VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Preferential Trade Agreement: The Case of Brazil and the U.S
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
preferential trade agreement
regionalism
external tariffs
trade liberalization
Thesis

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have become a popular tool for regional economic cooperation. While the WTO system is hard to coordinate between all of its 153 member countries, a PTA can function as the alternative policy that involves only a selected number of countries. Despite its popularity, however, many economists are still skeptical of the effectiveness of PTAs. Some argue that PTAs might cause member countries to charge higher tariffs on non-members. Bagwell and Staiger (1998) propose that PTAs can help liberalize multilateral trade precisely when multilateral cooperation in the region is very low with the effects of a Custom Union (CU) less pronounced than that of a Free-Trade Agreement (FTA) in this regard. This paper provides an empirical test of their hypothesis by using Brazil and the U.S. data to test for the effect of a CU and a FTA, respectively. The study finds that the results from both countries strongly support Bagwell and Staiger‟s hypothesis. The results suggest that the less constrained each country is from binding tariff (i.e. when the multilateral cooperation in the region is low), the more it decreases applied MFN external tariffs over time. Moreover, a country decreases its MFN tariffs significantly more if its products are under a FTA but not as significant under a CU.
The Effect of Privatization Method on Inequality in Eastern European Transition Economies
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
privatization
transition economies
income inequality
consumption inequality
Gini coefficient
Thesis

Transition economies in Eastern European experienced a drastic change in both income and consumption inequality following privatization of the public sector using voucher, sale, and management-employee buyout methods of privatization. This paper draws on the insights of Bennett, Estrin, and Urga’s (2007) study regarding the effect of privatization method on the growth rate of transition economies, and instead analyzes the effect of privatization method on income and consumption inequality. To do this, factors that contribute to the phenomenon of inequality are studied. The three privatization methods are demonstrated to have insignificant effects on changes in income inequality, but significant effects on changes in consumption inequality. The sale and management-employee buyout methods are shown to be associated with an increase in consumption inequality, while the voucher method is shown to be associated with a decrease in consumption inequality, for the decade following privatization.
The Government-Sponsored Enterprises and the Mortgage Crisis: New Perspectives on the Debate
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics. GSE
low and moderate income
special affordable
financial crisis
Thesis

The U.S. mortgage crisis that began in 2007 generated questions about the role played by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) who dominate the secondary mortgage market, in its causes. Numerous scholars and the press have blamed the Affordable Housing Goals (AHGs), introduced by Congress through the GSE Act of 1992, and the single-family mortgages the GSEs purchased to meet those goals, for driving borrowers at high risk of default into the mortgage market. Using regression discontinuity analysis, this paper measures the effect of one of the goals, the Underserved Areas Goal (UAG), on the number of mortgages purchased by the GSEs in targeted census tracts from 1996 to 2002. Focusing additionally on tracts that became UAG-eligible in 2005-2006, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) began to determine eligibility using the 2000 Census, I measure the effect of the UAG on GSE purchases during peak years for the subprime mortgage market. The results suggest a small UAG effect and challenge the perspective that the GSEs‟ single-family mortgage purchases were the primary mechanism by which they increased the number of high-risk borrowers in the mortgage market during the years prior to the crisis.
The Indian’s Departure: The Removal of the Indian Mascot at Stanford University
Keywords: Native Americans
Native college students
Mascots
Stanford University
Athletics
Native American imagery
College students > Political activity
Thesis

The rise and fall of the Stanford Indian is a story that extends far beyond its 42-year tenure as the University mascot. Officially adopted in 1930, the Indian symbol was embedded in campus culture and could be found everywhere from jerseys to notebooks to bumper stickers. By the early 1950s, the Indian mascot was brought to life by a Yurok Indian named Timm Williams, who performed alleged cultural dances in full regalia at Stanford athletic events. Prince Lightfoot, as Williams’ character came to be known, was officially dropped as the school mascot along with the emblem in 1972, when the 55 Native Americans of the Stanford American Indian Organization (SAIO) petitioned to have the symbol and Prince Lightfoot removed. Though no longer present in day-to-day campus culture, the legacy of Prince Lightfoot lingers close to the surface.
The Market for Talent: Are Top Draft Picks Overpaid?
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
National Basketball Association
player compensation
rookie compensation
monopsony
collective bargaining
NBA draft
NBA rookie pay-scale
Thesis

The National Basketball Association imposes two important, and unusual, restrictions on
its new employees: a draft, in which they are assigned a single employer with which they
can contract with, and a pay-scale, which prescribes maximum compensation levels for
up to the first four years of their careers. Using a sample of veteran players, who have
gone through free-agency, I establish the value owners ascribe to a player-season in the
open free-agent market. Comparing this value to player compensation, under rookie
contracts, allows me to examine the surplus generated by new players for their teams. I
find that the two rookie restrictions allow owners to extract significant monopsony rents
from new players; the rents are highest for top draft choices, and decline steeply as the
draft goes on, implying that owners are rational surplus-maximizers.
The Non-Aligned Movement: A Struggle for Global Relevance
Keywords: CISAC
Center for International Security and Cooperation
Stanford University
nonalignment
Thesis

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) forms a powerful bloc in the United Nations and associated technical agencies. The movement was created during the height of the Cold War in response to tension between the Eastern and Western blocs with the goal of buffering NATO and the Warsaw Pact. However, the end of the Cold War did not bring about the end of the NAM – indeed, by some measures, the movement is stronger now than it was during the Cold War. Few researchers have endeavored to explain why this is the case. This thesis examines the puzzling persistence of the NAM, first telling a narrative history of the movement from its inception to the present, then presenting data as evidentiary proof of the NAM’s maintenance of cohesion, and finally analyzing this data and this narrative using international relations theory to explain the maintenance of NAM power. This thesis argues that the Non-Aligned Movement has persisted due to a rise in counterhegemonic ideology among NAM states, combined with pressure from radical NAM hawks and increased institutionalization.
Thinking regionally [electronic resource] : rural landscapes and economic connections in Roman southern Italy
Keywords: Classics

This dissertation explores the formation of an economic region within the wider context of the Roman Mediterranean economy in a study of southern Italy from the 1st-6th c. CE. This dissertation contributes to the study of the Roman economy by advancing a methodology for the identification and study of regional systems, and by offering a new interpretation of the southern Italian economy during this period. My goal in this project is to understand the role of rural economic processes in creating a regionally connected system across space and through time, and the implications of such connections for the long term economic experience of southern Italy in particular. How did a regional system form in southern Italy? How might regional economic connections in rural contexts have contributed to the stability of southern Italy as it advanced from the imperial period into late antiquity? Southern Italy provides a revealing case study for exploring these economic processes because of the stability, perhaps prosperity, of its economic system into late antiquity, a period of great change in the larger Mediterranean economy. I take a long-term approach and argue that the strength of its regional connections played a fundamental and foremost role in sustaining a stable southern Italy economy, laid down in part before the onset of late antiquity. Evidence comes from a wide geographic area in southern Italy, composed of the modern-day provinces of Puglia, Basilicata, Campania and the Molise, and includes data from excavated and surveyed villa, village and farm sites. It offers information on settlement patterns, the role of transhumance pastoralism, production strategies, and patterns of consumption, all important components of economic life in these rural landscapes, treated in four separate chapters of this dissertation. I contextualize this material and textual evidence within its wider landscape, among routes of connection, urban places, and the natural environment to create a comprehensive, layered picture of how sites, their production activities and the movement of people and goods contributed to building this regional system over time. This dissertation demonstrates that a strong regional economy, formed through rural economic flows, was important for creating stability in southern Italy over time, even in light of the transformations in the Mediterranean economy in the later empire. From the perspective of studies on the Roman economy in general, this dissertation argues for the importance of interrogating mid-scale spatial systems of organization to understand better how the Roman economy functioned.
Three essays in international finance [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics

This thesis consists of three essays on international finance. The first essay is "Exchange rates and Fundamentals". A new open interest rate parity condition that takes account of economic fundamentals is developed from stochastic discount factors (SDFs) of two countries. Through this parity condition, business cycles or fundamentals are linked to exchange rates. Key empirical findings from this parity condition are as follows. First, this model beats the random walk hypothesis: economic fundamentals explain exchange rate movements for high interest rate currencies. Exchange rates of low interest rate currencies act like a random walk because they are less correlated with fundamentals owing to their low risk. For example, U.S. business cycles explain the direction of changes in exchange rates against the dollar. The same thing is true for Japan. Second, this model resolves the forward premium puzzle: the forward premium puzzle is not a general characteristic as regarded in previous studies. It happens when the risk awareness of investors is low, during economic expansions and for low risk currencies. The second essay is "Carry Trade and Global Financial Instability". Carry trade, an opportunistic investment strategy that takes advantage of interest rate differential across countries, is identified the cause of the large-scale depreciations of peripheral currencies in the later half of 2008. A simultaneous equations model, which is derived from a conceptual partial equilibrium model for a local foreign exchange market, is estimated from a cross-sectional sample. The results suggest that the larger appreciation of the yen than the dollar was brought about by a lack of the local supply of the yen rather than a more severe crunch of yen credits. The third essay is "The Economic Origin of Letters of Credit". This essay discusses the economic origin of letters of credit, an instrument widely used in international trade. A game theoretical analysis shows that letters of credit improve efficiency in trade settlements, increasing returns in trade. A few notable facts on letters of credit are discussed. First, the new institution is adopted by merchant banks to maximize their profits and in the process, an improvement in efficiency of international transactions is obtained. Second, the organization established by the legacy institution, bills of exchange, played a critical role in adopting the new institution. Third, the legal enforcement is not essential in this economic institution. Finally, two drivers are identified that improve efficiency of transactions: concentration and projection.
Time of the sacred [electronic resource] : conceptualizing the political in Franco's Spain
Keywords: Iberian and Latin American Cultures.

A prevalent characteristic of the twentieth century is a hyper-affirmation of the human subject's enslavement to the order of nature and a denial of any transcendental mode of accessing a spirituality beyond the confines of reason. This transition has underpinnings in Darwinism and Hegel's Weltgeist, which roots Spirit securely within the confines of world history and not in a transcendent, eternal beyond. The emergence of postsecularism in the last two decades alongside a general belief in the decline of Western liberalism has additionally raised the specter that political thought and institution building retains essential components of traditionally religious and premodern methods of social formation. A cursory glance at the literature post-war Spain reveals, decades prior to the purported decline of secularity, an astonishing repetition of authors relating to, subverting and rearticulating political sovereignty through the mediation of the sacred, which Émile Durkheim argues is nothing other than an auto-reflexive image of society "hypostasized and transfigured". Conceiving of the 1960's and 1970's as a "time of the sacred" within Iberian cultural production provides an understanding of how the political was imagined under the auspices of an authoritarian regime. It moreover offers a code for disentangling problems that are currently plaguing the peninsula, such as the polemical theorization of a pluralistic Iberia, the always latent specter of violence that underpins debates surrounding such issues as the ethics of bullfighting and the resistance to regional autonomy, and Spain's problematical relationship with the Catholic Church and other forms of religion.
Topics in inflation and eternal inflation [electronic resource]
Keywords: Physics

This thesis is divided to three parts. In Chapter 1 we study observational signatures of chaotic inflation with nonminimal coupling to gravity. In the next two chapters we focus on the eternal nature of inflation and the measure problem. In Chapter 2 we compare predictions of several measures in eternal versus non-eternal inflation. Finally in Chapter 3 we study the Boltzmann brain problem for the scale factor cutoff measure of eternal inflation.
Topology of spaces of micro-images, and an application to texture discrimination. [electronic resource]
Keywords: Mathematics

Using the fact that most 3-by-3 pixel high-contrast patches from natural images accumulate around a space with the topology of a Klein bottle, we present in this thesis a novel method for texture representation and discrimination. Given a texture image, most of its high-contrast patches can be projected onto the aforementioned Klein bottle. We analyze this sample in terms of its underlying probability density function, which we show can be represented via Fourier-like coefficients. These coefficients in turn, can be estimated with high confidence from the sample. Dissimilarity measures are defined on the set of estimated coefficients, and performance of the method is tested on a large collection of texture images.
Toward improved characterization of brain network temporal properties with functional magnetic resonance imaging [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) based on blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) contrast is a powerful technique for non-invasive measurement of brain activity. Recent fMRI studies have revealed that the spontaneous BOLD fluctuations of the human brain organize into distributed, temporally-coherent networks ("resting-state networks"; RSNs). Examination of RSNs has yielded valuable insight into neural organization and development, and demonstrates potential as a biomarker for conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and depression. However, the accuracy by which the spatio-temporal properties of RSNs can be delineated using fMRI is compromised by the presence of physiological (cardiac and respiratory) noise and vascular hemodynamic variability. Further, our present understanding of how RSNs may interact and support cognitive function has been limited by the fact that the vast majority of studies to-date analyze RSNs in a manner that assumes temporal stationarity. Here, we describe efforts to correct for non-neural physiological influences on the BOLD signal, as well as investigations into the dynamic character of resting-state network connectivity. It is found that low-frequency variations in cardiac and respiratory processes account for significant noise across widespread gray matter regions, and that a constrained deconvolution approach may prove effective for modeling and reducing their effects. Application of the proposed noise-reduction procedure is observed to yield negative correlations between the spontaneous fluctuations of two major RSNs. The relationship between respiratory volume changes and the BOLD signal is further examined by simultaneously monitoring and comparing chest expansion data, end-tidal gas concentrations, and spontaneous BOLD fluctuations. The use of a breath-holding task is proposed for quantifying regional differences in BOLD signal timing that arise from local vasomotor response delays; such non-neural timing delays are found to impact inferences of resting-state connectivity and causality. Finally, a preliminary analysis of non-stationary connectivity between RSNs is performed using wavelet and sliding-window approaches, and it is observed that interactions between networks may reconfigure on time-scales of seconds to minutes.
Towards high efficiency and low cost nano-structured III-V solar cells [electronic resource]
Keywords: Applied Physics

State-of-the-art III-V multijunction solar cells have achieved a record efficiency of 42%, the highest solar-electric conversion efficiency achieved by any technology. This has fueled great interest in the utility sector for large-scale deployment of solar cells. However, III-V solar cells have thus far proven too expensive for widespread terrestrial applications due to the combined cost of substrates, growth processes and materials. Here, we propose a novel III-V solar cell design based on the epitaxial growth of AlGaAs/GaAs on pre-patterned low-cost substrates to provide a path to cost-effective, large-scale deployment. This approach is based on our discovery that the surface kinetics of epitaxial growth by MBE is significantly altered when growing on three dimensional nanostructures instead of planar surfaces. Based on our exploratory results, we present the device design, electrical and optical simulation, and materials growth and device fabrication and characterization of core-shell nanostructured III-V solar cells. We use both bottom-up and top-down approaches to prepare the nanostructured templates in shape of nanowires and nanopyramids. Finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) and Rigorous Coupled Wave Analysis (RCWA) simulation show that the nanostructures have enhanced absorption and much wider incident acceptance angles than their planar counterpart, and outperform planar three-layer anti-reflective coatings. We first demonstrated high quality, single crystal III-V (GaAs and AlGaAs) polar material conformally epi grown on group IV (nanostructured Ge on Si substrate) nonpolar material via MBE and MOVPE (also known as MOCVD) with largely reduced anti-phase domains. We developed complete and mature routines to fabricate a working, single crystalline III-V solar cell on a nanostructured template. The I-V characterization of the fabricated nanostructured GaAs solar cell proves the concept and shows the great potential of making high-efficiency nano-structured III-V solar cells on low-cost substrates.
Tractability of complex control systems [electronic resource]
Keywords: Aeronautics and Astronautics

This thesis is divided into two main parts. In the first part, we consider the problem of efficiently computing wavefront estimates for use in adaptive optics hardware on ground-based telescopes. Our contribution is a warm-started single-iteration multigrid algorithm that performs as well as conventional vector-matrix-multiplication methods, but at a fraction of the computational cost. We used numerical simulations to compare our algorithm to a variety of other published methods, and validated our findings at the Palomar Observatory. In the second part, we consider feedback control subject to an information constraint. Using a novel algebraic framework, we are able to prove many structural results, including a new convexity result, in a natural and purely algebraic way. We also develop a new condition we call internal quadratic invariance, under which the controller synthesis can be cast as a convex optimization problem. This describes the most general class of tractable decentralized control problems known to date. Both parts of the thesis fit into the broader question of tractability of complex systems. In the first part we look at a practical example which is difficult because of the large number of sensors and actuators. In the second part, we look at decentralized control, which is difficult because of the non-classical information constraint.
Trade enabling investments in networked markets [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics

In many markets not all buyers can trade with all sellers. These markets can be represented as a network where the buyers and sellers are the nodes and weighted edges represent potential gains from trade between buyer-seller pairs. In these networked markets the structure of the network will affect who trades with whom and the terms of these trades. In particular, agents' alternative trading opportunities might provide outside options for them. In Chapter 2 I identify a parsimonious mapping from the network structure into market outcomes that captures these intuitions and is stable insofar as no buyer-seller pair could do better by instead trading with each other. In many instances networked markets are formed endogenously through investments that enable trade. In the remainder of Chapter 2 I explore such investments when they are directed. For example, two countries might build a pipeline to enable them to trade natural gas. In Chapter 3 I consider undirected investments in search, where the set of the possible trading opportunities that are discovered, and can subsequently be utilized, depends on the search efforts of the agents. For example, workers and firms might exert effort searching for each other in the labor market. This dissertation explores the nature and size of inefficiencies in these trade enabling investments.