Redistribution in cash is growing in popularity as a tool for poverty alleviation. This dissertation studies the effects of a randomized controlled trial of a large, one-time unconditional cash transfer to poor households in rural Kenya. Almost US 11 million was distributed to over 10,000 households across over 650 villages in Kenya. Villages were randomly assigned to the program, and all poor households within treatment village meeting a basic means-test received the transfer.

The first chapter describes the cash transfer intervention and data collection, then uses the experimentally-assigned treatment status to estimate effects on household welfare for recipient households, specifically asset ownership, household expenditure, income, revenue, food security, and health. Recipient households do appear to benefit from the transfers, as they experience an increase of about 40 percent in the value of their home and assets, a 12 percent increase in consumption, an 11 percent increase in revenue, and gains in food security. Spending on temptation goods does not increase, nor is there a reduction in labor supply. Measures of health status are also unchanged.

The second chapter studies the effects of the cash transfers on local public finance outcomes. Informal taxation, whereby households contribute to public goods outside the formal tax system, plays an important role in financing local public goods in many low-income countries, yet little is known about its magnitude or incidence. Informal taxation is implemented by local leaders and enforced socially, and trades off information advantages with potential elite capture. In contrast to formal tax systems, it is unclear how household informal tax payments respond to changes in income. This chapter uses panel data on households and local leaders, combined with exogenous variation in household income from the randomized unconditional cash transfer to poor households, to study how informal taxation and public goods provision responds to household income shocks. The (temporary) cash transfers are not captured by local leaders: I find no effect on household informal tax payments, and recipient household payments are in line with their pre-treatment income. In contrast, informal taxes do respond to non-experimental income changes in panel data. Recipient households pay more formal self-employment taxes, though the magnitude of the increase is small relative to the transfer amount: less than 1 percent of total transfer income is captured by formal or informal taxes. I find no effects of the cash transfers on public goods provision. This suggests local leaders emphasize equity considerations by exempting cash transfers to poor households but miss out on an opportunity to meaningfully increase public goods investment.

A broad range of informal institutions are common in many village economies. These include not just informal taxes for public goods, but also payments for social insurance, interhousehold transfers and interhousehold lending and borrowing. Many of these arrangements are also enforced via social sanctions, and the degree to which participation is voluntary is unclear. In the third chapter, I estimate the effects of an exogenous income shock via a randomized unconditional cash transfer on household social insurance contributions and interhousehold transfers. I find no effect on social insurance contributions, but statistically significant effects on interhousehold transfers, especially to family members. That said, the magnitude of these transfers as a share of the total unconditional cash transfer value is still small. Overall, I do not find that recipient households are not opting out of informal institutions in response to an increase in household income.

One of the most destructive grapevine viruses is grapevine fanleaf virus (GFLV), the causal agent of fanleaf degeneration. This virus is vectored from root-to-root by the dagger nematode (Xiphinema index) and can result in crop losses of up to 80% by greatly reducing fruit set and causing formation of ‘shot berries,’ small, seedless berries that do not mature. Currently, fanleaf degeneration is controlled by grafting vines onto the rootstock O39-16, which suppresses the expression of fanleaf degeneration symptoms in the scion. However, the Vitis vinifera parentage of O39-16 raises concerns about the rootstock’s long-term susceptibility to grape phylloxera and other pests and diseases. Additionally, O39-16 is susceptible to root-knot nematodes and induces high vigor to scions grafted on it. Due to these reasons, breeding efforts to produce alternative fanleaf degeneration rootstocks have continued.In 2007, 101-14 Mgt. was crossed with Muscadinia rotundifolia cv. Trayshed and the resulting progeny have been growing at the University of California, Davis. Muscadinia rotundifolia is the source of rootstock-induced tolerance observed in O39-16, and 101-14 Mgt. (V. riparia x V. rupestris) is a popular commercial rootstock commonly chosen for its ease of propagation, moderate nematode and phylloxera resistance, and the ability to control vigor to scions grafted on it. We quantified GFLV resistance and fanleaf degeneration tolerance in the progeny from this cross and studied the inheritance of these traits. Both traits segregated in the 101-14 x Trayshed population as quantitative traits controlled by multiple genes. Additionally, we developed a novel method that utilized digital imaging to obtain fruit set ratios for individual grape clusters as a means to quantify fanleaf tolerance in vines. Utilizing this method, we identified six progeny from this hybrid population (07107-012, 07107-043, 07107-091, 07107-112, 07107-135, and 07107-148) that were able to control fanleaf degeneration as well as O39-16 and exhibited desirable viticultural traits. This study is the first to have extensively quantified fruit set as a method to determine the degree of fanleaf degeneration tolerance induced by a rootstock to GFLV-infected vines. In addition to exploring the 101-14 x Trayshed breeding population, we also studied five recently-released rootstocks with broad and durable nematode resistance. Although these five rootstocks (GRN-1, GRN-2, GRN-3, GRN-4, and GRN-5) possess resistance to X. index, their ability to induce fanleaf tolerance (such as the case in O39-16) is unknown and the overall performance of these rootstocks on a GFLV-infested site has not been thoroughly evaluated. This manuscript presents the first evaluation of these new rootstocks on a fanleaf site in the San Joaquin Valley in California. After ten years of growth, all five GRN rootstocks performed comparably to O39-16. The low GFLV infection rate in vines grafted on GRN-1 shows the potential for GRN-1 to become a viable alternative to O39-16. Although further studies are needed to evaluate the long-term performance of these rootstocks, these initial results are promising.

A growing body of research has been dedicated to examining the effects of mass incarceration with particular emphasis on the lives of former prison inmates, their families, their communities, and their life chances post incarceration. This dissertation takes a different focus, looking at the everyday lives of inmates in a county jail system. Though often discussed anecdotally within studies of prisons, jails are distinct from other types of punishing institutions in terms of function, amenities available to inmates, and scope. These differences make for a qualitatively unique inmate experience. The distinctiveness of jails provides for equally distinct sets of punishments and coping strategies that inmates adopt for survival. The findings presented here reveal the practical application of "tough on crime" policies and practices inside jail walls where the lives of captured men have been nearly invisible.

Chloride-induced grapevine toxicity is a leading contributor to abiotic stress in viticultural regions characterized by aridity and limited water availability. Although an essential element for plants, in large enough quantity chloride can reduce net photosynthesis, leaf area, and water uptake in grapevines. Furthermore, the scarcity of water for irrigation has promoted the use of water use efficient irrigation methods such as dripline application, which can limit leaching of nutrients and toxins, and a build-up of salts on the periphery of the wetting-zone. Deficit irrigation practices can also be utilized to improve fruit quality. This dissertation explores the range of tolerance to toxic soil-chloride concentrations in genus Vitis, limitations and thresholds for chloride tolerance in grapevines, and the potential for breeding chloride tolerant grapevine rootstocks. Each topic is expanded in chapters 1, 2, and 3 of this dissertation, respectively. The historic threat of Grapevine Phylloxera in vineyards has resulted in the proliferation of grapevine rootstock cultivars to address this pest and other stressors. Relative to many other perennial crops, grapes have a wide selection of stock to choose from. However, there are innumerable, untested, and often undiscovered species and landraces undisturbed in their native habitats of the Americas that may hold further benefits to vineyards worldwide. To better define the range of chloride tolerance in Vitis germplasm, we examined the resistance to chloride toxicity in six species of wild grapevine collected from the south and southwestern United States alongside several cultivated and widely utilized rootstock cultivars. Presented in chapter 1, results from this survey suggest untapped potential for quasi-halophytic properties in some wild grapevine species such as V. acerifolia and V. doaniana. In chapter 2 common varieties were tested against a gradient of applied sodium chloride ranging from 0 – 100 mM NaCl to better define the chloride concentration threshold at which photosynthetic function begins to decline in commercial rootstock cultivars and chloride becomes toxic. Chapter 2 establishes a range of NaCl exposure between 25-75 mM NaCl in which photosynthetic function begins to break down in many rootstock varieties. Finally, chapter 3 crosses a highly tolerant and highly susceptible parent to explore the breeding potential of chloride tolerance phenotypes in grapevine offspring. Throughout the 77 tested offspring we observed a wide range of continuous increments of foliar chloride accumulation, suggesting possible heritability of chloride-excluding phenotypes. These experiments suggest an untapped source of chloride tolerance in grapevines exists, the range at which these semi-tolerant varieties have the highest efficacy and support the heritability of chloride-excluding phenotypes in subsequent generations. Taken together, this project increases the likelihood a breeding program can introduce chloride-tolerant grapevine rootstock phenotypes that could be successful.

Animal welfare science is a young and thriving field. Over the last two decades, the output of scientific publications on welfare has increased by c. 10-15% annually (tripling as a proportion of all science papers logged by ISI’s Web of Science), with just under half the c. 8500 total being published in the last 4 years. These papers span an incredible 500+ journals, but around three quarters have been in 80 animal science, veterinary, ethology, conservation and specialized welfare publications, and nearly 25% are published in just two: Animal Welfare and Applied Animal Behaviour Science . Farmed animals – especially mammals – have attracted by far the most research. This broadly reflects the vastness of their populations and the degree of public concern they elicit; poultry, however, are under-studied, and farmed fish ever more so: fish have only recently attracted welfare research, and are by far the least studied of all agricultural species, perhaps because of ongoing doubts about their sentience. We predict this farm animal focus will continue in the future, but embracing more farmed fish, reptiles and invertebrates, and placing its findings within broader international contexts such as environmental and food security concerns. Laboratory animals have been consistently well studied, with a shift in recent years away from primates and towards rodents. Pets, the second largest animal sector after farmed animals, have in contrast been little studied considering their huge populations (cats being especially overlooked): we anticipate research on them increasing in the future. Captive wild animals, especially mammals, have attracted a consistent level of welfare research over the last two decades. Given the many thousands of diverse species kept by zoos, this must, and we predict will, increase. Future challenges and opportunities including refining the use of preference tests, stereotypic behaviour, corticosteroid outputs and putative indicators of positive affect, to enable more valid conclusions about welfare; investigating the evolution and functions of affective states; and last but not least, identifying which taxonomic groups and stages of development are actually sentient and so worthy of welfare concern.