Дисертації з теми "New York City. Finance Department"

The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies small physical commodities firm owners need to establish a distribution channel within the commodities market to enhance profits. The general business problem was that importing physical commodities from emerging markets was not profitable. The specific business problem was some small physical wholesale commodities firm managers lacked strategies to establish distribution channels for imported commodities. The information presented in this study is important to suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of organic cacao products to identify strategies to enhance their distribution channels. Disruptive innovation and the theory of constraints grounded the conceptual framework to relate ideas presented in this study. The central research question guiding the study concerned strategies small physical wholesale commodities firm owners used to establish distribution channels within the commodities market. Participants included 6 small business owners who gave recorded responses during in-depth, face-to-face interviews. The 6 interview recordings were transcribed, then coded and interpreted. Data analysis revealed 6 themes, which included price point strategy, B2B relationships, differentiation, strategic locations, sufficient operating capital, and customer relationships. Enhancing profits in the distribution channels of small organic cacao companies requires a holistic approach in the New York City area. The social implications of this study may draw attention to organic cacao, which is a healthy alternative to confectionery chocolate. Strategies introduced to enhance profits may increase economic growth in the local communities in the New York Tri-State area.

Many people recognize inequity in educational resource allocation as a problem. It has been suggested this inequity stems from the consolidation of experienced teachers in low-poverty schools and higher teacher turnover rates at high-poverty schools. This paper uses an ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression to examine the relationship between school-level expenditures excluding teacher salary, and teacher turnover in New York City. The results of the analysis suggest that these expenditures have a statistically significant association with teacher turnover, and that, for the majority of them, increased spending is associated with less teacher turnover. The results also suggest that increased spending is associated with a higher level of teacher satisfaction, though the significance of this association is less consistent. These results could have policy implications for education researchers and practitioners concerned with improving fiscal equity through decreased turnover in high-poverty schools.

CHDS State/Local
Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited
A review of the events of September 11 in New York City shows that inadequate inter-agency coordination or interdisciplinary collaboration existed among the rescuers arriving at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. The 9/11 Commission recommended and NIMS mandated better coordination between the several agencies, specifically the fire and police departments. In 2004, New York City created the Citywide Incident Management System (CIMS) to address these shortcomings. The goal of this research is to provide an evaluation of CIMS several years after implementation; has it changed emergency response in New York City or are the same problems occurring? A survey of the FDNY chief officers was conducted and the results show that CIMS' policies are not consistently enacted. The history and creation of CIMS shortly following the September 11 terrorist attacks is discussed along with a brief background on interagency emergency operations. The history of conflict between the FDNY and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and its motives are not the subject of this thesis, although they are discussed briefly. In closing, many of the same problems that plagued the emergency responders on September 11 still exist according to the survey results.

Des universitaires considèrent que les processus de transnationalisation segmentent l’autorité politique et érodent la capacité de gouverner les territoires aux niveaux national et métropolitain. En analysant la mise en œuvre de quatre projets d’infrastructure à Londres et dans la ville de New York, dans les secteurs du transport et de l’environnement, nous cherchons à démontrer la pertinence de l’action collective dans les territoires métropolitains. Ce travail démontre que la mondialisation ouvre des opportunités de caractère structurel aux autorités métropolitaines pour réaffirmer leur autorité politique au sein du territoire et introduit la possibilité d’exercer la gouvernance par les autorités non souveraines. Il avance l’idée que la dotation d’infrastructures est un terrain où ont lieu des luttes de pouvoir entre les autorités souveraines, les autorités non souveraines et les grandes entreprises où le vainqueur conquiert des capacités budgétaires et de financement, ce qui légitime son autorité dans les sphères politiques. Les études de cas illustrent le fait que les acteurs qualifiés de la politique métropolitaine utilisent la légitimité de leurs services pour formuler des politiques et créer un environnement favorable au partenariat entre la sphère publique et les experts en financement d’infrastructures, acquérant ainsi la capacité budgétaire et financière nécessaire aux projets d’infrastructure. En conclusion, ce travail soutient que la dotation d’infrastructures publiques aujourd’hui requiert la participation d’acteurs relevant de l’État et d’acteurs locaux, pour créer les conditions de l’investissement permettant de forger des relations significatives avec de grandes entreprises et des investisseurs partageant les responsabilités, les risques et les bénéfices
Scholars suggest that transnationalization processes fragment policy authority and undermine the governability of national and metropolitan societies. This dissertation analyzes the implementation of four infrastructure projects in London and New York City’s transit and environment sectors to probe collective action capacities in metropolitan territories. It demonstrates that globalization opens structural opportunities for metropolitan governments to reassert policy authority within their territories and infuses governance at sub-sovereign scale with politics. It argues that infrastructure provision is a terrain for power struggles between sovereign and sub-sovereign governments and large firms, in which the trophy is the accumulation of fiscal and financing capacity and legitimate authority over policy spheres. The case studies highlight that skilled metropolitan policy actors use the legitimacy of their offices to formulate policies and forge stakeholder environments in which public and infrastructure finance experts produce the necessary fiscal and financing capacity for infrastructure projects. It concludes that providing public infrastructures today requires state and local actors to create investment settings that forge meaningful relationships with large firms and investors between responsibilities, risks, and rewards

This thesis analyses the role of the Euromarket, an offshore market for Eurodollars or expatriate US dollars, in the re-emergence of global finance during the 1960s and 1970s. It charts not only its Cold War origins and the development of various markets for Eurodollars, but also institutions and policies that shaped them from the return to convertibility in 1958 to the ill-fated efforts to regulate the nascent market by international financial institutions. By examining the nature of Eurodollars as both a US and global currency, the thesis sheds light on the changing features of the governance of global finance and its relationship with the economic sovereignty of nation-states. It argues that the Euromarket underwent repeated contestations as politicians, bankers, and economists vested their political ambitions and cultural assumptions in it. The popular, academic, and policy debates challenged the speculative nature of Eurodollars which would destabilise the domestic as well as the international monetary system of the Bretton Woods system. Without a single monetary authority, the tendency of the Euromarket to transcend the order of capitalist nation-states constrained national governments’ capacity to control capital flows and the autonomy of domestic monetary policy. However, nation-states were not impotent but deliberately sought to exploit the liquid pool of capital in Eurodollars. It was not merely the US government that benefited from the seigniorage of Eurodollars and the City of London which was reborn as the international financial centre in the Euromarket. Continental European countries that were hesitant about European economic integration, the UK Labour government, developing countries in the Global South, and even the Communist bloc, resorted to the Euromarket for their national interests. The ambivalent attitudes of national governments and their conflict of interests resulted in the failure of coordinated efforts to introduce the rules of the game but facilitated the transnational network of finance in Eurodollars.

While much has been written on the Australian film and television industry, little has been presented by actual producers, filmmakers and technicians of their time and experiences within that same industry. Similarly, with historical documentaries, it has been academics rather than filmmakers who have led the debate. This thesis addresses this shortcoming and bridges the gap between practitioner experience and intellectual discussion, synthesising the debate and providing an important contribution from a filmmaker-academic, in its own way unique and insightful. The thesis is presented in two voices. First, my voice, the voice of memoir and recollected experience of my screen adventures over 38 years within the Australian industry, mainly producing historical documentaries for the ABC and the SBS. This is represented in italics. The second half and the alternate chapters provide the industry framework in which I worked with particular emphasis on documentaries and how this evolved and developed over a 40-year period, from 1970 to 2010. Within these two voices are three layers against which this history is reviewed and presented. Forming the base of the pyramid is the broad Australian film industry made up of feature films, documentary, television drama, animation and other types and styles of production. Above this is the genre documentary within this broad industry, and making up the small top tip of the pyramid, the sub-genre of historical documentary. These form the vertical structure within which industry issues are discussed. Threading through it are the duel determinants of production: ‘the market’ and ‘funding’. Underpinning the industry is the involvement of government, both state and federal, forming the three dimensional matrix for the thesis. For over 100 years the Australian film industry has depended on government support through subsidy, funding mechanisms, development assistance, broadcast policy and legislative provisions. This thesis aims to weave together these industry layers, binding them with the determinants of the market and funding, and immersing them beneath layers of government legislation and policy to present a new view of the Australian film industry.

My dissertation is a quantitative study that focuses on the perspectives of 74 New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) school principals regarding educational opportunities for emergent bilingual (EB) students. While this population continues to increase, EB students consistently demonstrate lower academic achievement than their monolingual peers throughout the United States (Heineke, 2015; NAEP, 2017a; NAEP, 2017b). I purposefully selected the NYC DOE for my study for three reasons: 1) New York State’s language policy embraces bilingual education; 2) the NYC DOE has implemented a differentiated weighted funding formula for EB students; and 3) the EB student composition mirrors that of other United States’ cities. My study utilized New York State’s Blueprint for English Language Learner/Multilingual Learner (ELL/MLL) Success to design a survey to collect data from my target population of 1,136 NYC DOE school principals since it aligned with the literature on providing an effective education for EB students. I found: 1) NYC DOE school principals highly agree that the elements put forth in NYSED’s Blueprint for ELL/MLL Success are present in their schools; 2) funding and professional development are challenges, as well as recommended structures and supports; differences in schools principals’ responses by: 3) program type in which they serve EB students; 4) percentage of EB students; and 5) number of EB students. The Likert-scale responses demonstrated a high level of agreement with the statements associated with effective education for EB students, while the data collected from the open-ended responses provided more insight into the challenges that respondents experience. Notwithstanding, I concluded that these school principals' perspectives varied based on school factors. My findings have implications for policy and practice for school districts serving EB students throughout the nation and may serve as a pathway to improving educational opportunities for EB students. I recommend regular cost studies for funding for EB students; monitoring of those funds; a systemic approach to professional development specific to EB students; and a system for data collection from school principals to inform professional development and systems of support and ensure they are meeting their identified needs.

It is challenging for central authorities to change the nature of teaching and learning despite great efforts to do so through both command and commitment-style approaches, as well as through recent reforms aimed at teacher quality. Capacity-building initiatives, particularly those that engage educators in structured collaboration within and across schools, hold promise for school improvement. These approaches engage educators to develop contextualized solutions to the specific obstacles facing their students. However, without certain conditions in place, particularly a strong professional community that prioritizes continuous improvement, collaborative activities are unlikely to yield positive outcomes, and instead produce variable results based on schools’ capacity pre-intervention. This dissertation explores New York City’s attempt to build schools’ capacity for improvement through the Learning Partners Program (LPP), a program developed under the Chancellor Fariña administration in 2014. LPP combines interschool collaboration, inquiry, teacher leadership, and teaming, thus providing an opportunity to explore how a district can foster the prerequisite conditions necessary for school improvement. Drawing on qualitative data from 3 years of implementation, I provide a detailed portrait of the elements of the program in practice, and describe the processes and conditions that allowed some schools in the program to implement coordinated changes that moved them towards their improvement goals. These descriptions can provide lessons to other districts interested in taking on similar “learning organization” reforms, or reforms that generally aim to shift the teaching profession towards one that fosters self-examination and continuous improvement.

This study examines the paradigm shift in urban planning towards a strategic spatial approach by investigating the effects of new strategic plans and policies on large-scale urban development projects (UDP’s). Specifically, it compares the impacts of new planning legislation and strategic local plans introduced in New York, Paris and Sao Paulo on three UDP’s in each city by evaluating the impacts on the development programs, implementation process and public benefits delivered from 2001 to 2012. The study provides an overview of the literature on strategic spatial planning theory and practice, comparative planning systems and large-scale urban public/ private developments to describe the overarching ‘spatial turn’ in planning and establish how different planning cultures influence plan making and what the consequences are for public/ private development, focusing on the mechanisms of flexibility provided by strategic plans to address the planning and financing requirements of UDP’s. It argues that despite of the formal differences found between systems as legal constructs, there is a need to investigate if these consequences actually occur and how they are produced. It then presents the case studies of the Special Hudson Yards District in New York City, the ‘Zone d’Amenagement Concerte Clichy-Batignolles’ in Paris and the ‘Operacao Urbana Agua Branca’ in Sao Paulo, focusing on the reform of the local statutes, planning process and implementation using quantitative and qualitative data collected through planning documents, press articles, interviews, observation of public meetings and field research. Each case study is representative of a different planning model where each project was developed after a revision of the local planning statutes and introduction of a new strategic city plan. The study finds that despite the formal differences between strategic plans, UDP’s cause planning systems to converge towards a similar intermediate model where policy determination becomes bidirectional and final development programs are determined by both strategic plans and site-specific considerations. The variations found between projects are instead determined by the broader development models present in each case which determine the implementation capacity of cities and ability to capitalize public resources to capture part of the resulting increment in land values and deliver public benefits. The study concludes with proposed implications for planning research and suggestions of policy formulations aimed at improving the ‘public return’ generated by UDP’s.

This dissertation traces the commodification of money in the U.S. after World War II. In 1945, all money was issued either directly by the government or, under conditions determined by the government, by commercial banks. Today, forms of money that are issued by private firms without government backing make up the majority of all money claims, and a significant part of the U.S. payment system is operated by a private organization. These forms of money were essentially in existence by 1980; hence this dissertation focuses on their emergence between the late 1940s and the late 1970s. The new forms of money emerged outside public purview. In part, this was the result of their wholesale character: they were used not by the many households and small businesses that each made modest payments but by the few large organizations that moved vast sums around. But it was also the result of a fundamental choice made by these large organizations. They created new forms of money not by trying to change public laws but by evading them, through private contract and private law. While public discourse and democratic decision-making played virtually no role in the process, the state as an issuer of financial instruments did. Central bank deposits and government securities formed the basis on top of which private actors built crucial parts of the new forms of money. Creating a new form of money is difficult because its creators need to achieve two potentially contradictory goals. To get private actors to join the market, the creators need to convince them that the products traded are equivalent to money. To keep public actors from shutting down the market, the creators have to convince them that the products traded are not money (otherwise, the creators would be involved in counterfeiting). The former goal, I will argue against non-sociological explanations, cannot be achieved only by discovering an opportunity for arbitrage, exploiting a legal loophole, or making use of technological change. As important as these cognitive innovations are, the creators of a new form of money also need to be able to mobilize preexisting social relationships, so that the necessary transaction volume to render a financial instrument a form of money is achieved. The latter goal—keeping the state from shutting down the new form of money—was particularly hard to achieve in the postwar U.S. with its policy monopoly over money exercised by the Federal Reserve, a knowledgeable and powerful institution. I will argue that private actors found it possible to create a new form of money when the Federal Reserve saw the innovation only secondarily as concerned with money and primarily as furthering one of its other goals, in particular the financing of the U.S. government and the functioning of the banking system. Drawing on new archival data, this dissertation traces the eventful process through which the creators of private money navigated the two conflicting imperatives. Chapters 2–4 investigate new forms of money as a store of value. Chapter 2 describes how securities firms and corporate treasurers created a pioneering money market—the one in repurchase agreements—and how the major commercial banks reacted by calling for a restoration of the old monetary system. Chapter 3 shows that, when this call went unheeded by the Federal Reserve, the commercial banks themselves began to create new money markets, with effects that percolated through the entire financial system and led participants to reassess their roles and the norms that guided their interactions. Chapter 4 explains the management of the first major crisis of the money market, in 1974, as a silent triumph of the commercial banks over the Federal Reserve—in a moment of weakness, the money market became entrenched. Chapter 5 turns to money as a means of payment. It shows that, in contrast to the decentralized emergence of the money market, major commercial banks in the late 1960s built a new payment system through coordinated action and, in the crisis of 1974, took tremendous risks to stabilize that new form of money.

Objective: Although factors that promote initial and recurring homelessness among inner city women have been long explored, impoverished women continue enter and re-enter shelters at troubling rates. This trend is projected to increase over time. This longitudinal study uses Sydemics as a framework to advance our understanding of the relationship between depression, PTSD, trauma and intimate partner violence and the loss of housing among impoverished women using inner city Emergency Departments. We hypothesized that depression, PTSD, childhood trauma and IPV are positively associated with homelessness at baseline and that women with higher rates of a combination of these variables (e.g. PTSD and IPV) in wave 1 will have higher odds of experiencing both an initial and repeat bout of homelessness in the second and/or third waves, controlling for all other variables in the study. Method: Multivariate analyses and logistic regression, at baseline and longitudinally, were conducted to test study hypotheses with homelessness as the dependent variable. Six multivariate logistic regression models were used. Odds ratios (OR) with their 95% confidence intervals are reported. Results: Depression and childhood trauma were individually associated with homelessness at the .05 level in this sample of low income women. IPV was marginally related to homelessness (p=0.0917). PTSD however was not. Importantly, although IPV and PSTD were not individually associated with homelessness in bivariate analyses, housed, never homeless women, and women who had previously experienced homelessness had a greater odd of becoming homeless than those who experienced only one of these risk variables. Specifically, housed, never homeless women who had PTSD and IPV had a 2.2 odd of becoming homeless for the first time in waves 2 and 3, whereas those who experienced PTSD only had a 1.3 odds of becoming homeless for the first time; never homeless participants who experienced IPV only a 1.7 greater odds of becoming homeless (CI.0.348, 14.84; p=0.385), adjusting for all other variables. Similarly, the odd of becoming homeless again among participants who had PTSD and experienced IPV was 1.7 whereas the odds of recurrent homelessness was 1.2 among those who experienced PTSD only and 1.1 among those who experienced IPV only (CI.0.397, 7.46; p=0.463), controlling for all other variables in the study. Conclusion: Our findings confirm our hypotheses that low-income women who have PTSD, depression, histories of childhood trauma, and/or IPV have a higher odds of initial and recurrent homelessness when compared with women who do not have these risk variables. Our findings further confirm that women who have combinations of risk variables have even higher odds of future homelessness. Due to the low sample size of women with histories of homelessness in the study, there was lack of power. Despite this challenge, the results of these explorations (in determining heretofore unidentified effect sizes) utilizing Syndemics as a conceptual framework are promising. Future research with larger sample sizes (and sufficient power) are important to further the initial findings from this study.

Thesis (M.S.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2009.
Thesis advisor: Kathleen Bantley. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Criminal Justice." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-72). Abstract available via the World Wide Web.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, American dance artists have presented complicated images of American identity to world audiences, as dance companies traveled abroad under the auspices of the US State Department. This dissertation uses oral history interviews, archival research, and performance analysis to investigate how dancers navigated their status as official American ambassadors in the Cold War and the years following the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US. Dance companies worked and performed in international sites, enacting messages of American democratic superiority, while individual dancers re-interpreted the contours of American identity through personal encounters with local artists and arts practices. The dancers’ memories of government-sponsored tours re-insert the American artist into American diplomatic history, prompting a reconsideration of dancers not just as diplomatic tools working to persuade global audiences, but as creative thinkers re-imagining what it means to be American. This dissertation begins in the late 1950s, as the State Department began discussing appropriate dance companies to send to the Soviet Union, as part of the performing arts initiatives that began in 1954 under the direction of President Dwight Eisenhower. The dissertation concludes by examining more recent dance in diplomacy programs initiated in 2003, coinciding with the US invasion of Iraq. My analysis considers New York City Ballet’s 1962 tour of the Soviet Union, where the company performed programs that included George Balanchine’s Serenade (1934), Agon (1957), and Western Symphony (1954), and Jerome Robbins’ Interplay (1945) during the heightened global anxieties of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My analysis of Ailey’s 1967 tour of nine African countries focuses primarily on Revelations (1960), which closed every program on the tour. Moving into the twenty-first century, I analyze A Slipping Glimpse (2007), a collaboration between Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and Tansuree Shankar Dance Company, which began as a US State Department-sponsored 2003 residency in Kolkata. To explore each tour, I consider government goals documented in archived minutes from artist selection panels; dancers’ memories of the tours, which I collected in personal interviews conducted between 2007 and 2009; and performance analysis of the pieces that traveled on each tour.
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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Oral health is crucial to overall health and a focus of the U.S. Health Center program, which provides preventive dental services in medically underserved communities. Dental hygiene is an oral health profession whose practice is focused on dental disease prevention and oral health promotion. Variations in the practice and regulation of dental hygiene has been demonstrated to influence access to dental care at a state level; restrictive policies are associated lower rates of access to care. Understanding whether and to what extent policy variations affect availability and access to dental care and the oral health of medically underserved communities served by grantees of the U.S. Health Center program is the focus of this study. This longitudinal study examines dental service utilization at 1,135 health center grantees that received community health center funding from 2004 to 2011. The Dental Hygiene Professional Practice Index (DHPPI) was used as an indicator of the state policy environment. The influence of grantee and state level characteristics are also considered. Mixed effects models were used to account for correlations introduced by the multiple hierarchical structure of the data. Key findings of this study demonstrate that state policy environment is a predictor of the availability and access to dental care and the oral health status of medically underserved communities that received care at a grantee of the U.S. Health Center program. Grantees located in states with highly restrictive policy environments were 73% less likely to deliver dental services and, those that do, provided care to 7% fewer patients than those grantees located in states with the most supportive policy environments. Population’s served by grantees from the most restrictive states received less preventive care and had greater restorative and emergency dental care needs. State policy environment is a predictor of availability and access to dental care and the oral health status of medically underserved communities. This study has important implications for policy at the federal, state, and local levels. Findings demonstrate the need for policy and advocacy efforts at all levels, especially within states with restrictive policy environments.