VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Mobility, space and power in the making of Burma's borders, c.1881-1960
Keywords: Zomia
Myanmar
History
Borders
Burma
China
Thailand

This thesis investigates the shifting ideas, definitions and negotiations around the borders between Burma, China and Siam (Thailand) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Extending the work of scholars of ‘Zomia studies’ and recent advances in borderlands historiography, it uses extensive archival research in Burma, Thailand, the US and the UK to examine the changing relations between borderland dwellers, empires and nation-states in Southeast Asia. In doing so it seeks to contribute to wider debates over the nature of nation-state-making, sovereignty and citizenship at the edges of states.
The following chapters make three main claims. The first is that contests for territory between diverse centres of power in the borderlands in the late nineteenth century show that border-making in ‘Zomia’ was a multi-directional rather than state-centred process. This thesis questions the apocryphal narrative of the ‘anti-state’ Wa and the ahistoric, state-escaping Lahu, by showing the varied territorial strategies of different groups of actors vying for control of the borderlands. The second claim is that the transnational mobility of people and things was central to border-making in the region. Smugglers who traded opium across borders in order to benefit from differences in colonial tax regimes paradoxically made international boundaries more rather than less relevant. Likewise peregrinations of preachers, converts and foreign missionaries in the early twentieth century caused external states to try to regulate the movement of people, thereby making the borders real. Thirdly, the thesis examines how people’s ideas of borders shifted in the polarising world of the early Cold War. Borders meant different things to different groups, becoming nationalist symbols or zones of uncertain sovereignty. At the margins, borderland peoples’ alternative spatial imaginings and political formations continued to challenge central states’ certainties of ‘geo-bodies’ and ‘imagined communities’.
Culture, politics and form in the long nineteen sixties: reappraising the British experimental novel
Keywords: post-war British literature
experimental novel
late nodernism

The critical field surrounding mid to late twentieth-century British fiction is undergoing significant revision and expansion. Contesting long-held presuppositions that render postwar writing as secondary or transitional within the wider literary-historical narrative, recent scholarship has uncovered a rich variety of responses to the challenging legacies of literary modernism and a rapidly changing socio-cultural sphere.
Building on this momentum, this thesis considers the British experimental novel of the long nineteen sixties (c.1858-c.1974), elucidating the underexplored, and sometimes unexpected points of contact between experimental fiction and its wider historical, cultural and socio-political contexts. While recent accounts have done much to reinstate postwar experimentalism within the field, the tendency remains to describe a somewhat deracinated and anomalous British avant-garde, and the often-shared conceptual territory explored by writers across the postwar aesthetic ‘divide’ remains obscure.
Against interpretations that stress its oppositionality, this study advances a more complex picture of the experimental novel’s orientation to the dominant literary, intellectual and political cultures of its time. Considering works by B.S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin and J.G. Ballard, this thesis reads these authors’ formal innovations through and against the socio-cultural transformations of postwar Britain. Specifically, it advances an understanding of their novels as formal mediations of the conflicting discourses of the era, from the antagonisms engendered by prevalent conceptions of class, masculinity, individual and society; the formulations of race, culture and nationhood that emerged in the wake of imperial collapse; the ambiguously interwoven freedoms and proscriptions of the ‘permissive society’; and the strained interrelation between the aesthetic and ethical imperatives of postwar urban development.
Graphical calculi and their conjecture synthesis
Keywords: conjecture synthesis
quantum computing
graphical calculi

Categorical Quantum Mechanics, and graphical calculi in particular, has proven to be an intuitive and powerful way to reason about quantum computing. This work continues the exploration of graphical calculi, inside and outside of the quantum computing setting, by investigating the algebraic structures with which we label diagrams. The initial aim for this was Conjecture Synthesis; the algorithmic process of creating theorems. To this process we introduce a generalisation step, which itself requires the ability to infer and then verify parameterised families of theorems. This thesis introduces such inference and verification frameworks, in doing so forging novel links between graphical calculi and fields such as Algebraic Geometry and Galois Theory. These frameworks inspired further research into the design of graphical calculi, and we introduce two important new calculi here. First is the calculus RING, which is initial among ring-based qubit graphical calculi, and in turn inspired the introduction and classification of phase homomorphism pairs also presented here. The second is the calculus ZQ, an edge-decorated calculus which naturally expresses arbitrary qubit rotations, eliminating the need for non-linear rules such as (EU) of ZX. It is expected that these results will be of use to those creating optimisation schemes and intermediate representations for quantum computing, to those creating new graphical calculi, and for those performing conjecture synthesis.
C-reactive protein testing to discriminate bacterial from viral pathogens among febrile patients in Southeast Asia and its impact on antibiotic prescribing in primary care
Keywords: C-reactive protein
Antimicrobial resistance
Fever
Causes of fever
Primary care
Antibiotic prescription
sub-Saharan Africa
Southeast Asia

In an era marked by the worldwide decline of malaria, fever remains the most frequent reason for seeking health care in the tropics. Non-malarial pathogens are mainly studied among hospitalised patients, while evidence in primary care is scarce. In addition to the limited evidence on the local epidemiology, prescribers routinely face difficulty in identifying patients who really need an antibiotic. This translates into high antibiotic prescription, fuelling the worldwide spread of antimicrobial resistance. C-reactive protein (CRP) is one of the most studied host-response biomarkers for guiding the management of acutely febrile patients, although evidence mainly originates from hospitals in high-income countries, implying that findings may not be applicable in primary care in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs). My thesis aims to explore the bacteria and viruses driving acute fever in primary care in Southeast Asia, as well as the potential utility of CRP in identifying patients who need an antibiotic. To this end, we designed an individually randomised controlled trial of CRP-guided treatment in all febrile children and adults, ‘the CRP Study’. We also collected blood and respiratory specimens to ascertain the causes of fever in these patients. We found a significant antibiotic reduction of 7.8 percentage-points using CRP at a 40 mg/L threshold compared to routine practice, without differences in clinical outcome. Routine prescription levels were lower than prior to study implementation, suggesting that future studies should adopt a cluster rather than individual randomised design. Influenza virus type A, dengue virus and respiratory syncytial virus were the key pathogens among our primary care patients, although ascertaining causality was challenging due to lack of acontrol group, especially in nasopharyngeal swabs. Most bacterial infections showed low inflammatory levels and recovered without antibiotics, questioning the interpretation of microbiological findings among non-severe patients. CRP performance in distinguishing bacterial from viral pathogens was limited, suggesting that CRP may rather discriminate self-limiting from serious infections. We also evaluated the performance of CRP in a cohort of febrile patients in Tanzania. Here CRP showed a high sensitivity for detecting bacterial bloodstream infection, indicating that prospective evaluations on its effect on antibiotic prescriptions could be envisaged. The detection of bacterial zoonotic pathogens was of lower accuracy, warranting further evaluations for various levels of healthcare settings and age categories.
Empirical essays on the economics of healthcare and education
Keywords: Conflict
Incentives
Education
Health insurance
Health

This thesis consists of two chapters on healthcare and one chapter on education. Scholars and policy-makers have long recognised that health and education are important components of human capital, which in turn affect individual welfare and economic growth. This thesis aim to enhance our understanding of the drivers of healthcare quality, health outcomes, and educational performance.
The first two chapters focus on supply- and demand-side factors that affect healthcare quality and outcomes. In Chapter 1, I explore the impacts of a pay-for-performance scheme that creates asymmetric incentives for hospitals to provide quality care cross different patient groups. I find that these incentives improve outcomes for targeted patients and have positive spillover effects on patients for whom hospitals are not explicitly incentivised to improve quality, suggesting that there are complementarities in quality provision within hospitals. These results suggest that asymmetric incentives across groups need not disadvantage the group with "low-powered" incentives.
In Chapter 2, I explore the impacts of health insurance on hospital readmissions among heart attack patients, focusing on demand-side responses to changes in insurance characteristics. Using the age-65 eligibility threshold for Medicare as a source of variation in insurance coverage, I estimate discontinuities in 30 day readmissions and treatment intensity. Among men, there is evidence that eligibility for Medicare insurance increases 30-day readmission rates and that treatment intensity is smooth across the age threshold. These findings suggest that in addition to provider-side factors, the focus of the existing literature, patient side factors also matter for post-discharge outcomes.
In Chapter 3, co-authored with Sami Miaari, we examine the impact of conflict-related mobility restrictions on educational outcomes in the West Bank between 2000 to 2006 during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A prominent feature of this conflict is the system of mobility restrictions enforced through various physical barriers such as checkpoints. We find strong evidence that mobility restrictions in the form of checkpoints have adverse impacts on educational performance. There is evidence that three mechanisms could explain this effect: students lose time when crossing checkpoints on journeys to school, students’ psychological wellbeing is negatively impacted by exposure to conflict, and physical resources at schools are negatively affected by mobility restrictions.
Grandeur forever? : the French exceptionalist tradition and Europe, 1946-2007
Keywords: federation
exceptionalism
exceptionalist
France
European

By the end of the Second World War, France had lost the unique characteristics of a global great power, that of the “means and willingness to make its conceptions and interest prevail sustainably, in an independent fashion, in numerous domains and over any other power.” Domestically, the country was losing its historical military dominance, demographic ascendancy, and economic prosperity, and was experiencing great political instability.’ Abroad, France was losing its hold onto its worldwide empire, witnessing the birth of new nation-states and the gradual domination of the international system of states by two super-powers. The country was losing the material and ideational features which had once given it a central position in international politics. This reality was recognised by many abroad, as well as domestically.” However, despite their recognition of the country’s geopolitical decline, French political leaders continued, immediately after the Second World War, to perceive the country as a historically “exceptional” nation-state. As the post-war historians René Girault and André Siegfried have observed, they continued to feel that France “possessed a certain intellectual radiance [...]}—[and still had] a lesson to teach the world’.”” As the mainstream academic literature draws the attention to, out of the entire political class, one man, Charles de Gaulle, would be the incarnation of this sustained belief. Not only would he “passionately” voice this, but he would support a proactive foreign policy designed to reassert France on the world political stage.’
… continued in chapter 1 of thesis
Cypriot migration and settlement in Britain
Keywords: immigration
emigration
migration
Cypriots
settlement
Cypriot
Britain

This is a social scientific study of the extent, character and causes of Cypriot migration and settlement in Britain between the years 1945 and 1966. It is based largely on published sources, mainly statistical. Some 75,000 Cypriots, mostly young adults, emigrated from Cyprus to Britain during the period - numbers increasing up to around 1960, and then declining sharply. A variety of circumstances affecting the movement are considered, the most important of which are found to be economic conditions in Britain and Cyprus. Cypriot settlement in Britain amounted in all to more than 100,000 persons in 1966, and was highly concentrated in London. The demographic and economic characteristics of London Cypriots are analysed in detail, and the settlers are found to have developed a thriving and remarkably self-sufficient economic base for community life as an ethnic minority in modern Britain. While their migration has been roughly coincident with that of recent 'coloured' immigrants to Britain from other Commonwealth countries, the character of Cypriot settlement has more in common with that of Jewish immigrants to Britain over half a century previously.
Science aspirations of urban Latino students: A study in East Los Angeles, California
Keywords: Latino youth
intersectionality
ethnicity
immigration generation
science attitudes
gender
achievement gaps
science aspirations
equity

Latinos are now the largest racial and ethnic minority group in the United States. However, despite the size of the population, Latinos have historically been underrepresented in the sciences. While interventions have been implemented across the U.S. in order to raise aspirations towards a future in the sciences, the proportion of Latino youth choosing to enter the science pipeline remains low. This suggests that intervention programs designed generally might not take into account important factors influencing Latino science aspirations specifically. This study systematically investigated factors that impact the science aspirations of U.S. Latinos in secondary school (ages 11 to 14), filling a gap in knowledge and addressing a critical section of the ‘science pipeline’ from middle school to high school. Survey data was collected from a sample of 539 6th grade science and 428 9th grade science students attending six public middle schools and five public high schools in East Los Angeles, California. More than nine in ten of the students were Latino, reflecting the demographic composition of the neighbourhood schools. This thesis details science aspirations among this group of students, analysing variation according to gender, home language use, immigration generation, and socioeconomic status. Predictors of science aspirations included attitudinal constructs generated from survey data by principal components analyses. The results of hierarchical multivariate regression analyses suggest that most of these students were detached from science, their science aspirations strongly influenced by family, school experiences, and neighbourhood conditions. Comparisons of results show significant differences in science aspirations by age and gender: the 6th grade students held significantly higher science aspirations than the 9th grade students; 9th grade girls held the lowest science aspirations. Post analysis teacher interviews and an extended 6th grade sample provide valuable context for the results of the survey analyses. The results and findings are discussed in relation to sociocultural theories which stress the structuring effect of U.S. society on aspirations. The main contribution to knowledge of this study was to establish a detailed understanding of the influences on the science aspirations and science-related attitudes of urban Latino youth, based on empirical data from a large and representative East Los Angeles sample.
The effect of exposure to corruption information on specific and diffuse political trust: evidence from a survey experiment
Keywords: socialisation
political trust
corruption
evaluation

How does the disclosure of factual information about corruption affect different dimensions of political trust? Existing literature suggests that exposure to corruption will have a strong negative effect on people’s reported levels of political trust. However, little empirical work has been produced to identify whether that effect is driven by a decrease in the individual’s trust in particular political agents and institutions or by a drop in the confidence they express with regard to the principles of the political regime as a whole. This thesis is the first to address this research question from an experimental angle. I employ a vignette-based survey experiment, based on original data collected from an online survey conducted in March 2020, through which I seek to measure the extent to which revealing information about corruption deteriorates various dimensions of political trust. I further analyze how political trust judgments change when individuals are confronted to different types of corruption, namely personalized or institutionalized. I find that when corruption revelations do not provide sufficient information to effectively attribute blame to particular political objects, specific political trust and trust in the principles of democracy deteriorate the most strongly, while trust in the overarching institutions of the state remains intact. This effect is amplified when the vignettes identify bribery as the most common form of corruption, which I theorize is the result of blame being primarily attributed to political agents. When the vignettes identify lobbying as the most common form of corruption, however, trust in the overarching institutions of the state suffers a meaningful decrease as well, which I argue occurs because blame attribution is no longer exclusively personal but indicates the existence of a systemic or procedural flaw. Given the lack of inter-temporal outcome measurement, I suggest that these results should be interpreted with caution and perhaps complemented with further longitudinal analysis.
Can Bernanke save QE? Bond supply shocks in a DSGE model with a Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist style financial accelerator mechanism
Keywords: Large Scale Asset Purchase Program
Financial Frictions
Quantitative Easing
DSGE

This thesis inserts a household preference over bond maturities into a costly state verification financial accelerator model based on Christiano, Motto, and Rostagno’s 2014 AER paper . It is thus building both on the branch of the financial frictions literature that originated with Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist’s 1999 paper, and more recent post-crisis attempts to study the macroeconomic affects of quantitative easing programs within the DSGE framework. It uses a sufficiently large ‘risk shock’ a la Christiano et al. (2014) to introduce a crisis. And then introduces a lagged shock to the outstanding quantity of long term bonds and lagged monetary policy shocks calibrated to match the first round of the Federal Reserve’s Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAPs) and accompanying constraints on the short rate. The results of this simulation show that in the model QE first reduces investment, which then later amplifies the post-crisis stock market boom.
Three papers on macroeconomics with financial frictions
Keywords: Mortgage Credit
Shadow Banks
DSGE
Non-Banks
House Prices
Quantitative Easing
Optimal Policy
Securitization
Financial Frictions
Macroprudential Policy

Chapter 1: Financial frictions amplify the portfolio balance eﬀect of QE. A costly state veriﬁcation friction increases output growth by between 0.13 - 0.41 percentage points and increases inﬂation between 6 - 18 basis points more than the model without the friction. I ﬁnd that overall that the Federal Reserve’s second round of Large-Scale Asset Purchases (LSAPII) boosts output between 0.51% - 1.62%, which is the equivalent of a 83 - 278 basis point cut in the Federal Funds rate. Investors who arbitrage between long term government debt and corporate debt create a Portfolio Balance Channel in that the eﬀects of QE spill over to the overall cost of corporate borrowing. This long term maturity preference of investors increases output growth by between 0.4 and 1.27% points, and inﬂation between 20 and 64 annualized basis points more than the model without this channel.
Chapter 2: From 2000-2006 US house prices and mortgage credit grew substantially. Simultaneously, the relative cost of mortgage credit fell – particularly for privately securitized mortgages – suggesting the importance of credit supply factors. This chapter explores two candidate (credit supply) shocks: an increase in the inﬂow of global savings into the US, and innovations in the securitization of mortgage credit. I model a two-layered mortgage market. This generates a novel balance sheet effect: changes in aggregate mortgage credit quantity are linked to changes in mortgage spreads via the interaction of ﬁnancially constrained commercial banks and mortgage securitizers. Innovation in securitization matches mortgage credit market dynamics by directly relaxing the securitizers’ ﬁnancial constraint. Conversely, the inﬂow of global savings leads to a counter-factual increase of mortgage spreads through the balance sheet eﬀect.
Chapter 3: In this chapter I show that the existence of unregulated ﬁnancial institutions (“shadow banks”) generates overborrowing (relative to the socially optimal level) in competitive equilibrium. This is because borrowers fail to internalize that an additional unit of borrowing, when the ﬁnancial sector is well functioning, has adverse eﬀects on the credit conditions they will face if a crisis arises. The social planner therefore has a motive to intervene to reduce borrowing in good times so as to limit the severity of a crisis. The discretionary planner’s optimal allocation can be decentralized either using borrower based instruments or via regulation of ﬁnancial intermediaries. The optimal regulation of commercial banks is pro-cyclical.