This dissertation surveys and analyzes a frequently absent subject in the field of international migration in which scholars have tended to focus overwhelmingly on immigrants: those who would travel or migrate across nation-state borders but do not due to either sociological for…
America’s tectonic shift from an agrarian society to an industrial society has never been adequately accounted for by our system of government. The foundation of the American system of government is struggling to remain intact beneath this unaccounted-for weight. I begin this wo…
