eVOLVe is a game about bumping and grinding your way around the tide pool, consuming organisms that are smaller than you to grow. At the same time, however, players must avoid larger organisms that are trying to consume them. Along the way you will find floating power-ups to help you in the game. The power-ups give you the ability to swim faster or regain health. You must also watch out for flying rocks which appear at random in the game and take away health if you are hit by them. The goal of eVOLVe is to become the king of the sea by surviving, growing, and eventually defeating the boss organism.

Rationale. Integrated trauma-focused treatments produce superior PTSD and substance use outcomes than comparison conditions for co-occurring posttraumatic stress disorder and alcohol use disorder (PTSD/AUD), but little is known about psychosocial functioning outcomes or mediators of change in PTSD/AUD treatment. This three-paper dissertation aimed to 1) examine baseline associations between posttraumatic-cognitions (PT-cognitions; I am incompetent/the world is dangerous) and functioning; 2) compare psychosocial functioning outcomes, and 3) examine PT-cognitions as a mediator of symptom, functioning, and suicidal ideation (SI) change in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) comparing integrated-prolonged exposure (I-PE; trauma-focused) and integrated-coping skills (I-CS) treatments for PTSD/AUD. Methods. Participants were Veterans with PTSD/AUD from an RCT comparing I-PE and I-CS. Study 1 used baseline data (n=145); studies 2-3 used an intent-to-treat sample (n=119) with assessments at pre, posttreatment, 3-month, 6-month timepoints. Results. Study 1 (Lyons et al., 2019) used multiple regression to examine associations between baseline PT-cognitions and psychosocial functioning. PT-cognitions were significantly associated with functioning when controlling for PTSD/AUD severity (b=-0.42,p<.001,sr2=0.11). Study 2 (Lyons et al., 2021) used multilevel models to examine if psychosocial functioning improved more in I-PE than I-CS. Psychosocial functioning improved to a significant degree during treatment (b=9.55, 95%CI:6.66;12.45), with no significant treatment differences (b=1.65,95%CI:-4.11;7.45). Functioning change did not reach reliable change (RCI=9.70)–improvements may not be noticeable in daily living. Study 3 (Lyons et al., in preparation) used structural equation models to test if improvements in PT-cognitions during treatment led to concurrent improvements in psychosocial functioning, PTSD severity, heavy drinking, and SI. Reductions of PT-cognitions during treatment were associated with concurrent improvements in PTSD (b=9.096,p<0.001) and functioning (b=-7.915,p<0.001). No significant between treatment PT-cognition effects emerged. Concurrent change between PT-cognitions and SI were not significantly associated, whereas change between PT-cognitions and heavy drinking were differentially related. Conclusions. Findings highlight the need to examine additional ways of targeting functioning in PTSD/AUD, given lack of reliable change. Moreover, these studies show that PT-cognitions play an important role in symptom and functioning improvement across cognitive behavioral treatments for PTSD/AUD. However, no significant treatment differences in PT-cognition change suggest that additional mediators should be examined to better understand how I-PE produces superior PTSD outcomes.

We build a bargaining-theoretic model of an important dilemma inherent in any major political economic transition process. While swiftly removing the old order is a necessary condition for a successful transition, it also leads to widespread social disruption that may threaten the viability of the reform process. This issue lies at the heart of much of the "big-bang/gradualism" debate in the literature. We argue that this dichotomy is overly simplistic. In particular, the debate, as it has been framed, has failed to capture the significance of interest group competition. Interest group competition matters precisely because the political environment during a transition is fluid and malleable and is thus open to manipulation by interests seeking to mold post-transition governance structures to best serve themselves. As different economic and political structures will give rise to different incentives within these interest groups, one might expect that transition strategies will differ across societies. We show this is the case with two interesting examples. First, we consider how transition strategies differ in open and closed economies. We are able to derive a number of strong results, the most striking of which identifies conditions under which closed economies outperform open economies in terms of social welfare. Our second set of experiments examines Krueger's (1993) "vicious and virtuous circles" theory of policy reform. We identify conditions under which societies with political systems that reward rent-seeking behavior enjoy higher social welfare than societies with political systems that reward productive behavior.

The Bulgarian land reform process is burdened by a fundamental tension between disruption and continuity. This tension arises from the dual roles played by the nomenklatura in the transition to a market economy. Both roles stem from their privileged status in the old order. While the nomenklatura have the potential to provide the agricultural sector with indispensable human capital, they also have the' potential to extract rents from the sector, thus undermining its competitiveness. Both the productivity of nomenklatura capital and their capacity to extract rents are diminished to the extent that the reform disrupts the established agrarian order. Thus in order to succeed, the agrarian reform process must sail between Scylla and Charybdis. Too much disruption degrades economic productivity, possibly to the extent of threatening the viability of the reform movement itself. Too much continuity skews the distribution of political power in favor of the nomenklatura, which may undermine the competitiveness of the nascent free market institutions. This chapter develops a formal political-economic model of this trade-off. The model challenges the conventional political economic wisdom that decoupling politics from economics will improve economic performance. In particular, we identify conditions under which the quality of the transition is enhanced by coupling the nomenklatura's acquisition of political power to the magnitude of the rents that they extract.