VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays on democratization and redistribution in the Philippines [electronic resource]
Keywords: Political Science.

Does democratization lead to redistribution? The redistributive hypothesis has long contended that it does, but existing work has been conflicted and inconclusive. This dissertation seeks to deepen and expand our understanding of the redistributive hypothesis by using the Philippines as a case study. Unlike most previous studies, I explore the effects of democratization on many different aspects of redistribution. The three chapters of this dissertation cover the effects of democratization on tax structure, public services provision, and land redistribution. Throughout, I use both qualitative and quantitative analyses and construct several original datasets based on primary and secondary sources. My results show that democratization has increased some forms of redistribution but that the effect has not been universal. On the one hand, I find evidence that democratization led to more progressive taxation and increases in the government consumption, education spending, public school enrollment, and land redistribution. On the other hand, I find no evidence that democratization led to increases in total tax revenue or health outcomes. Moreover, while tax revenue came from more progressive sources under democracy, this result is attributable to greater tax compliance by the wealthy rather than more progressive statutory tax rates. Similarly, while land redistribution increased under democratization, it also still encountered significant limits. Overall, my results provide partial support for the redistributive hypothesis. Consistent with this hypothesis, my analysis of the Philippines demonstrates that democratization can still lead to redistribution in developing countries today. However, despite seeing this effect, we also observe substantial restrictions on both the type and degree of redistribution in the Philippines. This suggests shortcomings in the redistributive hypothesis as well as the importance of analyzing multiple measures of redistribution.
Essays on development economics [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters, all of which deal with topics in development economics. The first chapter explores the extent to which ability accounts for the observed differences in private school test scores versus public school test scores. The second chapter looks at the effects of an exogenous indigo price change in the nineteenth century on innovation. Finally, the third chapter looks at victims of violence during a civil war and tests whether victims of violence are targeted for their wealth, and particularly if this is the case for more liquid households. In school choice, and between private and public schools, sorting plays an important role. A sharp general equilibrium model of school choice is employed in Chapter 1 to estimate how much of the difference between private and public school test scores is due to ability differences. By calibrating a general equilibrium model and combining it with the universe of grade 8 test scores from Kenya across ten years, a distributional analysis is conducted to estimate the private school effect after controlling for ability sorting. Using the equilibrium distributions of ability from the model, the results suggest that, in the base case, the robust one standard deviation difference in test scores reduces to 0.50 standard deviations once heterogeneous ability is accounted for in each sector. Furthermore there is strong evidence that higher ability students perform better at private schools. Induced innovation, the idea that a relative change in factor prices will lead to innovation of the factor that has become relatively expensive, has strong theoretical foundations but scant empirical evidence. Chapter 2 uses the historical events of riots in Bengal, India and the American Civil War both in close succession in the late nineteenth century, to show how these events increased prices of natural indigo and induced innovation in synthetic colors. Identification comes from the substitutability of synthetic colors for natural colors. In terms of numbers, the induced effect is estimated to be an extra 97 patents, or roughly one fifth of the existing patents in dyeing at the time. Chapter 3 considers the determinants of violence in Sudan with a unique household dataset to characterize the degree to which victims are targeted for economic reasons. Wealthier households are found to have disproportionately worse outcomes across both physical (e.g. loss of assets) and human (e.g. personal injury) measures of the impact of the conflict. This pattern of targeting is robust, and furthermore there is evidence that violence was especially targeted at those who had lootable wealth.
Essays on economic networks [electronic resource]
Keywords: Business.

This dissertation theoretically analyzes how networks of relationships among decision-makers affect two kinds of economic processes: (i) investment in public goods; and (ii) repeated updating of beliefs or behaviors based on observing neighbors. The results connect these processes to the spectral properties of networks -- that is, eigenvalues and eigenvectors -- and use the connection to shed light on economic outcomes. The first essay, based on joint work with Matthew Elliott, focuses on games in which each player simultaneously exerts costly effort that provides different benefits to each other player. The goal is to find and describe effort profiles that are immune to coordinated coalitional deviations when such a game is played repeatedly. Formally, these effort profiles are the ones that can be sustained in a strong Nash equilibrium of the repeated game. We introduce a class of effort profiles that are called centrality-stable. These are characterized by a network centrality condition: agent A's contribution (defined as effort level times marginal cost) is equal to a weighted sum of the contributions of those who help A; the weight on B's contribution measures the marginal benefit B's effort provides to A. Under certain assumptions (mainly concavity of utility functions), centrality-stable profiles exist, are Pareto-efficient, and any such profile is sustainable in a coalitionally robust equilibrium of the repeated game. Centrality-stable profiles also have an alternative definition: they are those at which all agents are first-order indifferent to scaling all efforts by a factor near
Essays on human capital and entrepreneurship [electronic resource]
Keywords: Business.

This thesis analyzes economic models and empirical evidence on the topic of the evo- lution of labor market and the development of human capital in a rapidly developing country. The rst chapter develops a theoretical model of evolving skills and wages when there is an exogenous increase in return to skill. The model predicts that recent graduates' wages may decrease in the medium and long run even as the demand for skilled workers increases. The second chapter provides empirical evidence that supports the theory devel- oped in the rst chapter. The rst half of the chapter analyzes a recent China dataset, and nds that while wages for recent graduates decreased, wages for the experienced graduates increased. The second half of the chapter examines evidence from other developing countries at similar stages of development. The third chapter develops a model which provides a mechanism of rising return to skill after trade liberalization. By trading with a developed country, the developing country can make its high-skill workers more productive by working with foreign high-skill trainers, or by using cheaper skill-intensive foreign inputs. The fourth chapter develops a model of technology catch-up and its impact on the return to skill in a developing country. The opportunity for technology catch-up increases the demand for high-skill workers and drives up the return to skill. Moreover, if the new technologies acquired by the developing country are skill-intensive, the return to skill will increase further. i.
Essays on market design and experimental economics [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics

I explore fundamental behavioral aspects of several market design environments in a variety of projects using both theoretical models and laboratory experiments. I show that human tendencies can drastically shift potential outcomes away from those which would result if individuals were fully 'rational' and unbiased in decision problems similar to those found frequently in the field. I explore two common classes of centralized matching mechanisms--Deferred Acceptance and Priority--which have wildly different success rates in practice despite both being open to manipulation by agents who have incomplete information about the other participants in the match. For this reason, theory predicts both mechanisms in equilibrium will yield match outcomes which are unstable, meaning some agents will desire to renegotiate with one another after receiving their match assignments, and thus reduce participants' confidence in using the match. I provide laboratory evidence that out-of-equilibrium truth telling by agents is substantially more frequent in the Deferred Acceptance environment and thus Deferred Acceptance matches will generally be more stable in practice than matches using a Priority mechanism. This may explain why Deferred Acceptance mechanisms appear to be more viable in the field. I also explore two different models of decentralized two-sided matching environments where establishing scarce signaling methods can improve market outcomes. In a laboratory experiment, I show that allowing potential receiving job offers to send a single signal to their favorite potential employer before job offers are made increases overall match rates in the market, but is potentially damaging to the firms making offers when compared to the market without such a signal. Then, in a theoretical model where pre-offer communication takes the form of an interview process where workers have natural limits on the number of interviews in which they can participate, I show that in many cases firms can benefit themselves and the market as a whole by voluntarily restricting the number of interviews they offer to participate in. While not traditionally thought of as market design problems, voting mechanisms are fundamentally goods allocation problems as well and have many of the same issues as traditional markets do. I explore the effects of voter bias on outcomes in an otherwise standard voting model and find that even slight external pressure on individuals in a committee tasked with coming to a collective decision can destroy the ability of that committee to arrive at the correct result, even when individuals have good information about the best decision to make. Furthermore, the quality of the decision made by such a committee can actually degrade as the committee size increases, in contrast with the canonical Condorcet Jury Theorem which predicts that a committee's ability to choose the right outcome increases quickly as more members are added.
Essays on political economy [electronic resource]
Keywords: Economics

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter, Predictability and Power in Legislative Bargaining, is a joint paper with Nageeb Ali and B. Douglas Bernheim. This paper examines the effect of the predictability of recognition processes on the concentration of political power in legislative bargaining. For a broad class of legislative bargaining games, we identify a mild predictability condition on the recognition rule, requiring an ability to rule out some minimum number of legislators as the next proposer, under which Markovian equilibria deliver all economic surplus to the first proposer. When legislators can be nearly certain that the next proposer belongs to a class of the requisite size, the first proposer receives nearly all of the surplus. The second chapter, Designing Checks and Balances, is a joint paper with Tiberiu Dragu and James Kuklinski. We study the design of checks and balances institutions when two (or more) parties need to agree on changing an existing policy in environments with single-peaked preferences. We characterize a class of checks and balances rules that satisfy strategy-proofness and Pareto efficiency and show that there is a unique rule that satisfy these properties. It consists of implementing the ideal policy of the more moderate player, that is, the player that prefers the less aggressive change from the policy status-quo. We study the implications of our analysis for constitutional review. The third chapter is Regulation and Liabilities. I develop a game theoretic model of the interaction among a firm, a regulatory agency and a consumer group. I use this framework to analyze the effect of allowing product liability compensation on the incentives and utility of the firm. I show that the firm's incentive to produce a quality product increases in the level of the damage compensation awarded through tort claims; however, the firm's utility may increase or decrease in the level of tort claim compensation.
Essays on the new separation of powers [electronic resource]
Keywords: Political Science.

A central insight motivates the essays in this dissertation: we cannot fully understand the actions of any given branch of government---the executive, the legislature, or the judiciary---without considering the inter-dependence of the branches. The behavior of any branch depends not only the attributes of the branch itself. It also depends on the behavior of the other branches of government. The essays analyze this motivating insight from three different angles. The first essay examines legislative rules from a separation of powers perspective; the second essay considers judicial decision-making in a separation of powers environment; and the third essay analyzes the legislature's decision to delegate authority to another branch of government.
Essays on the social stratification of consumption in postwar United States and France [electronic resource]
Keywords: Sociology.

This dissertation consists of three stand-alone studies, which address a common problem in research on the social stratification of consumption: the empirically unsubstantiated theoretical discussion of trends on the topic. In response, the first study uses American data on different types of social ties to examine the evolution of the association between social class and lifestyles since the mid-1970s. It concludes that, contrary to much accepted wisdom, there is no evidence of decline in the association, and in fact, some evidence for its intensification due to well-documented recent trends of civic disengagement and isolation among Americans. The two other studies use historical data from France and the United States to explore the social stratification of a comprehensive list of spending practices. Both reach the same conclusions. First, the social structure of spending patterns resembles a multi-dimensional, homogeneous space, whose shape and stability challenge arguments associated with the relevant literature in economics as well as with sociological literature on class analysis and postmodernist theory. Second, spending practices are organized around classic forms of social distinction, whose grounding in material inequalities challenges arguments about the contemporary predominance of positional and cultural distinctions. Third, the observation of strong and persistent differences by occupation and education in spending patterns challenges arguments about the increasing importance of financial differences or alternatively about the irrelevance of traditional socio-demographic determinants to contemporary consumption. The overall conclusion of the dissertation project is that consumption practices are deeply embedded in the complex dynamics of contemporary institutions, whose postindustrial logic tends to reformulate rather than supplant industrial-era patterns of socio-economic inequality.
An essential role of the immune system in remodeling the tumor microenvironment upon oncogene inactivation [electronic resource]
Keywords: Immunology.

Oncogene addiction is thought to occur cell autonomously. Immune effectors are implicated in the initiation and restraint of tumorigenesis, but their role in oncogene inactivation-mediated tumor regression is unclear. Here, we show that an intact immune system, specifically CD4+ T cells, is required for the induction of cellular senescence, shutdown of angiogenesis, and chemokine expression resulting in sustained tumor regression upon inactivation of the MYC or BCR-ABL oncogenes in mouse models of T cell acute lymphoblastic lymphoma and pro-B cell leukemia, respectively. Moreover, immune effectors knocked out for thrombospondins failed to induce sustained tumor regression. Hence, CD4+ T cells are required for the remodeling of the tumor microenvironment through the expression of chemokines, such as thrombospondins, in order to elicit oncogene addiction.
Evolution and individuality; beyond the genetically homogeneous organism [electronic resource]
Keywords: Biology.

In the first chapter, we argue that an individual organism ought not to be defined in terms of genetic homogeneity, but rather by the evolutionary criteria of the alignment of fitness interests, the export of fitness due to interdependence for survival and reproduction, and adaptive functional organization. We consider how these concepts apply to various putative individual organisms, review the costs and benefits of intraorganismal genetic heterogeneity, and demonstrate that high relatedness is neither necessary nor sufficient for individuality. In the second chapter, we model the benefits and costs of genetic mosaicism for a long-lived tree in coevolution with a short-lived pest. We demonstrate benefits of mosaicism for trees at both the individual and population levels when somatic mutation introduces new defenses. In the third chapter, we develop a game theoretic model of the decision to reject or fuse with a potential partner in a colonial ascidian, based on weighing costs and benefits of fusion. We find that once fused, the interactions between cell lineages are cooperative in the soma, but competitive in the germline.
Examining judicial divisiveness on the U.S. Supreme Court [electronic resource]
Keywords: Political Science

This dissertation explores the impact of judicial divisiveness in Supreme Court decision-making, as well as the factors that influence divisiveness and consensus on the Court, paying special attention to how modern chief justices compare in this regard. This exploration is accomplished via three separate research questions: First: Why should we care about judicial divisiveness on the Supreme Court; what are the long-term implications for unanimous or divided decisions, if any? Second: How does Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. fare relative to his modern-day predecessors; under his tenure are there more or less 5 to 4 decisions; are there more or less unanimous decisions? Third, what factors do or do not impact consensus on the Supreme Court? All in all, the findings outlined in this dissertation provide a theoretical underpinning to current and developing research in judicial behavior and confirm and debunk popular, but heretofore empirically unexamined, folklore about how the Supreme Court operates.
Exciton recombination in the fullerene phase of bulk heterojunction organic solar cells [electronic resource]
Keywords: Applied Physics

Finding alternatives to fossil fuel energy sources is necessary to stem global warming, to provide economic and political independence, and to keep up with increasing energy demand. Because of their low cost, flexibility, and because the material resources needed to make them are abundant, organic polymer solar cells are an attractive alternative to conventional solar technology. Organic solar technology has been developing rapidly; however, with the best power conversion efficiencies at ~8%, much improvement is needed before it can be competitive with established solar technologies. Poly-3-hexylthiophene:[6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (P3HT:PCBM) solar cells are the most studied type of organic solar cell. Nevertheless, their loss mechanisms are still not fully understood. In this work, we study excitonic losses in the PCBM phase of the blend. We develop a way to accurately measure internal quantum efficiencies (IQEs) and use this technique to characterize P3HT:PCBM devices. We observe spectral dependence of the IQE and conclude that a majority of excitons generated in the PCBM are lost to Auger recombination with polarons that are trapped in that phase. We also provide evidence that this process may happen in other materials and may be a critical factor in limiting exciton diffusion in organic semiconductors.
Existence and regularity of branched minimal submanifolds [electronic resource]
Keywords: Mathematics

We consider two-valued solutions to elliptic problems, which arise from the study branched minimal submanifolds. Simon and Wickramasekera constructed examples of two-valued solutions to the Dirichlet problem for the minimal surface equation on the cylinder $\mathcal{C} = \breve{B}_1^2(0) \times \mathbb{R}^{n-2}$ with Holder continuity estimates on the gradient assuming the boundary data satisfies a symmetry condition. However, their method was specific to the minimal surface equation. We generalize Simon and Wickramasekera's result to an existence theorems for a more general class elliptic equations and for a class of elliptic systems with small data. In particular, we extend Simon and Wickramasekera's result to the minimal surface system. Our approach uses techniques for elliptic differential equations such as the Leray-Schauder theory and contraction mapping principle, which have the advantage of applying in more general contexts than codimension 1 minimal surfaces. We also show that for two-valued solutions to elliptic equations with real analytic data, the branch set of their graphs are real analytic $(n-2)$-dimensional submanifolds. This is a consequence of using the Schauder estimate for two-valued functions and a technique involving majorants due to Friedman to inductively get estimates on the derivatives of the two-valued solutions.
Expanding the numerical central conceptual structure [electronic resource] : first graders' understanding of integers
Keywords: Education.

In working with integers, students have difficulties that may extend into middle school and even adulthood. However, even young children can display insights into negative numbers well before receiving formal instruction. Using a pre-test, instruction, post-test design, this study explores how 61 first graders reason about negative number properties and operations and how their understanding changes depending on the instruction they receive. Results of the study indicate that children build on their existing whole number understanding to develop a central conceptual structure for integers. Furthermore, the process by which they extend their numerical central conceptual structure differs among students; their initial schemas, together with the form of the integer instruction, influence how they reason about and solve integer addition and subtraction problems. These results highlight the need to revisit the placement, duration, and content of integer instruction in curricula.