This dissertation assesses the relationship between inequality and the longevity of urban communities. It does so through an examination of low-status households, a population segment I term Urban Commoners, at the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize. Aventura was a socioeconomically diverse urban center that grew to its peak in...
In today’s climate of rising economic inequality, drone warfare, xenophobic politics, and Big Brother technology, understanding how we might best design learning environments to provide opportunities for expanding the purpose and potentialities of STEM education for minoritized communities grows in importance daily. This dissertation is a 3-part study that examines...
There is a paradox at the center of twenty-first century American poverty. On the one hand, American poverty seems to have become an object of significant interest (at least to scholars and to the reading public)—as evidenced through the surge of wildly successful non-fiction books about poverty. On the other...
My dissertation identifies the causes of inequality traps - i.e., high and persistent levels of economic inequality - in Latin America and explains how and why some countries manage to escape such traps and embark on paths of diminishing inequality. I argue that the Redistributive State Power shapes the main...
In this dissertation, I combine quasi-experiments and computational tools with large-scale data in new ways to address questions that revolve around the Matthew Effect of status. My dissertation is a collection of four empirical papers on status at both the organizational and the individual levels. I employ two distinct empirical...
My research paper focuses on inequality in America specifically covering the incarceration system and the intersection of race and the criminal justice system. This is an important topic to study due to the high number of racially diverse individuals that are disproportionally affected and incarcerated due to the inequalities in...
Changing economic activities bring significant cultural, epidemiological, and nutritional transitions. These transitions have important and lifelong effects on the health of populations experiencing them. Infancy represents a critical period when rapid growth and metabolic programming occur, making infants particularly vulnerable to long-lasting biological changes due to such transitions. The objective...