Browsing by Subject "Debt"
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Item Open Access A Sea of Debt: Histories of Commerce and Obligation in the Indian Ocean, c. 1850-1940(2012) Bishara, Fahad AhmadThis dissertation is a legal history of debt and economic life in the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. It draws on materials from Bahrain, Muscat, Bombay, Zanzibar and London to examine how members of an ocean-wide commercial society constructed relationships of economic mutualism with one another by mobilizing debt and credit. It further explores how they expressed their debt relationships through legal idioms, and how they mobilized commercial and legal instruments to adapt to the emergence of modern capitalism in the region.
At the same time, it looks at the concomitant development of an Indian Ocean-wide empire of law centered at Bombay, and explores how this Indian Ocean contractual culture encountered an Anglo-Indian legal regime that conceived of legal documents in a radically different way. By mobilizing written deeds in imaginative ways, and by strategically accessing British courts, Indian Ocean merchants were able to shape the contours of this growing legal regime.
Most broadly, the dissertation argues that law and courts became increasingly central to economic life in the Indian Ocean, and that economic actors in the region employed a wide range of different legal strategies in adapting to a changing world of commerce. In the Indian Ocean, as elsewhere, the histories of commerce and law were inextricably intertwined.
Item Open Access Black/white differences in the relationship between debt and risk of heart attack across cohorts.(SSM - population health, 2023-06) Hamil-Luker, Jenifer; O'Rand, Angela MBackground
Numerous studies show that increasing levels of education, income, assets, and occupational status are linked to greater improvements in White adults' health than Black adults'. Research has yet to determine, however, whether there are racial differences in the relationship between health and debt and whether this relationship varies across cohorts.Methods
Using data from the 1992-2018 Health and Retirement Study, we use survival analyses to examine the link between debt and heart attack risk among the Prewar Cohort, born 1931-1941, and Baby Boomers, born 1948-1959.Results
Higher unsecured debt is associated with increased heart attack risk for Black adults, especially among Baby Boomers and during economic recessions. Higher mortgage debt is associated with lower risk of heart attack for White but not Black Baby Boomers. The relationship between debt and heart attack risk remains after controlling for health behaviors, depressive symptoms, and other economic resources that are concentrated among respondents with high levels of debt.Conclusion
Debt is predictive of heart attack risk, but the direction and strength of the relationship varies by type of debt, debtors' racial identity, and economic context.Item Open Access Fictional Timing: Neoliberalism and Time in the Contemporary Latin American Novel(2020) Whitehouse Gordillo , Matthew SMy dissertation, “Fictional Timing: Neoliberalism and Time in the Contemporary Latin American Novel”, studies recent developments in the Latin American novel to better understand the relation between economics and time in contemporary Latin America. I analyze Alberto Fuguet’s Las películas de mi vida (2002) Jorge Volpi’s No sera la Tierra (2006), Pedro Mairal’s El año del desierto (2005), Diamela Eltit’s Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998) and Mano de obra (2002), as well as Barataria (volume 1 published in 2012, volume 2 published in 2013) by Juan López Bauzá, to argue that at the heart of the Latin American novel’s examination of the shifting signifier that is “neoliberalism” (Brown 20), we find a return to matters of time and temporality. Since the early 1970s, Latin America has provided a site for political experiments in reshaping the dynamics between the social and economic spheres, thus between citizens and the market. The region became the third great stage for the neoliberal model, as well as the first systematic experiment of neoliberal reforms during Pinochet’s dictatorship (Valencia 478). It has become all but commonplace to credit changes in technology, debt reforms, privatization, austerity, and global markets for a distinctively contemporary experience of time as the acceleration and compression of lived experience that ensures a predictable future (Harvey 1989; Lazzarato 2012). While taking this now commonplace view into account, I conclude that contemporary Latin American novels insist on the heterogeneity of temporal experiences. Each chapter explores these diverse times at work within neoliberal rationality, discourses, practices, and subjectivities.
Item Open Access Household Debt Across the Life Course: An Analysis of the Late Baby Boomers(2010) Tippett, Rebecca MarieAs an aggregate, American households have shown rising debt levels over the past few decades, yet we do not understand how debt varies within households over time and what factors influence this variation in a meaningful way. To date, household debt appears predominantly as a component of measures of net worth, obscuring heterogeneity in the meaning of debt within a household. Moreover, most studies focusing specifically on indebtedness rely on cross-sectional data. In addition, no cohesive theoretical model exists to account for changing patterns of debt. This dissertation seeks to fill these gaps. Utilizing a variety of methodological approaches and drawing on longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, it adds sociological explanation to a social process that has been previously ignored and under-theorized.
First, drawing from literature in economics and sociology, I propose a dynamic, life course model of indebtedness that specifies three mechanisms driving differentiation in household indebtedness: institutional context (period), social heterogeneity, and patterned disadvantage, or structural risk. Second, I use multilevel logistic regressions to explore the association between the hypothesized mechanisms and the likelihood of holding non-collateralized debt. While experiencing negative life course risks increases the likelihood of holding debt, I find that occupying positions of structural disadvantage--being black, being in poverty--decreases the likelihood of holding debt, while having advantages--higher education, being married, holding assets--increases the likelihood of holding debt, pointing to distinct differences in who can access debt to buffer life course shocks and who cannot. Examining the interrelationships between debts and assets further underscores the tenuous economic well-being of the disadvantaged. I find that those most likely to experience negative life events are both less likely to have financial assets with which to buffer these events and more likely to experience constrained access to non-collateralized debt.
Third, I employ multilevel linear regressions to examine the association between the proposed mechanisms and three unique indicators of debt burden. I find that many of the standard coefficients included in models of net worth are not significant predictors of the level of non-collateralized, non-revolving debt, suggesting that we know much more about the correlates of income and wealth than we do household debt. Variation in debt burden may be better understood by heterogeneity in non-economic variables frequently not captured in survey research. To better explore this unobserved heterogeneity, I utilize latent class regression models to estimate the early life course trajectories of debt burden for the NLSY79 cohort. I find four distinct trajectories of indebtedness with varying consequences for later life financial outcomes. Overall, I conclude that household debt is nuanced and contextually contingent. More importantly, debt adds to our understanding of long-term stratification processes when studied as a unique indicator of inequality.
Item Open Access Tax-Based Collateral Limitations, Borrowing Arrangements and Firm Value(2019) Hills, RobertI examine a tax-related friction that limits U.S. multinational corporations’ ability to use foreign assets as collateral in obtaining U.S. debt financing. I find that tax-based collateral limitations are associated with reduced debt capacity and higher borrowing costs. Additionally, I show that collateral limitations are associated with a decrease in the use of capital covenants and an increase in the use of performance covenants in private debt agreements. While the U.S. House and Senate passed versions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that included provisions to eliminate tax-based collateral limitations, the final version surprisingly retained these limitations. I find a negative relation between the extent to which a firm is affected by tax-based collateral limitations and market reactions around the passage of the final version of the Act, suggesting tax-based collateral limitations constrain borrowing arrangements and thereby reduce firm value. The costs associated with these collateral limitations offer one explanation for the under-sheltering puzzle, which suggests firms fail to take advantage of the supposed benefits of tax avoidance strategies.
Item Open Access The Politics of Indebtedness: The Dialectic of State Violence and Benevolence in Turkey(2017) Yoltar, CagriThis dissertation examines the interplay between sovereignty and governmentality in the domain of welfare provision in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast through the analytic of debt.
The dissertation shows that debt lies at the heart of Turkish and Kurdish political identities in Turkey, but with a significant difference. For decades the Turkish state has exerted strong control over the economy and selectively distributed economic resources in favor of allegiant populations while dispossessing the unruly. This dynamic has given way to a common conception among the mainstream Turkish citizenry that allocation of economic resources is at the mercy of the state and citizens owe allegiance and obedience to the state for all that it bestows on them.
Although this debt morality pervades Turkey, it is interrupted and transformed in the Kurdish region. Considered the internal other of the Turkish nation and resisting ethnic homogenization and economic and political centralization policies for decades, Kurds have been subjected to systematic state violence and dispossession. This state violence and resistance to it have engendered a counter-debt morality in the Kurdish region, finding expression in the idiom bedel ödemek (paying the price). Foregrounding a history of state violence and dispossession rather than state benevolence, bedel reverses the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey, rendering the state indebted to the Kurds. Moreover, having emerged out of the Kurdish struggle, bedel redefines the Kurdish political identity around a new set of obligations: to stand up against the state for individual and collective self-determination and to pay tribute to those who made sacrifices in resisting the state.
This dissertation unpacks the political, economic and cultural logics of these two competing debt moralities and traces their contestation in the domain of welfare bureaucracy in an effort to demonstrate how struggles over sovereignty permeate governmental practices in the region.
My two years of ethnographic research (2012–2014) largely focused on the decision-making practices of local welfare officials, who enjoy an immense discretionary power in selecting beneficiaries. It showed that many officials’ practices were informed by the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey that promotes welfare as state benevolence and expects beneficiaries to repay their debt through allegiance and subservience. Although bedel leaks into welfare distribution—through the moral judgments of Kurdish officials—it works in the shadows, remaining largely silent and secret. This suppression of bedel, I suggest, bespeaks the state’s role in denying its own violence and asserting a unidirectional debt relation on beneficiary citizens. Illustrating how state-sponsored social welfare governance operates as a violent, debt-producing mechanism, the dissertation suggests that sovereign violence is intrinsic to the state’s governmental practices in the Kurdish region.
However, the domain of social welfare is not limited to the central state-sponsored social assistance programs. Over the years Kurdish movement has initiated its own welfare programs. Just as with centrally organized welfare programs, alleviation of poverty constitutes the main framework in which these initiatives operate. However, bedel plays a more overt role in these initiatives’ approach to social welfare than it does in centrally organized public social assistance programs. This difference can be traced to the categories and vocabularies that Kurdish movement-led initiatives use as well as to their practices of beneficiary selection. The dissertation traces the ways in which bedel is incorporated into the workings of Kurdish movement-led welfare programs and illustrates how this incorporation opens up room for the nurturing of resistant subjectivities and socialities that challenge the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey as well as the political and economic dispossession it entails. I thus argue that incorporation of bedel in Kurdish initiatives politicizes welfare and constitutes an obstacle to the Turkish state’s establishing and maintaining its sovereign power in the Kurdish region by means of welfare governance.
The dissertation contributes to broad theorizations of power and statecraft, redistribution and dispossession, and political conflict in the Middle East. These lines of inquiry have dominated social sciences for decades, but they have often remained separated. This disconnect obscures the close connections between governmental practices and the workings of sovereign power, preventing us from accounting for the moral and economic dynamics that inform political conflicts. I take debt as both an empirical object and an epistemological vantage point to bring these literatures together and offer different historical and ethnographic strategies of analyzing the state, political subjectivities and their conflictual construction.
Item Open Access The State of Water and Wastewater Utility Debt in North Carolina(2018-04-27) Atkins, MadelineOver the next 20 years, North Carolina water and wastewater systems will require up to $26 billion in capital costs to improve degrading infrastructure. Debt financing is a popular option to raise capital to fund these projects, as revenues from water sales alone are not usually sufficient to finance large projects. This study seeks to understand the current state of water and wastewater debt in North Carolina and quantify future financial capacity for issuing debt. Data on all local government debt issuances from 1951 to 2017 was obtained from the North Carolina Department of State Treasurer Local Government Commission. Analyses find that as of the end of fiscal year 2017, local government utilities in North Carolina have a total of $8.3 billion in outstanding water and wastewater debt. Additional analyses of debt per capita and debt service payments are performed to provide insight into the future capacity of utilities to issue debt.Item Open Access Wages of Righteousness: The Economy of Heaven in the Gospel According to Matthew(2012) Eubank, NathanIn comparison to Mark and Luke, Matthew's Gospel contains a striking preponderance of economic imagery, especially in passages dealing with sin, righteousness, and divine recompense. This cluster of economic terms is found in every strand of tradition in Matthew's Gospel, and frequently appears to be the result of Matthean redaction. A good chunk of this language occurs in five uniquely Matthean parables dealing either with the pricelessness of the kingdom or judgment and reward (the hidden treasure in 13:44; the pearl in 13:45-46; the parable of the unforgiving servant in 18:23-35; the parable of the workers in the vineyard 20:1-16; the sheep and the goats in 25:31-46). Matthean additions to the triple tradition also tend to contain economic language.
In this dissertation I begin by analyzing Matthew's economic language against the backdrop of similar language in other early Jewish and Christian literature. I then go on to examine the import of this language for the narrative as a whole, arguing that some of the Gospel's central claims about Jesus emerge from this conceptual matrix. To be more specific, the narrative provides a coherent description of how Jesus saves his people from their sins and comes to be enthroned as Son of Man. Matthew draws on images of exile and debt-bondage to depict the people Jesus came to save as captives because of the debt of their sins. Jesus is introduced as the one born to save his people from their sins (1:21), and throughout the Gospel he does this by teaching them how to find debt forgiveness and store up treasure in the heavens in order to acquire eternal life. From the time Jesus begins predicting his death and resurrection he also teaches his disciples to follow him in giving their lives and being repaid with resurrection (16:24-28; 19:29), participation in the rule of the Son of Man (19:27-28), and the price of release for others who are in captivity. The passion narrative portrays the very repayment Jesus told the disciples that both he and they would receive: Jesus is raised from the dead, given all authority as Son of Man, and earns the ransom-price for the many. The end of the age remains in the future, and so suffering and doubt persist. Nevertheless, God's repayment of Jesus' self-giving is a foretaste of the coming settling of accounts.