Economic Democracy and worker cooperatives are part of a growing movement for economic change. In the dissertation I explore the ideas of Economic Democracy, what they can teach the academy, their history and theoretical underpinnings. I am specifically interested in understanding whether worker cooperatives offer a solution to the problems of capitalism and whether they fundamentally change the nature and process of work as well as the quality of life for ordinary workers, especially those workers who traditionally have been relegated to the bottom of the labor market, workers of color. Through the use of the Marxist theory and the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and war of position I analyze the complicated and difficult structural, administrative, ideological/cultural and racial struggles that these types of enterprises face in enacting their visions.

Through a comparative case study based on interviews and participatory action research of workers and developers involved in the worker-cooperative movement of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area of California, I study how worker cooperatives can and do impact communities of color in the U.S. as well as what problems they face when it comes to issues of race, racism and gender politics. I argue that worker cooperatives are a valuable resource in the hegemonic contest over ideological discourses and visions of how the world ought to function. Alternative forms like cooperatives become discredited within the realm of possibility because they offer a different understanding about how the economy should work that threatens the current dominant capitalist model. Worker cooperatives as part of a democratic economy are not just different ways of engaging within a capitalist economy or of creating small niche sharing economies to help bolster communities of color who have often not been allowed to advance because of racist glass ceilings. They are part of a war of position in the ideological and cultural struggle over what role and whose needs the economy and capital should serve in the course of human history, and as such are a fundamentally different mode of production. In order for them to fill this important historical role, however, they must take seriously the tenets and the day-to-day practice of democracy.

This dissertation consists of a three-part study on criminality and organized crime---mainly gangs---on development and inequality. With a focus on El Salvador, each chapter analyzes the effects of the emergence and evolution of gang activity in the country starting in the late 1990s on human capital and material wellbeing, as well as the policies that have shaped the state's relationship with gangs. Chapter 1 provides context on the growth and expansion of gangs in El Salvador and situates the dissertation project in the broader literature. The importance of gangs' territorial control and its medium to long-term consequences for inequality and poverty are the focus of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 highlights the role of competition and collusion in driving gangs' main income source, extortion. Lastly, Chapter 4 turns to the externalities of a controversial, yet common, occurrence when dealing with robust criminal organizations: direct negotiations between the state and gangs. All chapters are unified by a focus on how criminality shapes developing, urbanizing societies.

The second paper of my dissertation studies how the growth, and in particular, territorial control of gangs affects socioeconomic development in El Salvador's urban areas. Leveraging a natural experiment stemming from the mass deportations of individuals with criminal backgrounds from the United States to El Salvador in the late 1990s, we find that gang members repatriated from the United States quickly exploited the power vacuums following the country's devastating civil war. Through a regression discontinuity analysis, we analyze socioeconomic inequality across gang and non-gang controlled areas. The results highlight strong, negative effects on educational attainment and wealth, and also point to a novel mechanism: mobility restrictions. In order to carry out their illicit activities, gangs severely limit the mobility of individuals living in territories under their control, limiting the degree to which individuals can seek gainful employment.

Relying on their extensive territorial control and widespread networks, gangs engage in repeated extortion of businesses and households. Using detailed data on individual extortion payments to gangs and sales from a leading wholesale distributor of consumer goods and pharmaceuticals in El Salvador, the third chapter documents evidence on the determinants of extortion payments, firm responses to extortion, and effects on consumers. Leveraging a non-aggression pact between MS-13 and Barrio 18, the country's two main gangs, in 2016, we examine how collusion affects extortion in areas where they previously competed. Although there is a precipitous drop in violence, extortion increases by upwards of 15%, affecting the prices for pharmaceutical goods and potentially contributing to a rise in hospital admissions for chronic illnesses.

Given the direct and indirect suffering brought about by gangs' territorial control and violence, governments often turn to unconventional measures to deal with organized crime. A common, and controversial, policy involves brokering or facilitating truces with and among criminal organizations. In the last chapter, we estimate the short-term impacts of the 2012 Salvadoran gang truce, a plausibly exogenous reduction in violence, on labor market decisions and human capital investments. The opaque negotiations between the Salvadoran government and the country's two main gangs lead to a significant drop in homicides. However, other economic agents did not react: neither businesses nor households changed their behavior after the gang truce. We discuss the role of uncertainty in explaining our null results.