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Persistent group disparities are a global policy challenge. Large, targeted wealth transfers may reduce inequality, but their social and political consequences remain poorly understood. Prior literature generates contrasting expectations: such transfers may promote advancement and cohesion, fail to alter entrenched social norms or intergroup inequality, or even provoke backlash from dominant groups that leaves targeted groups worse off. We provide one of the first evaluations of the economic, social and political consequences of a group-targeted wealth transfer. We examine a program in Telangana, India, which provided one-time capital grants of 1 million rupees---five times the median annual household income---to households from historically disadvantaged Dalit castes, who number over 200 million people in India. Using original survey data from 3,184 households and a natural experiment comparing villages along a pilot constituency's boundary, we assess impacts on Dalits and non-Dalits. Two years after implementation, we find that the program increased Dalit ownership of consumer assets, reduced economic inequality between Dalits and non-Dalits, and strengthened Dalit perceptions of government responsiveness. Against expectations of social backlash, both Dalits and non-Dalits reported substantial declines in intergroup conflict. Yet deeply rooted norms of social separation remained unchanged. Moreover, non-Dalit support for redistribution policies such as subsidized credit and affirmative action programs for Dalits declined significantly, driven by perceptions of reduced Dalit economic need despite persistent intercaste wealth gaps. Large, group-targeted wealth transfers can mitigate durable inequalities without provoking social backlash. However, they can simultaneously erode political support for complementary redistributive measures.

Coercive, non–pro rata debt restructurings, often driven by private equity sponsors, have become a major force for fixing distressed companies. They are promoted—by stressed companies, their owners, their advisors, and favored creditors—as the best way to avoid bankruptcy and reduce financial stress, and thereby extend distressed firms’ runways to recover and take off. If true, these benefits would explain their growing frequency. But the post-deal results contradict proponents’ positive claims.

First, a majority of coercively restructured firms end up filing for bankruptcy anyway—a letdown for a maneuver mainly justified as a way to avoid bankruptcy. Second, the winning participants typically take higher-priority debt rather than stabilizing equity, further undermining already overindebted structures. High debt levels and low credit ratings persist. The added capital complexity can prod the firm toward default and a potentially thornier bankruptcy. Third, efficiency justifications commonly offered—like avoiding bankruptcy’s expense—are doubtful. Coercive debt restructurings are themselves expensive, and many restructured firms end up in bankruptcy anyway, yielding two costly deals. Fourth, coercive restructurings are as consistent with redistributing value from disfavored creditors to owners and favored creditors as with efficient restructuring. When dealmakers redistribute value, they have less incentive to focus on stabilizing the firm’s finances and improving its operations.

We present evidence supporting all four claims—nearly definitive for the first two, substantial although not ruling out alternatives for the second two. The evidence overall points to coercive recapitalizations’ potential to lock capital in poor investments for too long. From a lawyer’s perspective, that could raise troubling fiduciary-duty questions. From a market-wide perspective, inefficient deals and misallocated capital could eventually favor more effective contracts and deals. Rent seeking to grab value from other investors can persist despite its costs, but not always.

Attentional dysfunctions are prevalent and treatment-resistant cognitive deficits across numerous neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. The medial prefrontal cortex is essential for top-down attentional control and is regulated by local inhibitory microcircuits and cholinergic modulation. However, the precise cellular mechanisms stabilizing prefrontal output during attentional demands remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we developed a novel operant behavioral battery to isolate three components of attentional control in mice: sensory engagement, sustained attention, and resistance to distraction. Our research focuses on choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) interneurons, a rare subclass of cortical cells that uniquely co-release acetylcholine and GABA. Because these ChAT-VIP neurons provide temporally precise and developmentally tuned modulation, we hypothesize that they coordinate the excitatory-inhibitory balance in the medial prefrontal cortex to suppress maladaptive perseveration under high cognitive load. We combined our operant attention battery with in vivo calcium imaging and chemogenetic manipulation in ChAT-Cre mice. Preliminary findings indicate that chemogenetic silencing of ChAT-VIP interneurons unexpectedly improves overall accuracy and sensitivity, suggesting that tonically removing a predominantly GABAergic inhibitory brake enhances cue detection and attentional performance. Furthermore, calcium imaging revealed that prefrontal pyramidal neurons encode cue information and predict trial outcomes. By bridging population-level dynamics with cell-type-specific contributions, this research defines the regulatory role of local cholinergic drive in attentional control. Ultimately, uncovering these prefrontal microcircuit mechanisms may inform novel strategies for circuit-level interventions to restore cognitive function in disease.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that has been increasingly linked to changes in the gut-brain axis and the composition of the gut microbiome. This thesis describes an independent computational reanalysis of a large publicly available shotgun metagenomic dataset of PD and control stool samples using a standardized diversity and differential abundance pipeline with explicit covariate adjustment and cross-validation across two independent statistical approaches. Key findings were subsequently tested for replication in a second independent PD cohort using a formal meta-analysis. We analyzed taxonomic and functional community profiles from 724 stool samples from 490 individuals with Parkinson’s Disease and 234 healthy controls. Low prevalence taxa and pathways were filtered out prior to analysis leaving 196 species level taxa and 397 pathways for downstream testing. We incorporated a second independent cohort of PD patients (Bedarf et al., 2017; 59 stool samples, 31 PD and 28 controls) using curatedMetagenomicData to test cross-cohort replication of results. Alpha diversity was largely overlapping among the groups. Beta diversity based on Bray-Curtis dissimilarity revealed high overlap between PD and control samples. Permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) showed a significant association between disease status and community composition (R² = 0.0095, F = 6.91, p = 0.001) that remained significant after adjustment for age and sex. Differential abundance testing identified 62 of 196 species (31.6%) and 234 of 397 pathways (58.9%) to be significantly associated with PD at FDR 0.05, consistent with two recent multi- cohort meta-analyses of the PD gut microbiome (Romano et al., 2021; Nishiwaki et al., 2024). Meta-analysis of the 117 species with sufficient data in both cohorts identified 16 species as significant after FDR correction. The enrichment of Ruthenibacterium lactatiformans in PD was the strongest and most consistent finding (r = 0.25, FDR q = 5.5 × 10−10, I2 = 0%). Several taxa identified in the single-cohort analysis including Actinomyces oris and Bifidobacterium dentium did not replicate under this stricter cross- cohort test (I2 = 82% and 64% respectively). These results are evidence implicating the gut microbiome in PD pathogenesis. They demonstrate that a large proportion of individual microbial features can differ significantly between groups even when the effect size at the community level is small. This analysis provides a baseline to enable future extensions of this work including gut virome profiling and addition of further independent cohorts as they become available.

This study examines whether secessionist and autonomist self-determination organizations differ in their commitment to democratic principles and practices. Although existing scholarship has extensively explored the causes, strategies, and legal dimensions of self-determination movements, comparatively little attention has been devoted to evaluating the democratic orientations of these organizations themselves. This study addresses that gap by systematically comparing the democratic commitments of secessionist and autonomist organizations. Democratic commitment is operationalized through five indicators derived from democratic theory and international human-rights norms: political pluralism, separation of religion and state, commitment to internationally recognized human rights, protection of minorities, and gender equality. The study analyzes 83 ethnic or regional self-determination organizations in Asia, including 38 secessionist and 45 autonomist groups operating in India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Malaysia, China, Iran, and Iraq. Organizations were evaluated on a 0-10 scale based on publicly available rhetoric and observable behavior, including manifestos, official statements, governance practices, peace agreements, and reports from international organizations and human-rights institutions. To improve comparability, the sample includes only countries or historically distinct regions containing both secessionist and autonomist organizations.

The findings reveal a substantial and statistically significant difference between the two groups. Autonomist organizations achieved a mean democratic score of 6.18, compared to 2.71 for secessionist organizations. The difference is highly significant (p 0.000001) and associated with a large effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.43). The study provides empirical support for the argument that autonomist organizations are, on average, more likely than secessionist organizations to demonstrate commitments to democratic principles. More broadly, the findings suggest that the mode through which self-determination is pursued may influence organizational behavior and their observable commitment to democratic principles, with implications for peace negotiations, autonomy arrangements, and post- conflict political development.