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We investigate the impact of the US drone program in Pakistan on insurgent violence. Using details about US-Pakistan counterterrorism cooperation and geocoded violence data, we show that the program was associated with monthly reductions of around nine to thirteen insurgent attacks and fifty-one to eighty-six casualties in the area affected by the program. This change was sizable, as in the year before the program, the affected area experienced around twenty-one attacks and one hundred casualties per month. Additional quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that this drop is attributable to the drone program. However, the damage caused in strikes during the program cannot fully account for the reduction. Instead, anticipatory effects induced by the program played a prominent role in subduing violence. These effects stemmed from the insurgents’ perception of the risk of being targeted in drone strikes; their efforts to avoid targeting severely compromised their movement and communication abilities, in addition to eroding within-group trust. These findings contrast with prominent perspectives on air-power, counterinsurgency, and US counterterrorism, suggesting select drone deployments can be an effective tool of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism.

This study presents a detailed analysis of weather window accessibility for marine renewable energy (MRE) sites along Ireland's coast, utilizing a robust 12 year met-ocean dataset. The research focuses on key test sites—the atlantic marine energy test site (AMETS), the galway bay test site (GBTS), and the Westwave Demonstration Site—and expands to a broader spatial analysis of Irish coastal waters. By integrating significant wave height and wind data, the study evaluates site accessibility, emphasizing the paramount role of wave height in determining access. Findings reveal substantial spatial variability in accessibility, with high-resource areas like AMETS facing greater access challenges due to harsher conditions, as opposed to the more accessible GBTS. The study underscores the need for a nuanced, region-specific approach to MRE development in Ireland, highlighting how strategic planning and technological advancements are crucial in exploiting the country's significant MRE potential. The results also stress the importance of long-term data for accurate environmental variability assessment, offering vital insights for future MRE site viability and strategy development.

This project evaluates the existing literature on Tribal co-management regimes for their success in enabling Indigenous sovereignty and homelands management in the United States and Canada. Developed to inform policy makers and Tribal leaders on co-management frameworks, this systematized thematic literature review analyzes both the practical components of co-management regimes, as well as the intrinsic components which impact their effectiveness. Informed by the anti-colonial praxis of Indigenous Political Ecology, 27 case studies were analyzed according to six metrics of Tribal co-management success: 1) recognition of Tribes as sovereign governments, 2) incorporation of US Trust responsibilities, 3) the existence of structures to enable Tribal involvement, 4) early integration of Tribal management, 5) extensive recognition and incorporation of Tribal expertise, and 6) the effectiveness of conflict resolution processes. Analysis of the case studies showed mixed-results in which co-management regimes produced some benefits but not without caveats and nuance. When executed thoughtfully, co-management can increase Tribal involvement in land management regimes; however it does not result in decolonization. Instead, co-management should be viewed as a possible pathway towards increasing the capacity and political power of Tribes to engage in true decoloniality.

This dissertation presents three essays advancing the theory of taxation.The first chapter presents a new method for evaluating proposed reforms of progressive piecewise linear tax schedules. Typically, estimates of the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) are used to predict taxpayer responses to changes in tax rates and/or tax bracket thresholds. In this chapter, I show that elasticities are not always needed for this task; the \"bunching mass'' at a bracket threshold (the share of taxpayers locating there) is a sufficient statistic for the revenue effect of behavioral responses to small changes of the threshold. Building on this finding, revenue forecasting and welfare analysis of threshold changes can be conducted using the pre-reform distribution of taxable income alone. I apply these results in an analysis of the Earned Income Tax Credit, an exercise which motivates extensions addressing taxpayer optimization errors, tax rate heterogeneity, large reforms, and income and participation effects. My approach complements existing bunching methods: it avoids key limitations of bunching-based ETI estimation, but addresses a relatively narrower set of policy questions.The second chapter explores the evolution of economic inequality and political inequality in a democratic society where these two types of inequality mutually reinforcing. I introduce a simple dynamic model of democratic redistribution where, in each period, two candidates compete in an election by proposing how a fixed amount of income will be divided amongst a group of citizens in the next period (i.e. pure redistribution policy). Campaign spending is financed by citizen political donations, leading to inequality of political influence favoring wealthier citizens. This creates a feedback loop through which the current distribution of income affects the future distribution. If the marginal dollar of income yields a sufficiently large increase in political influence, long run convergence to a plutocratic equilibrium can occur for arbitrarily small levels of initial economic inequality. The opposite scenario is also possible: a society which is initially extremely unequal may nonetheless be destined for egalitarianism. The long run distribution of income can exhibit extreme sensitivity to initial conditions: tiny differences in initial inequality may determine whether democratic redistribution leads to plutocracy or egalitarianism. Turning to a version of the model where elections are fought over a nonlinear income tax, I show that the same conditions that determine whether convergence to egalitarianism occurs in the pure redistribution model also dictate whether taxation of the rich is possible in the nonlinear tax model.The third chapter employs a variant of the election model from the second chapter to examine the optimal tax treatment of political contributions. Adopting the normative stance that inequality of political influence is undesirable, I characterize the optimal nonlinear tax schedule on political donations. Sufficient statistics for optimal policy include not only donation demand elasticities, but also the marginal efficacy of campaign spending, and the effect of taxes on the sensitivity of donations to candidate policy platforms. Using numerical simulations, I provide proof-of-concept results showing that this framework can rationalize real world policies such as the nonlinear subsidy schedules present in Canada. These feature generous marginal rates of subsidy on the first dollar of political donations, with rates of subsidy declines in donation amount.

Engaged research emphasizes researcher–stakeholder collaborations as means of improving the relevance of research outcomes and the chances for science-based decision-making. Sustainability science, as a form of engaged research, depends on the collaborative abilities and cooperative tendencies of researchers. We use an economic experiment to measure cooperation between university faculty, local citizens, and faculty engaged in a large sustainability science project to test a set of hypotheses: (1) faculty on the sustainability project will cooperate more with local residents than non-affiliated faculty, (2) sustainability faculty will have the highest level of internal cooperation of any group, and (3) that cooperation may vary due to academic training and culture in different departments amongst sustainability faculty. Our results demonstrate that affiliation with the sustainability project is not associated with differences in cooperation with local citizens or with in-group peers, but that disciplinary differences amongst sustainability faculty do correlate with cooperative tendencies within our sample. We also find that non-affiliated faculty cooperated less with each other than with faculty affiliated with the sustainability project. We conclude that economic experiments can be useful in discovering patterns of prosociality within institutional settings, and list challenges for further applications.

Automotive manufacturers and researchers have posited that pedestrians will feel uncomfortable crossing in front of driverless vehicles—autonomous vehicles that lack visible human operators. This belief is often based on the lack of driver-related cues such as eye contact and hand waves that can communicate when it is safe for a pedestrian to cross. As such, interface concepts based on explicit communication such as displays, lights, or projections have been developed to indicate to pedestrians when it is safe to cross. However, the underlying need for such interfaces, and their efficacy, have not been thoroughly explored in on-road settings. It is likely that autonomous vehicles can simply depend on legacy behaviors, such as slowing appropriately, to interact with pedestrians.This dissertation explores the design of motion and engine sound as implicit communication between autonomous vehicles and pedestrians. We begin by investigating motor sound's subtle influence on human-robot interactions, working towards identifying characteristics of sound that contribute to particular subjective experiences. We show that changing the timbre of sound alone, while leaving all other dimensions constant, can change someone's perception of a robot. We then apply these findings in the context of autonomous vehicles, where engine sound could implicitly cue that the vehicle will yield for a pedestrian, particularly in electric vehicles that will soon be required to project artificial engine sound while moving at low speeds.Through a field study, we demonstrate how a visibly driverless vehicle's motion and engine sound can communicate to pedestrians that it is safe to cross. During these studies, we drove a simulated driverless vehicle in everyday traffic, and researchers standing by interviewed unsuspecting pedestrians who interacted with the vehicle. We then analyzed video of each interaction to evaluate responses to the vehicle. While the novelty of a driverless vehicle did surprise some, many did not even notice its autonomous nature. Most pedestrians reported positive experiences, and all crossed in front of the vehicle without the need for explicit communication.While not inclusive of all crossing situations, this work challenges the assumption that driverless vehicles will need explicit displays to replace driver-pedestrian communication at crosswalks. In addition, it contributes design requirements for socially appropriate stopping behavior and artificial engine sound for autonomous electric vehicles. In doing so, we bring automotive design a step closer to solving a critical human factors problem that could hinder the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles.

How should taxes on externality-generating activities be adjusted if they are regressive? In our model, the government raises revenue using distortionary income and commodity taxes. If more or less productive people have identical tastes for externality-generating consumption, the government optimally imposes a Pigouvian tax equal to the marginal damage from the externality. This is true regardless of whether the tax is regressive. But, if regressivity reflects different preferences of people with different incomes rather than solely income effects, the optimal tax differs from the Pigouvian benchmark. We derive sufficient statistics for optimal policy, and use them to study carbon taxation in the United States. Our empirical results suggest an optimal carbon tax that is remarkably close to the Pigouvian level, but with higher carbon taxes for very high-income households if this is feasible. When we allow for heterogeneity in preferences at each income level as well as across the income distribution, our optimal tax schedules are further attenuated toward the Pigouvian benchmark.

Traditional optimal commodity tax analysis, dating back to Ramsey (1927), prescribes that to maximize welfare one should impose higher taxes on goods with lower demand elasticities. Yet policy makers do not stress minimizing efficiency costs as a desideratum. In this note we revisit the commodity tax problem, and show that the attractiveness of the Ramsey inverse-elasticity prescription can itself be inverted if the tax system is chosen -- or at least strongly influenced -- by taxpayers who are overly confident of their ability, relative to others, to substitute away from taxed goods.

FITTINGinSIDE by Stefan Prins, I will not kiss your f.ing flag by Marco Stroppa, and MAP by Timothy McCormack are three contemporary musical works important to the future genre of contemporary classical art music, specifically with regard to the trombone. This dissertation details the significant contributions of these three musical works to contemporary art music, to understand their aesthetic aims, and to explore the philosophy behind their composition. Primary material for study is drawn from writings and interviews of the three composers studied, relevant historical criticism and musical analysis, and contemporary aesthetic and philosophic theory. Research is demonstrated by writing on and producing a compact disc recording of the three musical works. An essay titled \"Deconstructing the Museum: Music, Prins, and Heterotopia\" analyzes Prins' FITTINGinSIDE. This composition addresses the issue of how the concert hall, academia, and other similar modern museums often, consciously or not, encourage the distance felt between art and society. With this essay, I introduce the idea of heterotopia into musical discourse. Specifically, I speak on Michel Foucault's sixth principle of heterotopia. \"Locating 'Deeper Human Reality': A Musical Phenomenology of Marco Stroppa's I will not kiss your f.ing flag\" titles the second essay. What reality is and how we perceive reality is questioned in Stoppa's composition. His musical work unveils new possibilities of composition, electronic interaction in live performance, and acoustical reality in performance space. In this essay, I appropriate the philosophical study of phenomenology to supplement Stroppa's musical reevaluation of reality and our perception of it. The third essay, titled \"Beauty, Nature, and McCormack. Musical Asunder\" scrutinizes McCormack's MAP. At first glance, MAP is the prototype of New Complexity music, but the meticulous and exhaustive compositional method of MAP is employed to explore physical human actions. In the adversarial relationship between technique and human action, a performer realizes the beauty in MAP. MAP focuses on the microscopic, born from the body, and consequently born from nature. In this essay I theorize MAP as living wholly in beauty, born from the natural world. From Jean Baudrillard's theories, McCormack literally maps his own territory of what is beautiful. Doctoral Performance and Research submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Musical Arts by Dylan Thomas Chmura-Moore at University of Wisconsin-Madison, May 2011. I. Solo Recital, November 22, 2008, Morphy Hall: (1) Basta by Folke Rabe (2) Solo de Concours by Adrien Barthe (3) Indeed by Pascal Dusapin (4) Trombone Concerto by Christopher Rouse. II. Concerto Performance, March 27, 2009, Mills Hall: Trombone Concerto by Christopher Rouse. III. Chamber Recital, May 2, 2009, Morphy Hall: (1) Electroacoustic Improvisation by Dylan Chmura-Moore - with video Police Car by John Cale & One by Yoko Ono (2) General Speech by Robert Erikson - with video Baghdad No Particular Order by Paul Chan (3) Concerto for Piano and Orchestra & Two5 for Tenor Trombone and Piano by John Cage - with video Garden Path by Stan Brakhage (4) Coming Together & Attica by Friederic Rzewski - with video Heterodyne by Hollis Frampton & Apotheosis by Yoko Ono. IV. Solo Recital, November 24, 2009, Mills Hall: (1) À la manière de Debussy by Jean-Michel Defaye (2) Ricercare una melodia by Jonathan Harvey (3) The Song of King David by Norman Bolter (4) Romance, Mandoline, La Chevelure, & Beau Soir by Claude Debussy (5) ANIMUS a brainstorm by Luca Francesconi. V. Lecture Recital, May 3, 2010, Frederic March Play Circle: (1) Lecture Title: \"Finding a 'Deeper Human Reality' in I will not kiss your f.ing flag' (2) Recital: I will not kiss your f.ing flag per aumentato e electtronica da camera by Marco Stroppa (I) Sferzante (II) Recondito (III) Blueeued (IV) \"i sing of Olaf\" (with talking hands.) Vivido, ribelle (V) Sfuggente (VI) Estraneo. VI. Dissertation: (1)Title of Written Project: \"Three Essays and an Untitled Recording that Realize the Musical Potential of Heterotopia, Phenomenology, and Beauty as Asunder\" (2) Recorded Compositions: FITTINGinSIDE by Stefan Prins; I will not kiss your f.ing flag by Marco Stroppa; MAP by Timothy McCormack (3) Description: Philosophical theories of heterotopia, phenomenology, and beauty are applied to contemporary musical concerns related to the interpretation of newly composed music, specifically that which was recorded for this project.