VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays in Macroeconomics and International Economics

This dissertation analyzes the interaction of firm level heterogeneity and selection. This selection can encompass either the survival of firms in the market, or their participation in international trade. In the first part I concentrate on the question of how large the aggregate productivity losses from the misallocation of resources across firms are. If firm exit is endogenous, micro-frictions can induce extensive margin misallocation: inefficient firms continue to survive (Zombies) and efficient firms are forced to exit (Shadows). I develop and estimate a fully specified model with plant-level micro-data to quantify extensive margin misallocation. This method allows me to identify Zombie firms, estimate the efficiency distribution of Shadow firms and calculate aggregate Total Factor Productivity (TFP) gains when Zombies are replaced by Shadows. Estimates for Indonesia show that extensive margin misallocation can increase aggregate TFP losses from micro-distortions by over 40%. Compared to existing estimates aggregate TFP losses from micro-distortions are 50-100% higher./nIn the second part of the dissertation I trace out the implications of a simplified version of the framework I developed in the first part to questions of international trade. The cross-country comparisions in measured micro-distortions suggest that differences in firm heterogeneity could be potentially important to explain aggregate TFP and therefore also trade patterns. I consequently develop a tractable multi-country general equilibrium model of such differences in firm level heterogeneity across countries. I show how the model naturally links measured trade frictions to national firm-efficiency distributions and endogenously generates asymmetries in trade flows in the absence of asymmetric trade frictions. The model is able to generate key stylized facts, specifically the absence of a strong negative relationsship of firm-size dispersions and internal trade shares as predicted by the standard heterogeneous firm trade model with identical efficiency dispersions across countries.

Advisor: Hsieh, Chang-Tai
Gourinchas, Pierre-Olivier
Scenes of Abjection: Power, Sexuality and Caste in Modern Tamil Literature

This dissertation traces the figure of the sexual abject in modern Tamil literature produced between the mid nineteen sixties and the first decade of the twenty first century. Drawing primarily from psychoanalytic scholarship and Western literary criticism, I look at abjection as a structural form of marginality that threatens and reconfigures meaning and subjectivity, thus enabling the possibility of self-remaking. I draw attention to the consistent textual equation between femininity and abjection and note a shift in the representation of the sexual abject in Tamil literature produced from the nineteen sixties onwards that is multiply marginalized along axes of sexuality, caste and religion. For the sexual abject of this period, embracing abjection, I suggest, is the only available means of exercising any agency even at the risk of reinforcing the structural constraints that constitute and limit such agency. I focus on the abject body that now marked low caste and poor, becomes a strategic site of resistance against sexual violence and exploitation.

Advisor: Hart, George
Addressing Disparities in Emergency Communication with the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing: Cultural Competence and Preparedness for First Responders

It is critically important to foster a resilient Deaf and hard-of-hearing (Deaf/HH) population empowered to act in a pre-event phase before and respond during and after critical large-scale public health emergencies. Standard all-hazards emergency preparedness risk & response communication efforts don't always reach people with barriers relating to literacy, language, culture or disability. This is a significant problem given that there is a growing body of evidence of higher risk during disasters for injury, death, property loss for 32 million Deaf/HH Americans and for 90 million Americans with low-literacy skills. It is beneficial to use a participatory, community-directed approach to improve all-hazards preparedness capacity for the Deaf/HH./nThis dissertation is in a three-paper format. Part I, a literature review, systematically examines all-hazards emergency communication access for the Deaf/HH during large-scale disasters with an eye towards maximizing emergency preparedness capacity within the Deaf community. The literature review does not simply examine lessons learned from any access issues that have been documented in previous disasters but also reviews the peer reviewed and gray literature (non-peer-reviewed literature, often non-published reports) to determine the need for interventions or systemic change on a policy-level. By identifying the scope and magnitude of the problem, this literature review is a stepping stone for Parts II and III, which aim to develop best practices for educational outreach and training for first responders./nPart II is a program evaluation utilizing mixed methods of a training program for law enforcement officers at the scene of domestic violence (DV) emergencies involving the Deaf/HH. A program evaluation of cultural competency training for the Deaf/HH has never been published, to my knowledge, despite several available trainings for first responders or medical professionals and students nationally (Appendix 1). Once trainings are developed, standardized and shown to be beneficial, they can be distributed to Deaf/HH audiences and/or first responders, which can sustain longer-term development efforts that might mitigate the impact of future emergencies or improve the quality of life/infrastructure on broader levels./nPart III is a qualitative exploration of barriers, attitudes, perceptions, and knowledge of law enforcement and first responders regarding working with the Deaf/HH in an emergency. Specific abstracts for each Part can be found in the corresponding section./nThe closing section provides a summary of policy and legislative developments on a national level that are informed by Deaf/HH experts in emergency communication; these developments have implications for further research and practice to address disparities in emergency preparedness communication for the Deaf/HH.

Advisor: Deardorff, Julianna
Crowded Subjects: The Crisis of Two Souls in Early Modern England

This dissertation challenges the over-familiar Christian dualism of the corrupt body and the redeemed soul, and completely rethinks the significance of the term "soul" in Renaissance culture. I argue that sixteenth and seventeenth century poets and philosophers uneasily defined the human as possessing two contradictory souls, and that the anxiety provoked by the contradiction of the Aristotelian and Christian souls led to a basic redefinition of the early modern subject. The dissertation begins with an intellectual history describing how 16th century theologians came to realize that the presence of two souls in man, Aristotelian and Christian, represented a major crisis for Christian doctrine. Reading the work of Pietro Pomponazzi, Philipp Melanchthon, and John Woolton, I argue that the paradox of two souls became a problem of political obedience and a rationalization of the Christian subject's passive relation to law. The dissertation then tracks the critical response of prominent English poets, such as William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Davies, who argued that the paradox of two souls could not be understood as a fictional justification of law and political obedience, and that 16th century theologians were telling the wrong fiction to explain the two souls. All of these English poets turned to the resources of poetic language and dramatic plot as the most potent means to understand and resolve the two souls paradox as a basis for a novel Christian poetics of freedom, and not an abject servility to law. In all of these English poets, I identify a sustained work of contesting and redefining the parameters of the word "soul" as the basis of the Christian subject, and a reconfiguration of the two souls paradox into a problem rendered comprehensible by literary narrative and the craft of poetry.

Advisor: Kahn, Victoria
Probabilistic Semantics for Modal Logic

We develop a probabilistic semantics for modal logic, which was introduced in recent years by Dana Scott. This semantics is intimately related to an older, topological semantics for modal logic developed by Tarski in the 1940's. Instead of interpreting modal languages in topological spaces, as Tarski did, we interpret them in the Lebesgue measure algebra, or algebra of measurable subsets of the real interval, [0, 1], modulo sets of measure zero. In the probabilistic semantics, each formula is assigned to some element of the algebra, and acquires a corresponding probability (or measure) value. A formula is satisfied in a model over the algebra if it is assigned to the top element in the algebra---or, equivalently, has probability 1./nThe dissertation focuses on questions of completeness. We show that the propositional modal logic, S4, is sound and complete for the probabilistic semantics (formally, S4 is sound and complete for the Lebesgue measure algebra). We then show that we can extend this semantics to more complex, multi-modal languages. In particular, we prove that the dynamic topological logic, S4C, is sound and complete for the probabilistic semantics (formally, S4C is sound and complete for the Lebesgue measure algebra with O-operators). The connection with Tarski's topological semantics is developed throughout the text, and the first substantive chapter is devoted to a new and simplified proof of Tarski's completeness result via well-known fractal curves./nThis work may be applied in the many formal areas of philosophy that exploit probability theory for philosophical purposes. One interesting application in metaphysics, or mereology, is developed in the introductory chapter. We argue, against orthodoxy, that on a 'gunky' conception of space---a conception of space according to which each region of space has a proper subregion---we can still introduce many of the usual topological notions that we have for ordinary, 'pointy' space.

Advisor: Mancosu, Paolo
Barry, Stroud
FROM COUNTERPUBLICS TO COUNTERSPACES: Livable city advocates' efforts to reshape cities through carfree-streets events

American cities have gone through major transformation as the automobile has become the primary means of transportation for the masses. This change has come with long-lasting implications for the experience of urban life and for the streets. This dissertation analyzes various livable city advocates' efforts to reshape cities, and particularly, to challenge automobiles' dominant influence on urban form. The analysis first focuses on three carfree-streets events--Critical Mass, Park(ing) Day and Sunday Streets--and later, on the recent physical and social transformations in San Francisco, California. The study examines the implications and limits of carfree-streets events on urban social and spatial justice with mixed research methods./nEach carfree-streets event is different and unique, yet each reclaims public space from automobiles and assumes an underlying need to make cities and urban streets more inclusive of multiple users and uses. Thus, the research is situated at the intersection of discussions about right to the city, public sphere, appropriation of urban space, and the right to green and livable cities. Two foundational theoretical concepts help frame the analysis: "counterspaces" (Lefebvre 1991) and "counterpublics" (Fraser 1992). Analysis of the three carfree-streets events details temporary counterspaces created during the events and the multiple reasons that underlie the carfree-streets counterpublics' interest in alternative uses of streets. Analysis of spatial changes details the City's recently developed programs through which the local government's role is reduced to a manager, and the cost and efforts involved in providing improvements to public spaces are significantly outsourced to community groups, private and civic sector./nI argue that such spatial transformations may indicate an extreme case of neoliberalism in which the do-it-yourself attitude is institutionalized. Further, the marginalized position of non-motorists in the context of their limited access to streets, in contrast to the carfree-streets events' organizers/initiators' considerably powerful standing in society, reveals the complexities of spatial justice. Finally, although the events help alleviate the automobile's hegemony in urban space, and make the city more just and inclusive of non-motorists, the ways in which the City provides new public infrastructure might result in social and spatial inequalities in other respects.

Advisor: Cranz, Galen
Lightweight Specifications for Parallel Correctness

With the spread of multicore processors, it is increasingly necessary/nfor programmers to write parallel software. Yet writing correct/nparallel software with explicit multithreading remains a difficult/nundertaking. Though many tools exist to help test, debug, and verify/nparallel programs, such tools are often hindered by a lack of any/nspecification from the programmer of the intended, correct parallel/nbehavior of his or her software./nIn this dissertation, we propose three novel lightweight/nspecifications for the parallelism correctness of multithreaded/nsoftware: semantic determinism, semantic atomicity, and/nnondeterministic sequential specifications for parallelism/ncorrectness. Our determinism specifications enable a programmer to/nspecify that any run of a parallel program on the same input should/ndeterministically produce the same output, despite the/nnondeterministic interleaving of the program's parallel threads of/nexecution. Key to our determinism specifications are our proposed/nbridge predicates -- predicates that compare pairs of program states/nfrom different executions for semantic equivalence. Our atomicity/nspecifications use bridge predicates to generalize traditional/natomicity, enabling a programmer to specify that regions of a parallel/nor concurrent program are, at a high-level, free from harmful/ninterference by other threads. Finally, our nondeterministic/nsequential (NDSeq) specifications enable a programmer to completely/nspecify the parallelism correctness of a multithreaded program with a/nsequential but nondeterministic version of the program and, further,/nenable a programmer to test, debug, and verify functional correctness/nsequentially, on the nondeterministic sequential program./nWe show that our lightweight specifications for parallelism/ncorrectness enable us to much more effectively specify, test, debug,/nand verify the use of parallelism in multithreaded software,/nindependent of complex and fundamentally-sequential functional/ncorrectness. We show that we can easily write determinism, atomicity,/nand nondeterministic sequential (NDSeq) specifications for a number of/nparallel Java benchmarks. We propose novel testing techniques for/nchecking that a program conforms to its determinism, atomicity, or/nnondeterministic sequential specification, and we apply these/ntechniques to find a number of parallelism errors in our benchmarks./nFurther, we propose techniques for automatically inferring a likely/ndeterminism or NDSeq specification for a parallel program, given a/nhandful of representative executions.

Advisor: Sen, Koushik
Racial Distinctions in Middle-Class Motherhood: Ideologies and Practices of African-American Middle-Class Mothers

My dissertation examines how intersections of racial identity, class and gender influence the cultural expectations and decisions of African-American middle-class mothers regarding work, family and parenting. Through this research I challenge three dominant sets of ideologies present in family, work and parenting scholarship. First, I challenge the widespread acceptance of the Intensive Mothering ideology that views mothers as principally responsible for raising their children within a nuclear family context. Second, I challenge the conflict paradigm that assumes a mother's decisions about work and family can be captured in a competing spheres framework. This framework assumes that mothers who allot more time to work have a stronger "work devotion" and those who allot more time to family have a stronger "family devotion." Third, I challenge the assumption that middle-class parents are primarily influenced by their class status when parenting their children and primarily use the concerted cultivation parenting approach. This approach emphasizes encouraging children's logical reasoning, developing their intellectual and physical skills through organized enrichment activities and viewing educational and other institutions in society from an entitlements and service oriented perspective./nUsing sixty in-depth semi-structured interviews of African-American middle-class mothers living in the San Francisco Bay Area I investigate three sets of questions. First, how do these mothers approach family, work and parenting? Second, what explains their distinctive strategies? Third, how does this case of mothers help to illuminate the range of mothering and parenting ideals and practices influencing all mothers' choices and what are the consequences of not conforming to dominant ideals and practices? My findings suggest that the ideologies that dominate family and work life scholarship do not adequately capture the cultural prerogatives of all mothers. Specifically, African-American middle-class mothers are influenced by a different orientation to mothering and parenting that I call the "Integrated Mothering Ideology." This ideology assumes that 1) childcare is a mother-centered, but extended-family and community-supported activity, 2) working outside of the home is a duty of motherhood and 3) mothers consistently consider issues related to racial identity, class and gender when making parenting decisions with the aim towards fostering specific orientations to African-American middle-class identity. Overall my findings demonstrate that middle-class mothers' approaches to managing work and family are influenced by racially situated identities, ideologies and practices that are supported by specific social, economic, cultural and structural circumstances.

Advisor: Ray, Raka
Applications of Out-of-Domain Knowledge in Students' Reasoning about Computer Program State

To meet a growing demand and a projected deficit in the supply of computer professionals (NCWIT, 2009), it is of vital importance to expand students' access to computer science. However, many researchers in the computer science education community unproductively assume that some students lack an innate ability for computer science and therefore cannot be successful learning to program. In contrast, I hypothesize that the degree to which computer science students make productive use of their out-of-domain knowledge can better explain the range of success of novices learning to program. To investigate what non-programming knowledge supports students' success, I conducted and videotaped approximately 40 hours of clinical interviews with 30 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory programming courses. During each interview, a participant talked as they solved programming problems, many of which were multiple-choice problems that were highly correlated with success on an Advanced Placement Computer Science exam. In the analysis of the interviews I focused on students' strengths rather than the typical decision to focus on students' weaknesses. I documented specific competencies of the participants and applied analytic tools from the Knowledge in Pieces theoretical framework (diSessa, 1993) to attempt to understand the source and nature of these competencies. I found that participants appeared to build upon several kinds of out-of-domain knowledge. For example, many students used algebraic substitution techniques when tracing the state of recursive functions. Students appeared to use metaphors and their intuitive knowledge of both iteration and physics to understand infinite loops and base cases. On the level of an individual students' reasoning, a case study analysis illustrated the ways in which a participant integrated her linguistic knowledge of "and" into her reasoning about the computer science command "and." In addition to identifying these specific applications of out-of-domain knowledge, this dissertation applies learning theories that had not previously been applied to computer science education. Through this application I extend the learning theories to the domain of computer science, propose refinements to the theories, and provide insights into participants' reasoning about particular computer science topics.

Advisor: diSessa, Andrea A.
Resolve, Reputation, and War: Cultures of Honor and Leaders' Time-in-Office

Leaders throughout history have been concerned--often obsessed--with how other leaders perceive them. Historians have argued that many wars have been fought for purposes of reputation, honor, status, and prestige. However, there is little systematic study of these phenomena, and specifically of the effects of concern for reputation for resolve on interstate conflict behavior. After precisely defining resolve, and reputation for resolve, this dissertation examines this question by developing a family of formal models of escalation and reputation-engagement. From these models I explicitly deduce four testable implications of variation in concern for reputation for resolve that take selection effects into account and are robust to a variety of assumptions./nTo test these implications I search for research designs where concern for reputation is manipulated in a manner that is reasonably well-understood, and in which large unknown biases are unlikely. I find two such designs. The first, analyzed in collaboration with Devin Caughey, compares U.S. conflict behavior depending on whether the president is from the U.S. South. The U.S. South has a "culture of honor" that places greater importance on an individual's reputation for resolve. Using permutation inference and NPC, a technique new to political science, to provide a joint statistical test of the predictions, we find that conflict behavior under Southern presidents is substantially and significantly different from non-Southern presidents in a manner predicted by my theory. Furthermore, this difference remains significant under a large number of matched comparisons. This result is unlikely to be spurious because of its robustness to conditioning and because of theoretical and empirical inconsistencies in the alternative accounts./nThe second research design compares the conflict behavior of leaders early in their time- in-office with those same leaders later in their time-in-office. Leaders at the start of their tenure, as compared with themselves later in their career, should care more about their reputations because they have less developed reputations and longer time horizons. Each prediction of my theory is examined and finds statistically significant support with relatively large effect sizes. Alternative potential explanations are systematically ruled out through critical tests. In summary, the results from a set of clear tests of the effect of concern for reputation are consistent with the strongest claims made in the literature: concern for reputation seems to be an extremely important cause of war.

Advisor: Weber, Steven