VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays in macroeconomics [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics

This thesis studies the effect of incompleteness in information and heterogeneity in preferences on two different aspects of macroeconomics: public communication and distortions implied by general equilibrium models with a representative agent. The first chapter builds a dynamic model of the information flow between heterogeneously partially informed financial institutions and a public agency. The financial institutions decide how to allocate their portfolio between a riskless technology with known payoff and a risky technology whose payoff is unknown. The public agency learns about the value of the unknown payoff by observing the actions of the financial institutions and decides whether to communicate the information at the agency's disposal. The work characterizes the optimal public communication plans and shows that they involve delayed communication. The second chapter studies the public communication problem in a abstract setting where agents want to match an unknown parameter evolving over time. A benevolent public authority learns about the fundamentals by observing agents' actions. Differently than in the first chapter, in any period the public authority decides how much of its knowledge to communicate in a public signal every period. Simulations of the model show that the welfare maximizing communication strategies involve opaque communication, that is adding noise to the public signal. In the last chapter, joint work with Aaron Bodoh-Creed, we show that in economies where agents have heterogeneous preferences that can be represented with Hansen and Sargent's multiplier preferences form, the representative agent will not have multiplier preferences. We consider the errors induced in model outcomes if an econometrician assumes the representative agent has a multiplier preferences form utility function in the context of exchange and production general equilibrium economies and provide conditions under which the two problems are the same. An appendix extends our results to a two period dynamic general equilibrium economy with savings.
Essays in macroeconomics [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics

This dissertation contains three essays that investigate aspects of the behavior of employment over the business cycle. I argue that employment, rather than other concepts of labor input, is the important margin of adjustment of labor input over the business cycle. This observation necessitates the use of explicit models of employment to address issues related to the behavior of labor input over the business cycle. I use the tools developed in the literature on "equilibrium unemployment'' -- namely the inclusion of a search and matching friction in the labor market -- and integrate them into the framework of Real Business Cycle models. The latter typically ignores the explicit analysis of employment and excludes involuntary unemployment. The integrated model is therefore suitable to analyze the behavior of employment. I use the integrated model to address the issue of synchronization of the business cycle. In the first essay I investigate the synchronization of changes in employment across sectors in the US economy. In the second essay I argue that from a modeling perspective, generating cross-sector employment correlation is closely related to generating high variability of aggregate unemployment. In the third essay I address the synchronization of business cycles across developed economies.
Essays in macrofinance [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics

This dissertation covers issues related to macroeconomics and finance. As research disciplines, these two fields are often considered distinct in nature. However, my research has always considered them as interrelated. While many of the questions posed in macroeconomics and finance can be answered using the tools of their respective fields only, I find it useful to combine macroeconomics and finance when attacking questions related to business cycles and monetary policy. Ignoring the impact of movements in asset prices on the real economy and vice versa is plagued with issues, namely the inability to understand the causes of and propagation mechanisms within the business cycle. The two papers I present link macroeconomics, monetary policy, and the term structure of interest rates, and attempt to understand how risk premia embedded within the term structure can shape the economy and policy going forward.
Essays in Networks and Finance [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics.

This dissertation consists of three essays. "Asset Pricing Implications of Tunneling: Evidence from the Bombay Stock Exchange" develops a long-short equity portfolio that gives positive risk-adjusted returns. Moreover, the portfolio performs significantly better in down-market conditions as compared with up-market conditions. "Axiomatic Foundations of Centrality in Networks", provides an axiomatic characterization of Degree, Closeness and Decay centrality measures, and argues that such axiomatizations are the correct way to distinguish between centrality measures. Further, it shows that these three centrality measures belong to the same family of measures. In ``Long Run Effects of Colonial Education Policy" (with Latika Chaudhary) we document the historical persistence of differences in regional literacy rates in India. Moreover, we examine the long-term effects of colonial public spending in former British India on literacy rates in post-independence India.
Essays in portfolio credit risk [electronic resource]
Keywords: Management Science and Engineering

This dissertation considers the measurement and management of portfolio credit risk. Collateralized debt obligations, which are securities with payoffs that are tied to the cash flows in a portfolio of defaultable assets such as corporate bonds, play a significant role in the financial crisis that has spread throughout the world. Insufficient capital provisioning due to flawed and overly optimistic risk assessments is at the center of the problem. In the first part of the dissertation, we develop stochastic methods to measure the risk of positions in collateralized debt obligations and related instruments tied to an underlying portfolio of defaultable assets. We propose an adaptive point process model of portfolio default timing, a maximum likelihood method for estimating point process models that is based on an acceptance/rejection re-sampling scheme, and statistical tests for model validation. To illustrate these tools, they are used to estimate the distribution of the profit or loss generated by positions in multiple tranches of a collateralized debt obligation that references the CDX High Yield portfolio, and the risk capital required to support these positions. The second part of the dissertation develops maximum likelihood estimators of the term structure of systemic risk in the U.S. financial sector, defined as the conditional probability of failure of a large number of financial institutions. The estimators are based on a new dynamic hazard model of failure timing that captures the influence of time-varying macro-economic and sector-specific risk factors on the likelihood of failures, and the impact of risk spillovers due to contagion or incomplete information about relevant risk factors. The estimation results, which cover the period January 1987 to December 2008, provide strong evidence for the presence of failure clustering not caused by variations in the observable explanatory covariates, which include the trailing return on the S& P 500 index, the lagged slope of the U.S. yield curve, the default and TED spreads, and other sector-specific variables.
Essays on gender, marriage and inequality [electronic resource]
Keywords: Sociology.

This dissertation explores issues of gender and inequality within marriage. In it I show that what a woman earns relative to her husband better predicts whether or not she will leave the labor force than her or her husband's absolute earnings. Additionally, I show that women who are married to men who spend more time in paid work (over 45 hours per week) are more likely to exit relative to women who are married to men who work fewer hours per week. I also show that marriage is associated with a slight increase in body mass index for women and men of all races. African American women, however, are the only group to be more at risk for obesity in marriage (compared to being single). Finally, I also find that a woman's last name choice in marriage affects how men of low education view her -- but only if her behavior is gender non-traditional as well. If her behavior is gender non-traditional and her name is non-traditional (in other words, different than her husband's or hyphenated), a man with a high school degree or less sees her as a less committed wife and holds her to higher standards than a woman whose name is gender traditional (the same as her husband's).
Essays on horizontal mergers and antitrust [electronic resource]
Keywords: Business.

This thesis contributes to understanding the economics of mergers and acquisitions. It provides new empirical techniques to study these processes, based on structural, game theoretical models. In particular, it makes two main contributions. In Chapter 2, I study the issues arising when mergers take place in a two-sided market. In such markets, firms face two interrelated demand curves, which complicates the decision making process and makes standard merger models inapplicable. In Chapter 3, I provide a general framework to identify cost synergies from mergers without using cost data. The estimator is based on a dynamic model with endogenous mergers and product repositioning. Both chapters contain an abstract model that can be tailored to many markets, as well as a specific application to the merger wave in the U.S. radio industry.
Essays on the statistical analysis of roll-call votes and judicial citations [electronic resource]
Keywords: Political Science.

This dissertation consists of one chapter exploring the statistical properties of idealpoint estimators and two chapters exploring the use of judicial citations to extend ideal-point estimation and advance our understanding of judicial opinions. Chapter one explores the statistical properties of ideal-point estimators. This chapter provides several theoretical results regarding ideal-point estimation. First, this chapter demonstrates a counterexample to consistency of common ideal-point estimators--even with regard to the rank of the ideal points. It then presents a simple estimator of the rank of unidimensional ideal points that is inefficient but also consistent for a generalization of most common ideal-point models. Chapter two--joint work with Robert Anderson and Stephen Jessee--introduces a method for estimating the ideology of judges and court cases based on the citations contained in judicial opinions that can directly estimate the ideological positions of cases from citations to precedent without using the votes in those cases. This chapter then uses this technique to address two important questions in judicial politics. The first regards whose ideology is reflected in a majority opinion. The second question focuses on the Supreme Court's decision to grant certiorari. The technique introduced in this chapter allows us to investigate previously untestable hypotheses regarding the relationship between the decision to grant certiorari and the lower court's opinion in the case. Chapter three uses judicial citation data for a different purpose--categorizing opinions. Citations explicitly link each opinion to other opinions--including the opinions of other courts--and legal documents. This chapter introduces a statistical model that assumes opinions are more likely to cite other opinions that deal with similar issues and allows issue areas to form a hierarchical structure. The results are analyzed to understand the relationship between different issue areas as well as changes in the Court's agenda over time. I also compare the results to a traditional hand-coding of these opinions.
Estimation and Prediction of Financial Contagion through Trade
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
Thesis

This presents a panel estimation model to the contagious effects resulting from financial integration and investigates the channels and conditions under which contagion can be distinguished from interdependence and random shocks. The identification strategy for contagion is pursued by controlling for bilateral trade links among countries. To identify contagion effects in the presence of interdependencies and random shocks the equations for individual countries contain country specific forcing fundamental variables. These variables are applied towards the construction of a time series reflecting the Country Pressure Index. Linear regression and predictive estimation is applied towards understanding the financial linkages of the different countries with their trade partners. Evidence is found that trade is an important determinant of financial markets integration and can sufficiently explain extreme conditions. Several predictive results are drawn to show the trend toward financial globalization and drawing results on sources of contagion for the Southeast Asian and Pacific countries.
Ethnic group rebellion in civil war [electronic resource]
Keywords: Political Science

Why do some ethnic groups involve themselves in civil wars, fighting in rebel groups against the state, while others do not? In particular, what explains variation in ethnic group involvement within the same country? The conventional wisdom is that poverty and political grievances are to blame for this involvement and participation in political violence more generally. Such conclusions tend to be based on studies of single cases or large-N studies that analyze a biased sample of ethnic groups. Countering these hypotheses, I propose a theory of ethnic group rebellion that predicts ethnic group involvement in civil war based on sub-national variation in the ability of the state to exercise a monopoly of control over territory and people, and its administrative strength in an area. Using original geographic, economic, and political data collected on an exhaustive set of ethnic groups from 48 African countries, I test hypotheses emanating from my theory and those of traditional explanations in the context of African civil wars between 1980 and 2006. I find that the distance between an ethnic group's inhabited region of the country and the capital city -- an important measure of the state's presence and capacity for control -- is positively related to the probability of involvement in rebellion. The periphery is a high risk region for involvement in both territorial (separatist/secessionist) rebellion and rebellion designed to take over the state and oust the government. The goals and organizational requirements for these two types of rebellion are quite different, and my theory proposes that these differences should attract ethnic groups from opposite ends of the economic spectrum. Territorial rebellions are likely to involve the poorest ethnic groups living in the periphery, as these movements do not require a high degree of organization or funding to continue a low-level insurgency against the state. In contrast, wealthier groups, which are likely to be better organized and better able to act collectively, are more likely to be involved in government takeover rebellions, which require a higher degree of rebel competence and strength to confront the forces of the state directly. The evidence from statistical analysis and case study examination is strongly supportive of the elements of my theory, suggesting that traditional emphasis on poverty, political representation, and transnational ethnic ties as central factors in this type of political violence is misguided and more focus should be placed on the ability of the state to administer its territory effectively and ethnic group responses to variation in this capacity.
Evaluation of forecasts with applications to meteorology [electronic resource]
Keywords: Statistics

Forecast verification is an important topic in meteorology and the methods developed have been applied to evaluating forecasts in other fields, e.g., evaluation of risk assessments in epidemiology and of risk models in banking. Instead of using scoring rules as in the traditional approach, we propose a new approach that uses a more intrinsic loss function. This new approach enables one to construct confidence intervals and tackle other problems of statistical inference, which can not be done in the scoring rule approach without overly restrictive assumptions. We apply the methodology to evaluate weather forecasts. Martingale theory provides an important tool in handling the temporal aspects of the forecasts, while the spatial aspects are handled by clustering into risk buckets.
Evolutionary constraint facilitates interpretation of genetic variation from resequenced human genomes [electronic resource]
Keywords: Genetics

I demonstrate how comparative sequence analysis facilitates genome-wide base-pair level interpretation of individual genetic variation, and address three questions of importance for human personal genomics: First, whether an individual's functional variation comes mostly from noncoding or coding polymorphisms; second, whether population-specific or globally present polymorphisms contribute more to functional variation in any given individual; third what is the functional impact of short insertions and deletions in an individual genome. These questions have not been definitively answered by analyses of existing variation data because of a focus on coding polymorphisms, ascertainment biases in favor of common variation, and a lack of base-pair level resolution for identifying functional variants. The data set used in this study consisted of 575 amplicons resequenced in 432 individuals at genomic sites enriched for evolutionary constraint, and variation from 5 published human genomes. Single-site measures of evolutionary constraint derived from mammalian multiple sequence alignments are strongly predictive of reductions in modern-day genetic diversity across a range of annotation categories and across the allele frequency spectrum. I show that putatively functional variation in an individual genome is dominated by polymorphisms that do not change protein sequence, and which originate from our shared ancestral population and commonly segregate in human populations. Furthermore, I demonstrate that selection against short human indels has been shaped by patterns of evolutionary constraint, belying their potential functional importance. These observations show that common, noncoding alleles contribute substantially to human phenotypes and that constraint-based analyses will be of tremendous value to identify phenotypically-relevant variants in individual genomes.
Exalted bodies, Charles Ellis Johnson and the practice of Mormon photography [electronic resource]
Keywords: Art and Art History

On September 24, 1890, the then president, prophet, seer, and revelator of the Mormon Church, Wilford Woodruff, made an announcement. "I have arived [sic], " he declared, "at a point in the History of my life as the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints whare [sic] I am under the necessity of acting for the Temporal salvation of the Church." Finally succumbing to almost four decades of the larger nation's anti-polygamy assault, Woodruff sought to save his religion by relinquishing plural marriage. In so doing, however, he profoundly altered the very nature of Mormonism itself. Because in renouncing the practice of polygamy, the LDS church did not simply disavow an unorthodox family structure. To the contrary, it abandoned perhaps the central doctrine of its founding theology -- a theology rooted in an intoxicating vision of the male body and that body's sexualized capacity to do nothing less than make heaven on earth. This dissertation examines both this vision and its loss through the work of the little-known Mormon artist Charles Ellis Johnson (1857-1926). Church photographer, Holy Land traveler, and, perhaps surprisingly, erotic stereographer, Johnson made pictures that both restage Mormonism's original, polygamous dreams and reveal the extent to which the country shattered these dreams when they broke the LDS to monogamy. More than this, Johnson's images simultaneously disclose how the nation's brutal anti-polygamy war rooted itself in not simply terror and revulsion but also a delicious myth of the manly Saint. Focusing on Johnson's Holy Land work and his erotic stereographs, I examine the way in which Mormon polygamy spoke to such collective fantasies of manhood, power, and, ultimately, the creative impulse itself; I examine, in other words, the way in which plural marriage never existed as an isolated religious event but rather belonged to an historical, cultural, and social vista that encompassed phenomena as diverse as minstrelsy, the New Woman, dude ranches, and even Emerson.
Excellence for all [electronic resource] : American school reform, 1983-2008
Keywords: Education.

Excellence For All: American Education Reform, 1983-2008 examines the history of school reform in the United States over the past quarter-century. Specifically, the work examines an approach to educational change best characterized by the phrase "excellence for all"—an equity-focused policy phenomenon uniquely situated for the policymaking context of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The idea of promoting excellence for all students united a broad enough coalition to pursue a truly national reform effort and captured the imaginations of leaders in state and local government, at philanthropic foundations, in colleges and universities, and in school districts across the country. Led by a corps of self-styled educational entrepreneurs aggressively pursuing reforms that they could take "to scale, " the movement sought to remake the American high school piece by piece. The dissertation examines this reform movement through the nation's three largest districts—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—and through three particular change efforts: a physical plant reform (the small schools movement), a personnel reform (Teach For America), and a curricular reform (the Advanced Placement Program). The work aims to establish the ways in which this most recent era of school reform represented a departure from previous reform eras, strives to explain the movement's broad appeal, and ultimately, aims to understand its shortcomings by exploring the assumptions underlying the excellence for all approach and the tradeoffs required by it.