Increased population pressure and political decisions have led to more intensive agricultural practices in China. As in other regions of the world, these practices can damage natural capital We use the Kalman filter and Chinese panel data to estimate an index of environmental productivity (natural capital), together with the parameters of environmental dynamics and the production function. These estimates show that intensive practices are likely to have had persistent, substantial, and statistically significant negative effects on productivity. Ignoring these effects can cause substantial misallocation of resources. The results illustrate the possibility of estimating sectoral environmental indices using data commonly available.

The demand for off-chip data bandwidth of serial-link transceivers have been pushed beyond 40-Gb/s/link. With the potential aggregate data rate, power consumption and area must be reasonable. State-of-the-art serial-link transmitters operating at data rates beyond 40-Gb/s can contribute up to 40-45% power consumption while the FFE is limited to 2 taps. The main design challenge comes from the fact that producing output signal levels using large devices at high frequency is very power hungry. It is critical to low the power of transmitter at high data rate to enable high performance serial links.

This dissertation explores the potential of operating transmitters at data rates that approach the fundamental technology limit. Several circuit techniques are proposed to improve power efficiency and performance of serial-link transmitters. A LC-based feedforward equalizer (FFE) is proposed to eliminate the need of multiple MUXs. The design methodology of LC-ladder filter is proposed and applied to the FFE design to improve the bandwidth and the use of inductors. The serializer is power-optimized using a direct 4:1 multiplexer (MUX) at final stage with a novel 4:1 MUX design. An inverter-based digital-to-phase converter (DPC) using harmonic rejection filter is proposed to improve the phase linearity.

To verify the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, a 64-Gb/s transmitter prototype and an 8-bit DPC are designed and measured in 65-nm CMOS technology. The optimal use of on-chip inductors improve the bandwidth and power efficiency significantly. The proposed transmitter prototype, achieves a maximum data rate of 64.5 Gb/s and an energy efficiency of 3.1 fJ/b. The DPC demonstrates a maximum INL and DNL of 1.33 and 0.52 LSB while consumes a power of 4.3 mW at 1.5 GHz.

In a 1968 survey of the enforcement of federal civil rights laws, the US Commission on Civil Rights declared that "Civil rights laws now apply in almost every area in which the federal government has responsibilities. It is not so much new laws that are required today as a strengthened capacity to make existing laws work." My dissertation shows that regulatory agencies are critical sites of policy-making, and even rights-making, for immigrants and non-English speakers and that they are instrumental to making civil rights laws work.

The dissertation asks how rights expand in the new civil rights era and why they expand to varying extents in different policy arenas. More specifically, it asks what politics and strategies are used to expand on existing civil rights statutes in order to create new civil rights. It uses the development of language rights as a lens into understanding processes of statutory interpretation and regulatory implementation directed at the political incorporation of immigrants. It compares the robustness of language rights produced by this politics of regulation by tracing the interpretation of "national origin" and "language minority" protections in education, employment, and voting.

The dissertation adopts a historical institutionalist perspective on legal change and path dependence and compares three case studies of policy innovation pertaining to language rights. First, the US Department of Education's interpretation of Title VI largely succeeded in its attempt to establish a right for national origin minority students with limited English proficiency to receive meaningful access to education regardless of language ability. Second, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was less successful in its efforts to find similar language rights for limited English proficient workers under Title VII. Third, in contrast to a regulatory approach, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to include express protections for "language minorities."

My explanation for why rights expanded in all three policy arenas, albeit to different degrees in each of the institutional contexts, is that regulatory constructions of the civil rights requirements contributed to a transformation of norms and expectations surrounding language access. Bureaucratic entrepreneurs within civil rights enforcement agencies used informal policy guidance to construct regulatory rights. Deference from courts and other institutions to these regulatory assertions imparted legal effect to these regulatory constructions and contributed to variations in the strength of regulatory rights.