VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Case for Free Trade Agreements: Historical Perspectives and a Projection for China, Japan, and Korea
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
FTA
gravity model
trade liberalization
tariff
non-tariff barrier
Thesis

In recent years, several major Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) have been proposed amongst countries that encompass a lion’s share of the world’s economic output.Thus, understanding the impact of FTAs on trade and income has become more crucial than ever. This paper sheds light on both the past and future effects of FTAs via a two-step approach. First, I use a gravity model to measure the effect of existing FTAs on the bilateral trade flows of member countries. Second, I project the potential increase in trade and GDP from a China-Japan-Korea (CJK) FTA specifically, through a combination of gravity model analysis and calculations based on various economic growth and tariff reduction scenarios. The results show that historically, FTAs have greatly increased trade amongst member countries. Looking forward, I estimate that a CJK FTA increases intraregional merchandise trade by 21%-46% and services trade by 49%-79%, with commensurately large increases in GDP. This suggests that FTAs might play a major role in boosting world economic growth.
The Effects of the Thai College Admissions System on Private Tutoring Expenditure, Income and Achievement Disparities
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
College admissions
Private tutoring
Thailand
Income and achievement gap
Thesis

College admissions in Thailand is under a centralized systems in which acceptance is based on a scoring system that combines students’ performance on the college entrance exam and their high school GPA. The system has a reputation for objectivity and fairness, as every student has equal chance of taking the same test. In this paper, I explore whether the centralized system can result in a wider achievement gap in students of different socio-economic status. I firstly assess whether the system leads to a higher demand in private tutoring among high school students by observing how household expenditure on private tutoring has changed after a change in the scoring system by giving more weight to test score was enforced; secondly, I explore the relationship between tutoring expenditure and education outcome. I find statistically significant effects on private tutoring in response to the policy change, with different magnitude and direction for different socioeconomic status of the households. I also find a strong correlation between households’ investment in private tutoring and college attendance. These results suggest government policy changes in education to increase attendance. These results suggest government policy changes in education to increase equality of opportunity, including investing more in the schools with less emphasis on the test scores for college admissions.
The Efficiency of Wikipedia’s Evolution
Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
Wikipedia
Eciency
Knowledge Production
Decentralized Platforms
Internet
Public Goo
Thesis

Wikipedia, the world’s most popular encyclopedia, is a unique enterprise characterized by its purely decentralized production. Thus, it is important to understand whether editors produce the pages in an ecient manner. I examine how eciently Wikipedia has developed from three perspectives. First, I evaluate whether the editors produce the pages with the highest eventual views first. I find that at a given point in time, editors create roughly 80% of the maximum possible views that could have been created up through that time. Second, I examine whether pages are created in order of how well-connected they are to other pages in the link structure, so how easy they are to find. I find that a page’s probability of being created at any point in time is significantly and substantially increasing in its relative number of views and connections. However, this e↵ect diminishes with time and page creation was much less sensitive to these measures in 2008 than in 2001. Third, I compare which pages frequent versus infrequent editors create. I find that frequent editors tend to produce highly-viewed pages while infrequent editors tend to produce better connected pages.
The Structural and Bonding Behavior of 3d Transitional Metal Carbonates at Mantle Pressures
Keywords:  Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences
School of Earth Energy &amp; Environmental Sciences
deep carbon
Thesis

Carbonate minerals are potentially major hosts for carbon in the lower mantle of the Earth. Since the mantle holds 100 times more carbon than the crust, atmosphere, and ocean reservoirs, a thorough understanding of the deep carbon cycle is necessary to model the global carbon cycle. High pressure studies are important because they help us define the stability of crystal phases that exist at extreme conditions and how these new carbonate structures hold carbon in the deep carbon cycle. Fe2+, the 3d transition metal in siderite (FeCO3), undergoes a coupled electronic spin transition and an isostructural phase transition at approximately 46 GPa, as well as a later structural phase transition at ~100 GPa. In contrast, Mn2+ in rhodochrosite (MnCO3) undergoes a structural phase transition to an orthorhombic structure at approximately 50 GPa and an electronic spin transition at ~100 GPa. These transitions were observed using in-situ Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction coupled with high-pressure diamond anvil cells. Studies of electronic spin and structural phase transitions in carbonates are crucial for developing the phase diagrams and understanding the properties under the extreme conditions in the deep Earth that govern the stability and behavior of carbonates as possible hosts for carbon in the lower mantle.
Thermal modeling of coring and drilling operations for solar system exploration applications [electronic resource]
Keywords: Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Heat created at a drilling site by the motion of a rotary-percussive coring system is a highly problematic, yet unavoidable consequence of geologic sample acquisition. This heat is particularly hazardous in the dry drilling techniques to be used for Mars sample return (MSR) and missions to the Solar System's moons, since heat has the capability of altering material composition or evolving compounds of interest, including water. In addition, sublimation of any ice contained in the rock or soil formation could cause vapor deposition onto cooler areas of the bit, permanently freezing the bit in the borehole and potentially leading to mission failure. A thermal model capable of predicting temperature profiles throughout the geologic formation and bit is an essential tool in creating drilling schedules that minimize both damage to samples and risk to system hardware. This investigation uses a series of drilling and coring tests, performed with a prototype MSR sampling system, to gather thermal data on a suite of solar system analog materials across a variety of atmospheric and starting thermal conditions. The materials and conditions were chosen to emulate rock types and conditions found on Mars and potentially on Jupiter's Moon Europa. The data is used to verify the accuracy of a finite element model specifically designed for this application. The model may be used to prevent rock or cuttings temperatures from reaching threshold values by predicting necessary pauses and/or power reductions. The average error of the model in predicting temperature profiles is 6.83%, with the errors of only two of eighteen tests exceeding 10%. A number of important relationships are found using the thermal profiles provided by the model. A linear relation between unconfined compressive strength (UCS) and maximum core temperature is developed, with decreased rock starting temperature leading to an increase in rock core temperature change. Maximum core temperature is dependent on system specific energy, defined as the ratio of energy consumption to rock volume excavated by the bit; rock parameters; operational parameters; and bit geometry by a simple power law. Energy transmission efficiency into the rock by a percussive bit is found to increase linearly with UCS and is also dependent on rock ambient pressure due to the subsequent changes in friction. Cuttings temperatures are identified by the model, which aids in the construction of sample acquisition schedules.
To be (moral) or not to be [electronic resource] : an analysis of the interaction between categorical identity and moral identity
Keywords: Business.

Organizations have social identities that encompass both a categorical identity, based on products sold or services provided, and a more individualized, organization-specific identity not necessarily based on products, which often consists of moral features such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities or actively engaging in the social well-being of local communities. Recent sociological research on organizational categories has shown that audiences prefer organizations that conform to a single, clear category. At the same time, social psychological research on morality shows that individuals reward moral actors and punish immoral actors. This dissertation examines how conformity to a categorical code differently affects audiences' reactions to organizational actors' moral and immoral actions. In Section I, I use two empirical settings to examine how the clarity of an organization's categorical identity affects the way audiences react to the organization's moral identity based on CSR in a local community. First, using a series of experiments, I show that organizations in a single category gain appeal when they perform a CSR activity while organizations that span multiple categories garner less appeal for making the same moral identity claim. I also replicate and extend these findings in an empirical analysis using corporate financial performance data, which shows that penalties also extend to organizations in ambiguous product categories, in addition to those operating in multiple categories. An important implication of these results is that organizations with unclear categorical identities can have greater difficulty cultivating moral identities that would serve to differentiate them in the marketplace. In Section II, I examine how category clarity affects audiences' response to immoral actions on the part of organizations. Using a series of experiments, I show that organizations with unclear categorical identities are punished more when suspected of immoral behavior than organizations operating in a single product category. However, when the immoral behavior is beyond suspicion and is accepted as fact, the buffering effect of a clear categorical identity disappears. In line with results from the studies in Section I, these findings suggest that organizations with unclear categorical identities can have a more difficult time rebounding from perceived immorality in the marketplace. Overall, the results from this dissertation enrich the current literature on organizational identity and expand on ideas about how the cognitive process in which rewards and penalties are meted out is affected by the categorical clarity of an organization.
To the gentle reader [electronic resource] : prefaces and books in early modern England
Keywords: English.

This project examines the preface, especially the dedication and epistle to readers, in Renaissance books. Its primary claim is that the preface, despite being a marginal element of the book, played a central role in the development of literary and print culture in early modern England. It demonstrates how prefaces shaped the practices of reading, publishing, and authoring books during a period when the nature and conventions of those activities were still unsettled. Moreover, this project brings the preface's significance to bear on issues such as Renaissance humanism, periodization and early modernity, early modern authorship, and dramatic publication.
Tools and methods for large-scale convex optimization [electronic resource]
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

Convex optimization is widely used in many areas of engineering science such as control theory, statistics and machine learning, and image and signal processing. There are, however, several barriers to the use of convex optimization in everyday engineering: solvers for convex optimization in general require specialized knowledge to code, and in order to solve problems, users must typically perform tedious manual transformations before calling a solver. This problem is exacerbated when problem sizes become extremely large. In this thesis, we investigate tools and methods to address these two issues in the context of large-scale convex optimization. In particular, we develop technology to handle very large problems, including a large-scale solver and a tool to model potentially large optimization problems. This tool allows users to describe their problems with an intuitive model that is automatically transformed into a form handled by the large-scale solver, liberating users from performing tedious manual transformations. For the large-scale solver, we use the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and express conic optimization problems in consensus form, splitting the linear algebra from the generalized conic inequalities. For modeling optimization problems, we present the quadratic cone modeling language (QCML), which like CVX is a tool that automatically converts convex optimization problems into conic form and solves them with a standard cone solver. Unlike CVX, QCML can be used to analyze and generate code for entire problem families without requiring another analysis or generation phase when problem (instance) data or dimensions change.
Topics in two-sample testing [electronic resource]
Keywords: Statistics.

Driven by recent advances in the collection of biological data, many such studies draw from heterogeneous datasources. We develop an idea of Jerome Friedman's to conduct two-sample testing using supervised learning procedures. In special cases, this technique generalizes the randomization t-test, for which an asymptotic normality result is known. Using Stein's method of exchangeable pairs, we produce Berry--Esseen-type bounds for the permutation t-statistic for the purpose of statistical inference. We demonstrate the use of kernel methods in two-sample testing on non-vectorial data (text and images), and apply multiple kernel learning (MKL) to the heterogeneous data domain. We show that these techniques can effectively synthesize signals from multiple datasources and produce interpretable weights that highlight the role of each component.
Topological insulator and magnetically doped topological insulator thin films by molecular beam epitaxy [electronic resource]
Keywords: Physics.

Searching for energy dissipation-less systems has become increasingly important for low power electronic devices. Topological insulators, a new topological state of quantum matter, have recently been proposed as an emerging material for use in low power electronics, because of the unique transport along its topologically protected edge/surface states. In addition, it has been predicted that the incorporation of magnetic elements into topological insulators could lead to the quantum anomalous Hall state, which is a truly dissipation-less system. However, the material quality of topological insulator thin films remains as a major stumbling block for exploring the novel physics of topological insulators and their proposed applications. In the first part of this thesis, I will first describe an advanced thin film deposition technique, molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and the mini-MBE system we designed and built for topological insulator thin film growth. Then I will briefly illustrate some basic principles and sample preparation methods for a variety of characterization techniques we used for the material property investigation. In the second part of this thesis, I will present the growth and characterization of topological insulator bismuth telluride thin films grown by a two-step MBE process developed as part of this research. By optimizing the growth recipe and particularly developing the two-step growth method, defect densities were significantly reduced and higher crystal and surface quality bismuth telluride thin films were achieved. The existence of a topological surface state on our bismuth telluride thin films was also confirmed. The Fermi level of our bismuth telluride thin film was tuned to very close to the bulk gap region. The successful growth of centimeter-sized, uniform, high quality topological insulator thin films provides an excellent platform for both fundamental studies of the properties of topological insulators and fabrications of mesoscopic devices. Finally, I will report on the first successful growth of gadolinium substituted bismuth telluride thin films with high Gd concentrations by MBE. We systematically investigated the crystal structure, band structure, magnetic, and electronic properties of gadolinium substituted bismuth telluride thin films. The topological surface state was found to remain intact by Gd substitution into bismuth telluride. Although ferromagnetic behavior in gadolinium substituted bismuth telluride thin films was not observed above 2K by both magnetic and magneto-transport measurements, gadolinium substituted bismuth telluride thin films were found to have a Curie susceptibility due to the paramagnetic Gd ions with an atomic magnetic moment of 6.93 Bohr magneton per Gd ion, which suggests that it is possible to realize dissipation-less transport with a small external magnetic field or with a ferromagnetic layer on top of gadolinium substituted bismuth telluride thin films.
Topology optimization of a MEMS device [electronic resource]
Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.

The mechanics of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are typically designed using a set of popular building blocks (rectangular cantilevers, folded flexure beams, crab legs etc.). Optimization of these structures or their variants is often performed using scaling laws, parametric optimization, or some insight gained from studying relationships between certain features and a device's behavior. Topology optimization is a more powerful tool that systematically generates the full topology of a design, including the size, shape, and location of features, and can satisfy several goals despite potentially complex relationships. The focus of this thesis is to answer the following question: Is it advantageous to design MEMS structures such as RF MEMS capacitive switches using topology optimization? This thesis takes the reader through a full design process. The problem setup and problem formulation are justified in depth. The mechanical behaviors of devices with stresses and stress gradients resulting from typical micro-fabrication processes are explained. The finite element simulations are described, and the modeling decisions that can be particularly relevant to other MEMS problems are highlighted. The topology optimization method is thoroughly explained, and the challenges and necessary adaptations to the method are exposed. Sets of topology optimized designs are presented; guidelines for future intuitive design are extracted from an examination of the resulting geometries. Experimental data is provided, justifying many of the decisions taken during the design process, and validating the finite element models and topology optimization results. The experimental results also provide supplemental understanding regarding capacitive switch mechanics. The new knowledge should be integrated into any future problem formulation. We conclude that topology optimization can be used for MEMS design, significantly increasing the design possibilities and solving complex, non-intuitive problems.
Towards 3D molecular movies [electronic resource] : electron orbital signatures in asymmetric tops
Keywords: Applied Physics.

High-order harmonic generation in atoms or linear molecules offers valuable information about valence electrons. When combined with molecular alignment, high harmonic generation is sensitive to both Angstrom-scale structure and sub-femtosecond dynamics, and can even create very simple movies of molecules in motion. Extending these techniques to more complex molecules with three distinct dimensions is hindered, however, by the interference of radiation from random molecular orientations. In this dissertation, I demonstrate a solution to this dilemma by making use of the full-scale molecular revival pattern of a three-dimensional asymmetric top. I present an alignment-decomposition approach based on methods derived from rotational coherence spectroscopy and test them on the asymmetric-top molecule sulfur dioxide. I then apply this approach to experimental results from the full sulfur dioxide high-harmonic spectrum and show that prominent spectral features must be due to ionization and recombination from multiple molecular orbitals. These results simplify the task of spectral analysis and extend the usefulness of high harmonic generation to increasingly complicated molecules. They provide a first step towards constructing real, three-dimensional molecular movies.
Towards a dynamic pragmatics [electronic resource]
Keywords: Linguistics.

This dissertation explores the interplay of conventional and interactional factors in the interpretation of natural language utterances. It develops a formal framework, dynamic pragmatics, in which pragmatic inferences arise as contextual entailments in a dynamic system in which information states are updated with information about the occurrence of utterance events (in contrast to dynamic semantics, where information states are updated with the content of linguistic expressions). In this way, the framework is able to faithfully model Gricean pragmatic inference as interlocutors' reasoning about each other's utterance choices. Linguistic utterances are analyzed as having essential facts of two distinct types: Epistemic effects (i.e., effects on the information states of the interlocutors) and normative effects (i.e., effects on the interlocutors' commitments). The latter effects are carried by extra-compositional, normative conventions of use that mediate the form-force mapping; the former arise largely due to the interlocutors' presumptions about each other's beliefs, preferences, and method of determining which (utterance) actions are best (i.e., practical reasoning). The framework of dynamic pragmatics allows us to consistently take a thoroughly Gricean perspective on language use, and allows us to explore how the interpretation of an utterance arises through the interplay of sentential force, content, and context. At the same time, the framework of dynamic pragmatics sheds a new light on the nature of conversational implicature, and language use in general.
Towards a string theory model of de Sitter space and early universe cosmology [electronic resource]
Keywords: Physics.

String theory is arguably the best candidate for a theory of quantum gravity and unified interactions. Reconciling Einstein's theory of General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics. The theory however is best understood on Minkowski and Anti-de Sitter space-times, and not on exponentially expanding space-times with positive cosmological constant, like our own universe. There is still no satisfactory formulation of String Theory on these so called asymptotically de Sitter space times. In this thesis I will discuss certain avenues of progress towards a String Theory formulation of de Sitter space-times. Specifically, how understanding of the analytic continuations of Liouville Theory and how to gauge-fix it in the Timelike regime will aid in the understanding of the proposed FRW-CFT duality of de Sitter space. It is also discussed how non-trivial topology effects proposed Chern-Simons Matter duals of Vasiliev Higher Spin gravity theories which are important in the dS-CFT description of de Sitter Space.