Timely and accurate rental measures are needed by market participants to assess the state of the housing market and shelter costs, which are primarily based on rent and rent-derived measures, representing about 40% of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). In addition, subnational measures are needed for a range of business operations and policy implementations. Property transactions are recorded and often publicly available. This has allowed the development of well established house price indices that are available at high temporal and spatial resolutions. This is not the case with rental contracts. Rental measures based on survey data are key to the CPI and other private and public sources have also been used to create rent measures in recent years. In our research, we review existing rent measures showing substantial variations in estimates of rent levels and trends across measures. We then focus on the strengths and limits of listing based measures. Finally we use listing data collected from several online platforms over the 2017-2023 period to compare them to existing measures. Our findings do show the potential and limits for developing repeat rent measures based on asking rents and the adjustments needed to make such data usable.

The goal of The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation, promote peaceful nuclear energy cooperation, and pursue global disarmament. Signatory countries meet every five years for the NPT Review Conference to assess the implementation of the treaty and strengthen its measures. The Preparatory Committees of the NPT are held three years prior to the Review Conference so signatories can discuss relevant topics. Studies on the NPTs effectiveness focus on non-proliferation compliance and overlook cooperation for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. In this study I map how the distribution of topics discussed in the Preparatory Committees change over time, how levels of state participation change over time, and if change in state participation in the Preparatory Committee correlates to increased transfers of nuclear reactor technologies. I employ a three-part approach in this study. First, I use topic modeling for categorizing the Preparatory Committee documents in seven categories. I assign the following labels to the categories by reading the most relevant documents in each one: Safeguards and Verifications, Non-Proliferation Policy and Disarmament, Conflict Resolution, Peaceful Nuclear Energy Cooperation, Implementation Assessments, New Initiative Proposals, and Logistics. Second, I generate “relevancy scores” between the names of the countries and the Preparatory Committee documents by using an embeddings model to quantify country’s participation. I then compare participation levels to nuclear technology transfers. Collectively, this research has shown that discourse on peaceful nuclear energy cooperation in the NPT forums often centers around the advancement of safeguards against proliferation. I also find that changes in participation do not correlate with changes in numbers of nuclear technology transfers. Thus, the NPT forums are platforms for dialogue on strengthening security against nuclear threats unrelated to tangible growth of peaceful nuclear technology usage.

Economic sanctions as a means of pressuring nations to improve human rights protections or end human rights abuses have become an increasingly common practice in recent years. Although the efficacy of sanctions for humanitarian ends remains under heavy scrutiny, the United States Department of State continues to both implement new sanctions and enforce existing policies of this kind. However, there is a notable discrepancy between regimes accused of human rights abuses by non-governmental organizations and those receiving these types of sanctions. This research aims to unveil potential factors that may explain this gap. I theorize that while investment and trade may protect a country from economic sanctions in an effort to keep certain markets open, past or present adherence to communist ideology increases the likelihood of receiving sanctions on the grounds that communism remains a perceived threat. To test my theories, I identify a set of countries that are currently verified by third party organizations as human rights violators. At this point, I conduct multivariate regression analysis to observe the relationship of both economic interest and conflicting ideology and the presence of sanctions citing human rights violations. While I expect to find that while both factors contribute to the presence of sanctions as outlined, I also theorize that economic interest will have a greater influence. This study serves to identify specific influences on sanctions that will enrich future discourse on their implementation.

The most prominent international organizations have emphasized their commitment in aiding the global transition to a carbon neutral world, which is estimated to cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. Despite these global efforts to mitigate climate change, countries, even when faced with similar levels of threat to climate disasters, prioritize the immediate issue differently. This study explores the relationship between economic security and state climate initiatives as a way to explain countries' varying commitment to climate change mitigation. While many scholars focus on the ability democracies have to combat climate change, I build upon and synthesize theories of economic opportunity, welfare programs, and class solidarity to hypothesize that both individual and state economic security impact states' prioritization of climate initiatives. I argue that economic security is a likely influence on the magnitude of effort which states put into climate initiatives, as it reflects both individual ability to safely fulfill essential needs and state ability to adapt capital. To test my hypothesis, I run a multivariate regression analysis to examine whether key indicators of economic security correlate to state carbon emissions per capita, controlling for regime type, institutional trust, political unrest, and median age of the population. I expect to find a negative relationship between economic security and state carbon emissions per capita. These findings would suggest that improving economic security is essential for the development and success of future climate initiatives. Understanding the underlying roadblocks of long term climate mitigation is crucial in guiding climate policy and optimizing climate aid.

Although oft-cited, the effects of campaign finance are neither well-understood nor well-evidenced; in particular, the supposed vote-buying motive --- contributions given with the expectation the recipient legislator will change their vote on specific bills --- lacks systematic evidence, and literature is mixed both in findings and in methodological quality. Nevertheless, since 2000 (before which much of the literature of “vote-buying” developed), gross campaign expenditures have exponentially increased; prima facie, this suggests that contributors expect returns to their campaign contributions and that (if their expectations are not systematically irrational) campaign finance does affect political outcomes. Building on the public choice theory of regulation, I theorize agents pay the cost of campaign contribution to produce political pressure on a recipient politician, who must then trade-off between the support of competing interest groups. Thus, it is expected that increased campaign finance contributions from interest groups that favor a bill’s passage are associated with a ceteris paribus increased likelihood of the recipient politician supporting the bill. Moreover, because interest groups are heterogeneous in their ability to generate pressure, the estimated treatment effect should systematically vary by contributor type. Previous literature has generally attempted to find statistical associations between contributions from a select few contributing groups and votes on a handful of selected bills (often selected because they are ex ante expected to give significant results), while also failing to incorporate adequate regression controls. Hence, this paper attempts to reconcile the literature’s differing results by using logistic regression to examine a large dataset of US House members’ legislative votes from 1980-2022 and concurrent campaign finance data. This paper's primary contribution is to extend current methods into a large-n analysis, the statistical strengths and methodological limitations of which are informative for future research into interactive mechanisms in economic theories of regulation.

Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing areas of study within the social sciences, as the internet is becoming an increasingly important piece of the international security system. Russia, along with the cybercriminal gangs that operate there, is one of the key global actors in cyberspace - making it crucial to research in order to better understand the global security landscape. My research centers on the governance structures that have emerged within cybercriminal organizations due to the anarchic, ungoverned nature of the internet. I am seeking to understand what structural factors prevent members of cybercriminal organizations from defecting, whether that be joining another organization or going to law enforcement. Traditional criminal organizations can rely on the threat of violence to prevent this type of defection, but due to their geographically dispersed nature and the anonymity the internet affords their members, cybercriminal organizations often have no way to credibly threaten violence. To understand defection and cybercrime organizations, I analyze the history of traditional criminal norms and traditions in Russia’s vorovskoi mir (thieves’ world) along with in-depth textual analysis of a trove of over 60,000 leaked internal chats from a prolific Russian ransomware gang with the use of natural language processing (NLP). I expect that my findings will show that cybercriminal gangs, without the threat of violence available to them, are forced to resort to positive incentives encouraging members to remain loyal. However, when these incentives fail, I expect to find that defections have very little impact on the overall functioning of the organizations. My research is aimed at contributing to a better understanding of the cybercriminal actors at large in our world today, and provides insightful observations about cybercriminal organizations that not only contribute to theoretical discussions but also have real-world policy implications.