Phd Dissertation

Research universities as gateways: The expanding roles of higher education institutions and their contribution to economic development

Publication Date

September 30, 2021

Author(s)

Areas of Expertise

Abstract

The past 30 years have witnessed a gradual expansion in the missions of many universities, and in the ways in which they contribute to local and regional economic development. While teaching and research continue to serve as the foundational core of most university missions, increased attention has been afforded to how universities, by their presence and functions, influence the spatial geographies of neighborhoods, cities, and regions. This dissertation research explores the changing roles of research universities in small and medium-sized metropolitan areas with an emphasis on their impacts across the different geographical scales by investigating associations between university presence and (1) growth in foreign-born populations; (2) the attraction and retention of highly educated residents; and (3) student-driven neighborhood change dynamics.

The findings of this dissertation extend previous studies emphasizing the increasing importance of higher education institutions to economic development activities at various scales. Results from metropolitan area level analyses demonstrate that counties with large research universities were associated with an increase in foreign-born residents following the 1990 Immigration and Naturalization Act, as well as an increase in highly educated residents in the 2000-2014 period. More specifically, while findings revealed that the presence of research universities generate significant spatial spillovers of highly educated residents from university host counties to metropolitan levels, there was little evidence of such spatially-explicit dynamics occurring amongst foreign-born residents. Furthermore, findings from neighborhood-level analyses indicated that proximity to large research university campuses may play an outsized role on the likelihood of neighborhoods undergoing studentification (i.e., student-driven neighborhood change) in the 2000-2014 period. These results may be indicative of a bifurcation of neighborhoods in university-dominant counties into wealthy and highly educated renter populations situated near the university campus, and relatively less wealthy and less educated homeowners residing on the further away from the campus or on the periphery of the county.

By exploring university contributions beyond the spheres of research, teaching, and service contributions, this dissertation presents scholars, urban planners, and policymakers with a more comprehensive portrait of the relationship between universities and their host communities. The evidence of this work suggests that the evolving role of higher education institutions, including their role as gateways for new populations, should be reflected in policymaking which seeks to leverage the locational advantages of research universities for city building or revitalization efforts. Further, policymakers and planners should also be cognizant that scale matters when considering how higher education institutions can better serve their surrounding communities. The contributions of research universities should not be thought of as monolithic or uniform, but should rather be seen as presenting different opportunities and challenges at different geographical levels.

Phd Dissertation

Human-centered computing and the future of work : lessons from mechanical turk and turkopticon, 2008-2015

Publication Date

June 30, 2015

Areas of Expertise

Abstract

Online labor markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), Uber, and TaskRabbit are contributing to rapid changes in the nature of work for hundreds of thousands of workers. These markets create significant new economic opportunities, but most currently treat workers as second-class citizens. Take-home pay is often low compared to similar work in traditional employment arrangements, and workers have limited means of influencing market design or management practice. This makes it hard for workers to create reliable livelihoods from the opportunities these markets present. This dissertation uses AMT, an online labor market for small information tasks, as a case through which to examine the consequences of treating workers as second-class citizens, to argue that future platform designs and management practices should treat workers as central stakeholders, and to develop theory and method for doing so. The central argument of the dissertation is that workers’ concerns should be more substantively and systematically addressed in the design and operation of online labor markets. Five messages elaborate this argument. First, in online labor markets, some workers are casual or transient, while others are professionals, providing significant and reliable value to customers and relying on income earned in the market to meet basic needs. Second, workers who rely on income earned through online labor markets should be considered first-class stakeholders, alongside customers and shareholders. Third, workers in online labor markets are rarely the narrowly self-interested profit maximizers of classical economic theory. Workers can be better understood as “situatedly rational” actors: human beings with incomplete information and finite cognitive capabilities whose actions and preferences are shaped by many factors, including rules, norms, and expectations. Fourth, online labor markets are not monolithic, perfectly competitive markets but parts of polycentric economic systems composed of complexly interlinked action situations characterized by imperfect competition and incomplete information. Fifth, institutions supporting crowd work research should develop an interdisciplinary practice-oriented agenda to understand the consequences of current online labor market designs and practices, and to develop new designs and practices that incorporate workers who rely on market income as central stakeholders.

Phd Dissertation

Development of Dielectric Elastomer Nanocomposites as Stretchable and Flexible Actuating Materials

Publication Date

June 30, 2015

Author(s)

Areas of Expertise

Abstract

Dielectric elastomers (DEs) are a new type of smart materials showing promising functionalities as energy harvesting materials as well as actuating materials for potential applications such as artificial muscles, implanted medical devices, robotics, loud speakers, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), tunable optics, transducers, sensors, and even generators due to their high electromechanical efficiency, stability, lightweight, low cost, and easy processing. Despite the advantages of DEs, technical challenges must be resolved for wider applications. A high electric field of at least 10-30 V/um is required for the actuation of DEs, which limits the practical applications especially in biomedical fields. We tackle this problem by introducing the multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) in DEs to enhance their relative permittivity and to generate their high electromechanical responses with lower applied field level. This work presents the dielectric, mechanical and electromechanical properties of DEs filled with MWNTs. The micromechanics-based finite element models are employed to describe the dielectric, and mechanical behavior of the MWNT-filled DE nanocomposites. A sufficient number of models are computed to reach the acceptable prediction of the dielectric and mechanical responses. In addition, experimental results are analyzed along with simulation results. Finally, laser Doppler vibrometer is utilized to directly detect the enhancement of the actuation strains of DE nanocomposites filled with MWNTs. All the results demonstrate the effective improvement in the electromechanical properties of DE nanocomposites filled with MWNTs under the applied electric fields.

Phd Dissertation

Epitaxis: A System for Deductive and Constructive Program Queries

Publication Date

December 31, 2010

Author(s)

Areas of Expertise

Abstract

Modern computer hardware (multi-core, multi gigahertz processors with gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of disk) along with IDEs allows programmers to build computer programs which are bigger and more complex than they can understand or keep in their working memories. Additionally, the problems these programs are designed to model are ever more complicated. Consequently, programs are full of inconsistencies, mistakes, and incompleteness’s. These problems are difficult to detect, difficult to locate, and difficult to correct. Often a change is made by a programmer to fix a problem for which understanding all the repercussions of the change is difficult. Consequently, further bugs are introduced into the code base. Because of the pervasiveness of software in society and the potential severity of the consequences of bugs, software developers need ever better tools to help them understand, navigate, and follow the consequences of their development and maintenance activities. This dissertation presents a novel framework based on tree/graph searching and parsing, deductive retrieval, dynamic analysis, symbolic execution, aspect oriented programming, and an open interpreter to allow a software developer to navigate, locate features, find bugs, and abstract information in software. The system is designed to have a fast modify-test cycle such that the programmer can search and test the software as it is being edited without time consuming recompilation, reinstrumenting, or database repopulating each time an edit is made to the code base. The system is language independent, requiring only files to specify the language grammar, control flow graph transformation, and execution semantics. In addition, because of the flexibility and programmability of the system it is an excellent environment to perform further research on program analysis techniques such as dynamic analysis, symbolic execution and abstract interpretation. A prototype system has been built along with data files for the C programming language which demonstrates the feasibility of the system and its ability to scale to “modern-sized” programs.

working paper

Impacts of Motor Vehicle Operation on Water Quality in the United States - Clean-up Costs and Policies

Publication Date

January 1, 2007

Abstract

This paper investigates the costs of controlling some of the environmental impacts of motor vehicle transportation on groundwater and on surface waters. We estimate that annualized costs of cleaning-up leaking underground storage tanks range from $0.8 billion to $2.1 billion per year over ten years. Annualized costs of controlling highway runoff from principal arterials in the US are much larger: they range from $2.9 billion to $15.6 billion per year over 20 years (1.6% to 8.3% of annualized highway transportation expenditures.) Some causes of non-point source pollution were unintentionally created by regulations or could be addressed by simple design changes of motor vehicles. A review of applicable measures suggests that effective policies should combine economic incentives, information campaigns, and enforcement, coupled with preventive environmental measures. In general, preventing water pollution from motor vehicles would be much cheaper than cleaning it up.

Phd Dissertation

Economic analysis of aircraft and airport noise regulations.

Publication Date

November 20, 2006

Author(s)

Abstract

The aviation industry has sought to address the negative externality of aircraft noise using a variety of approaches, but there has been little theoretical work to date encompassing both the market implications and the social optimality of air transportation noise policy. This dissertation develops simple theoretical models to analyze the effects of noise regulation on an airline’s scheduling, aircraft ‘quietness’, and airfare choices. Monopolistic and duopolistic airline competition are modelled, and two types of noise limits are considered: maximum cumulative noise from aircraft operations and noise per aircraft operation. As expected, tighter noise limits, which reduce community exposure to noise, also cause airlines to reduce service frequency and raise fares, which hurts consumers. Welfare analysis investigates the social optimality of noise regulation, taking into account the social cost of exposing airport communities to noise damage, as well as consumer surplus and airline profit. Numerical simulations show that the type of noise limit has a significant effect on the magnitude of the first-best and second-best optimal solutions for service frequency, cumulative noise, and aircraft size and level of quietness. Furthermore, the numerical analyses suggest that under the more realistic second-best case, the cumulative noise limit might be a preferable policy instrument over the per-aircraft noise limit. In the monopoly’s parameter space exploration, welfare is found to be slightly higher, cumulative noise is lower, and the fare is slightly lower when the planner controls cumulative noise rather than per-aircraft noise. In the duopoly case, when the per-aircraft limit yields greater welfare than the cumulative limit, the per-aircraft limit offers only modest welfare gains above the levels achieved with the cumulative limit. But when the cumulative limit yields greater welfare than the per-aircraft limit, the cumulative limit offers substantial welfare gains above the levels achieved with the per-aircraft limit. The effects of noise taxation and the optimal level of noise taxes are also investigated with the duopoly model; the analysis shows equivalence between noise taxation and the cumulative noise limit.

Phd Dissertation

Electronic waste management in California : consumer attitudes toward recycling, advanced recycling fees, "green" electronics, and willingness to pay for e-waste recycling

Publication Date

June 30, 2006

Author(s)

Areas of Expertise

journal article preprint

Used Oil Policies to Protect the Environment: An Overview of Canadian Experiences

Abstract

We examine some consequences of dumping used oil in the environment and review some policies to foster used oil recycling. We then contrast policies adopted in the Canadian Prairie Provinces for managing used oil, used oil filters, and containers, with those put in place in the rest of Canada. Our analysis proposes that public-private partnerships relying on economic instruments and public education can be more effective for recycling used oil than public agencies relying mostly on regulations.

working paper

A Framework for Evaluation of the Union-Management Relationship in Government

Publication Date

November 1, 1976

Author(s)

Areas of Expertise

Abstract

In the present study, a framework is developed for evaluating the union management relationship in government based broadly on the concept of organizational effectiveness. A number of previous evaluative studies of the union management relationship are first examined to demonstrate some of the inadequacies of alternative approaches as well as the differences between these approaches and the framework we develop. The conceptual rationale for using organizational effectiveness as the yardstick against which to evaluate the union-management relationship is then discussed. We conclude with a discussion of the utility of the framework for evaluating union-management relationships in government.

The impact of the union-management relationship on government effectiveness cannot be underestimated. Newland (1971) argues that “collective bargaining must serve as one of several vehicles for creative change…if it is to be compatible with future public interests” (p. i). A variety of assessments indicate, however, that collective bargaining in government has been, rather than a vehicle for creative change, an instrument for achieving partisan interests (Doherty, 1971; Nigro, 1972; Perry & Levine, 1976; Shaw & Clark, 1972). As long as public managers pit public employees against citizens or public employee unions pit the public against management, labor-management relations in government will have decidedly negative impacts on the parties, the public, and the political system. Methods are needed for re-integrating management, employee, and citizen interests. The evaluative framework we propose highlights the multiplicity of interests that must be balanced through the union-management relationship. It also identifies explicit criteria for which all the parties in public sector bargaining should be held accountable.