Browsing by Subject "Economic justice"

This thesis focuses on multiple themes in the field of public economics with intersectionsin development economics, environmental economics, and political economy. The overarching themes of this work are focuses on the city, institutions, and economic and environmental justice. The first chapter examines on the impact of lead abatement laws on eviction. The second chapter evaluates Myanmar’s National Community Driven Development Program. The final chapter examines the role of one’s representative on their home’s price. An abstract of each chapter is as follows:

Lead paint in old houses is the leading cause of leadpoisoning in children under 6 today. To combat this problem, several states have passed lead abatement laws, forcing landlords to remove lead in the homes they rent if tenants have children under the age of 6. However, these laws have unintended consequences, causing landlords to evict tenants rather than abate lead. I use a difference-in-differences approach while employing various model specifications with various fixed effects and sets of controls to examine the impact of Ohio’s 2003 lead abatement law on eviction rates. Using newly collected data from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, I find that the passage of Ohio’s lead abatement law sharply increased targeted evictions. Due to the law’s passage, the average census district in Ohio faced an increased eviction rate of roughly 0.457 points, corresponding to an additional 13.93 evictions a year. These impacts are highly statistically significant, sizeable, and economically meaningful, indicating that policy makers should incorporate distributional consequences when designing future lead abatement laws in order to avoid unintended consequences and ensure equitable outcomes.

Community driven development (CDD) has become acommon method of distributing aid throughout the developing world. Founded on two guiding principles, decentralization of the aid distribution process and empowerment through participation, CDD programs encourage community involvement in all steps of the development project. We evaluate Myanmar’s National Community Driven Development Program (NCDDP) by implementing a regression discontinuity design in sampling that takes advantage of the discontinuous cutoff in program receipt at the township border by sampling matched pairs of villages across program borders. We find that CDD successfully delivers village infrastructure, in line with the results of previous CDD evaluations. Moreover, in contrast to previous findings in the literature, we find large positive effects of CDD enrollment on the diversity and quality of local governance structures and greater participation of women and ethnic minorities. Finally, we provide novel evidence that these changes in local governance are associated with detectable improvements in local public goods provision beyond the scope of the CDD program, as measured by village-level responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, CDD villages enact more significantly more of the recommended measures to contain the spread of disease. These results provide evidence that CDD participation Congressional and state representatives and their parties use their political power to send kickbacks to their districts, providing funding for public goods and targeted investment within their district. However, representatives do not have an equal ability to do this, as those with longer tenure, important committee posts, and in more competitive districts have the ability to send more kickbacks to their districts. I estimate the impact of one's representative and district, at the state house, state senate, and congressional level, on housing prices using the 2010 redistricting to identify the impact of one's representative on housing prices. I first develop a model of political competition and housing prices with testable implications to bring to the data. Using data from InfoUSA, containing roughly 130 million housing transactions per year, from 2006 to 2014, combined with data on state and federal representatives, I identify and examine the impact of one's representative on housing prices using multiple methods, including location fixed effects, a regression discontinuity design, and an instrumental variables design. I find that "packing" districts so that they are not competitive is not only used to dilute voting power, but dilute local wealth as well, that more powerful representatives use that power to increase the value of their constituents' homes, and that representatives in the party in control of the respective house are able to use this power to send kickbacks to their constituents. Not only does partisan gerrymandering come at a social and political cost, but a great economic cost as well.

Considerable attention is being given to the growing problem of the racial wealth gap in the United States of America. Understanding this chasm requires a critique of the government’s imprimatur on the institution of slavery, the legalization of Jim Crow, and the myriad of ways institutional racism has been suffused into the fabric of America , directly impacting African Americans ability to acquire and accumulate wealth. After the official end of slavery in 1865, the Emancipated were promised a type of reparations in the form of “40 acres and a mule.” However, with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, his successor Andrew Johnson rescinded the order, forcing blacks into quasi-slavery in the form of vagrancy laws, sharecropping and convict leasing. Then, the next fifty years of Jim Crow segregation effectively allowed the country to improvise new ways to subjugate blacks into a new caste system with alternative laws at the hands of the political and economic elite, this was especially prevalent in those areas once reliant upon slave labor. Blacks were routinely subjected to literacy tests, black codes, vagrancy laws, poll taxes and grandfather clauses, which were meant to restrict political participation, economic inclusion and social integration, lasting from 1877 well into the 1950s. This research proposes that the commodification of black bodies served as the underpinning of American capitalism, and demonstrates how slave labor across the South, benefitted other parts of the country, even the world, and served as the driving force behind an emerging national economic system. The amalgamation of two-hundred and forty-six years of enslavement, ninety years of legalized Jim Crow segregation, sixty years of separate but equal and thirty-five years of racist housing policies, locked generations out of economic opportunity and gave rise to ubiquitous pathologies across the nation. These and other injustices were supported by local municipalities and bolstered by the United States Federal Government, which warrants a substantial justice claim. In 1989, the late John Conyers (D-MI.) began presenting a bill before the House of Representatives to develop a commission to merely study the social effects of slavery, segregation and its continuing economic implications. The bill has remained tabled in the House of Representatives for the past thirty years. In a historic move in 2019, a group of panelists were able to present cogent arguments before the House of Representative, debating the pros and cons of reparations, however since the landmark hearing, no further action has been taken on the matter. This research aims to justify a reparations program by establishing the myriad of ways historical kleptocracy, state-sanctioned segregation and federally supported laws set the stage for the current and ever-growing racial wealth gap. To construct this argument, I draw upon historical, sociological, theological and political scholarship, in an effort to establish the United States of America has yet to atone for the moral injury of slavery and should be held culpable for its lingering effects. Therefore, I propose the federal government should be held responsible for acknowledging, redressing and bringing closure to these and other reprehensible acts, and a mea culpa is only one step toward national healing and wholeness. I utilize Walter Rauschenbusch’s work, Christianizing the Social Order which examines the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and social reform, as he critiqued the economic conditions of his day and argued for radical social, political, and economic changes in the structures that crippled the vulnerable and the underserved. His understanding of reform and justice could play a vital role in moving the Church and the nation toward penance. In this work, I propose that reparations are not only a moral claim but a biblical and theological mandate, that will be analyzed and synthesize through past and contemporary scholarship. I will conclude with the idea that reparations are the only actionable recourse that will effectively close the racial wealth gap, in order to facilitate wholeness for the American descendants of slaves. This research will conclude that cumulative injustices leveraged against Blacks have had damaging effects on the present, and many of the injustices were supported and sanctioned by the United States Federal Government and executed by state legislatures. Therefore, my research argues that the federal government should be held culpable for the current social, political and economic damages experienced by contemporary African Americans.

Considerable attention is being given to the growing problem of the racial wealth gap in the United States of America. Understanding this chasm requires a critique of the government’s imprimatur on the institution of slavery, the legalization of Jim Crow, and the myriad of ways institutional racism has been suffused into the fabric of America , directly impacting African Americans ability to acquire and accumulate wealth. After the official end of slavery in 1865, the Emancipated were promised a type of reparations in the form of “40 acres and a mule.” However, with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, his successor Andrew Johnson rescinded the order, forcing blacks into quasi-slavery in the form of vagrancy laws, sharecropping and convict leasing. Then, the next fifty years of Jim Crow segregation effectively allowed the country to improvise new ways to subjugate blacks into a new caste system with alternative laws at the hands of the political and economic elite, this was especially prevalent in those areas once reliant upon slave labor. Blacks were routinely subjected to literacy tests, black codes, vagrancy laws, poll taxes and grandfather clauses, which were meant to restrict political participation, economic inclusion and social integration, lasting from 1877 well into the 1950s. This research proposes that the commodification of black bodies served as the underpinning of American capitalism, and demonstrates how slave labor across the South, benefitted other parts of the country, even the world, and served as the driving force behind an emerging national economic system. The amalgamation of two-hundred and forty-six years of enslavement, ninety years of legalized Jim Crow segregation, sixty years of separate but equal and thirty-five years of racist housing policies, locked generations out of economic opportunity and gave rise to ubiquitous pathologies across the nation. These and other injustices were supported by local municipalities and bolstered by the United States Federal Government, which warrants a substantial justice claim. In 1989, the late John Conyers (D-MI.) began presenting a bill before the House of Representatives to develop a commission to merely study the social effects of slavery, segregation and its continuing economic implications. The bill has remained tabled in the House of Representatives for the past thirty years. In a historic move in 2019, a group of panelists were able to present cogent arguments before the House of Representative, debating the pros and cons of reparations, however since the landmark hearing, no further action has been taken on the matter. This research aims to justify a reparations program by establishing the myriad of ways historical kleptocracy, state-sanctioned segregation and federally supported laws set the stage for the current and ever-growing racial wealth gap. To construct this argument, I draw upon historical, sociological, theological and political scholarship, in an effort to establish the United States of America has yet to atone for the moral injury of slavery and should be held culpable for its lingering effects. Therefore, I propose the federal government should be held responsible for acknowledging, redressing and bringing closure to these and other reprehensible acts, and a mea culpa is only one step toward national healing and wholeness. I utilize Walter Rauschenbusch’s work, Christianizing the Social Order which examines the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and social reform, as he critiqued the economic conditions of his day and argued for radical social, political, and economic changes in the structures that crippled the vulnerable and the underserved. His understanding of reform and justice could play a vital role in moving the Church and the nation toward penance. In this work, I propose that reparations are not only a moral claim but a biblical and theological mandate, that will be analyzed and synthesize through past and contemporary scholarship. I will conclude with the idea that reparations are the only actionable recourse that will effectively close the racial wealth gap, in order to facilitate wholeness for the American descendants of slaves. This research will conclude that cumulative injustices leveraged against Blacks have had damaging effects on the present, and many of the injustices were supported and sanctioned by the United States Federal Government and executed by state legislatures. Therefore, my research argues that the federal government should be held culpable for the current social, political and economic damages experienced by contemporary African Americans.