VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
How Skin Color, Class Status, and Gender Shape Labor Market Outcomes in Brazil

In this dissertation, I examine how skin color, class status, and gender shape labor market outcomes in Brazil. In spite of overwhelming evidence that racial inequality pervades almost every aspect of Brazilian life, there is still much disagreement among researchers and policy-makers as to the root causes of this form of inequality. According to one school of thought, racial inequality in Brazil is not the product of active contemporary discrimination, but related to the legacies of slavery as well as class-based inequalities, such as differential access to education. Others, however, argue that in spite of class-based factors, skin color has an independent effect on shaping racial inequalities. This dissertation, adjudicates between these competing explanations. Moreover, I examine whether perceived class status moderates the effects of skin color in shaping labor market outcomes. However, I take it two steps further. First, I test for the possibility that the effect of race is moderated by gender. Second, I test the validity of the “mulatto-escape hatch” hypothesis, which predicts that lighter skinned Afro-descendents (browns) suffer less discrimination than their darker skinned counterparts (blacks)./nIn this dissertation, I use a field-experiment to adjudicate between these competing theoretical perspectives and related contingencies. Whereas existing research on racial inequality in Brazil relies on indirect methods to estimate racial discrimination (e.g. “wage regression” analysis), I deploy a field experimental methodology to directly test for discrimination. After identifying job vacancies in newspapers, I sent 1,200 fictitious resumes to employers of entry-level jobs in two major metropolitan areas in Brazil: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. I signaled the skin color of job candidates through photographs attached on resumes, and class status through class-specific first and last names. There were several important findings from the field experiment. First, I found that skin color does shape labor market outcomes, but it is moderated by class status. Second, I found that the effect of skin color is also gendered. While skin color did not affect the likelihood of receiving a callback among men, it did so among women, in particular women with “poor” class status and with dark skin. Moreover, I found that the “mulatto escape hatch” hypothesis is also contingent on the intersection of skin color, class status, and gender as well as labor market contexts. The implications of these findings for the literature on racial inequality in Brazil are considered.

Advisor: Smith, Sandra S
Glimpsing the Divine : Prophets in Sixteenth Century French Literature

This project looks at literary representations of prophets from Rabelais to Montaigne. It discusses the centrality of the prophet to the construction of literary texts as well as the material conditions in which these modes of representation were developed. I analyze literature’s appropriation of Hebrew and Classical sources to establish its practices as both independent and politically relevant to the centralizing French monarchy. I propose that prophets are important to the construction of literary devices such as polyphonic discourse, the lyric subject, internal space, and first-person prose narration. The writers discussed in this project rely on the prophet to position their texts on the edge of larger socio-political and religious debates in order to provide a perceptive, critical voice. By participating in a language of enchantment, these writers weave between social and religious conceptualizations of prophets to propose new, specifically literary, roles for prophets. I look at François Rabelais’ prophetic genres – the almanac and the prognostication – in relation to his Tiers livre to discuss prophecy as a type of advice. I then turn to the work of the Pléiade coterie, beginning with Pierre de Ronsard, to argue for the centrality of the prophet to the formation of the lyric subject. The second Pléiade member that I discuss, Robert Garnier, puts prophets on the stage to interrupt the temporality of the dramatic action and direct the audience’s gaze toward the king as the embodiment of the divine on earth. I conclude with a reading of one of Montaigne’s essays in relation to contemporary descriptions of religious ceremonies as haunted houses. This allows me to pinpoint the formal literary constructions that arise in sixteenth century approaches to the representation of prophets.

Advisor: Hampton, Timothy
Renaissance Heraldry

Heraldry is a well-defined and, almost by definition, narrow subject; a “feudal language,” with codified rules, attributes, and a history that has been told many times. Originating in medieval Europe around the invention of full-body armor, the culture of jousting and tournaments, notions of heredity, strong corporate institutions, and the practice of genealogy, it was common throughout the so-called ancien régime. Its fortunes are widely thought to have declined in the Italian Renaissance because of its incompatibility with some of the very features that have characterized the Renaissance as a distinctive cultural configuration and revolution, including the rise of the humanism, the emergence of the individual, the emancipation of the artist, and the return to classical antiquity./nRenaissance Heraldry calls these theses into question with evidence of the vitality of heraldic forms in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy; and with evidence that heraldry as we know it today was a construction of certain strands of Renaissance culture. This was tied to the construction of the very concept of the Middle Ages. Our point of entry into the subject is a popular fifteenth-century poet, who has been famously neglected in Italian literary history with respect to the scope of his accomplishments: Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441ca. - 1495). We approach the subject also from one of the off-center centers of the peninsula’s pre-modern political geography, where Boiardo was born and where he operated: the Este states, with their capital at Ferrara, and their centuries-long tradition of “feudal” rule under a single dynasty./nSpecifically, Boiardo’s romance epic, the Inamoramento de Orlando (1482/3, 1495), and the history of its Renaissance reception are used as occasions here to investigate the competing discourses that circulated around a whole gamut of images relating to identity, property, authority, and the law, both in the Este states and elsewhere on the peninsula. The words these images were called by, the attributes they were said to possess, their histories, meanings, and the protocols governing their use, were actively questioned and contested. The technologies that eventually became known as philology and antiquarianism shaped the answers, and the means of arriving at them, that we are most familiar with today; our “grammars of signs,” as I call them. However, the Este dynasty nourished a humanism that brought different resources to the task of organizing the signs inherited from the past. This dissertation is invested in studying these resources, and in bringing them to light as essential contributions to the humanist tradition in the broadest sense.

Advisor: Ascoli, Albert R
Superconducting Circuits for Quantum Metrology with Nonclassical Light

The laws of quantum mechanics imply the existence of an intrinsic uncertainty, or noise, in the electromagnetic field. These noise fluctuations are central to many processes in atomic physics and quantum optics, including spontaneous emission of radiation by an atomic system, backaction on an atomic system during non-demolition measurement by probe light, and intrinsic bounds on the noise performance of an ideal amplifier. While quantum noise cannot be eliminated, the noise of one observable quantity may be reduced provided that of the conjugate observable is increased in accord with the relevant Heisenberg uncertainty relation; this process is known as squeezing./nRecently, superconducting circuits have emerged as a powerful platform for studying the interaction of squeezed light and matter, leveraging the low-dimensionality of the circuit environment to efficiently couple atomic systems to squeezed radiation. Beyond enabling the verification of canonical predictions of quantum optics, these experiments explore the potential utility of squeezing for the state readout of quantum bits, or qubits, used for quantum information processing./nIn this thesis, we present three experiments probing the interaction of a superconducting qubit with squeezed radiation. First, we observe how the fluorescence spectra emitted by a two-level atomic system are modified by squeezing of a resonant drive. The subnatural linewidths of the resulting spectra provide the first successful verification in any system of predictions from nearly three decades prior, and provide a tool for characterization of microwave squeezed states. Second, we combine injected squeezed noise with a stroboscopic measurement scheme to demonstrate the first improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio of qubit state readout due to input squeezing. This study includes a characterization of the effect of squeezing on measurement backaction, exhibiting the first use of squeezing to slow measurement-induced dephasing. Finally, we develop a circuit incorporating the qubit inside of a squeezed-microwave source and extensively study the measurement physics of this hybrid system. This device enables the transfer of quantum information from the qubit at $\sim$30 milliKelvin to a room temperature detector with a marked increase in steady-state efficiency.

Advisor: Siddiqi, Irfan
The Affective Society: Loneliness and Community in Post-war Britain

My dissertation is about loneliness as a social problem in Britain after the Second World War. I analyze four case studies in which various experts and care-taking professionals who identified loneliness as a problem among the populations with which they worked. Studying the period from 1945 to 1985, I show that the problem of loneliness challenged the social imaginary of the postwar settlement, in particular the sense of national community that underwrote British welfare state. I demonstrate that from this anxiety that modern Britons were lonely, new therapeutic cultures emerged in the fields of social work, psychiatry, and mental healthcare that emphasized the individual's capacity to create social bonds within a small group. These attempts to engineer community among strangers and neighbors undermined the very expertise that carried out the task./nHistorians often attribute the rightward shift in British politics in the 1970s and 1980s to economic and political thought that enshrined a transcendent and market-oriented individual independent from state assistance. My research into the cultural and social dynamics of loneliness shows that rather than hyper-individualism, experts in social work and psychotherapy imposed a different ideal: small peer groups that could serve the function of self-help, and individuals who could forge meaningful relationships with others based on a culture of sharing. To show this trajectory, away from a regime of expertise and toward independent small groups, I use four case studies. The first is social workers in public housing in the 1950s and 1960s; second is the Group Analytic Society founded by Samuel Foulkes, a pioneer in group psychotherapy; third is the policy of community care and the growth of patients' rights; and finally I study Alcoholics Anonymous UK and support groups./nThis project is based on original archival research conducted in the United Kingdom. For papers related to social work in British public housing, I visited the London Council of Social Service archives at the London Metropolitan Archives. The papers of the Group Analytic Society, Samuel Foulkes, and Mind were all found at the Wellcome Collection in London. The archives of Alcoholics Anonymous UK were located at the organization's headquarters in York, UK; and are in the process of being moved to the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York. I also draw on published primary sources put out by the above organizations and related entities.

Advisor: Vernon, James
Essays on Financial Markets

This dissertation consists of three chapters that concern financial markets. The first chapter analyzes how financial frictions impact local government infrastructure spending. The US is frequently criticized for its recent poor spending and upkeep in local infrastructure, such as schools, utilities, and roads. I provide evidence that financial frictions in municipal bond markets exacerbate infrastructure underfunding. To demonstrate this, I exploit the differential exposure to government-rescued monoline bond insurers during the financial crisis as a quasi-experiment that affected local government access to municipal bond markets. I show that local governments with more exposure to a government-rescued monoline insurer FSA and its purchaser Assured Guaranty had better borrowing outcomes and spending in capital investments, relative to others that had exposure to non-rescued insurers. Event-study coefficients and difference-in-difference regression estimates show that issuers in the treatment group issue more bonds in the years after 2008, and also spend more on capital investments. The effect is significant for categories of public goods for which federal resources are scarce -- specifically in education, housing development, and some general utilities./nThe second chapter analyzes the effect of passive indexing on informed trading. I develop a model of segmented trade that considers the effect of comovement on asset pricing, efficiency, and incentives to acquire information. The main contribution is to show that traders who participate via passive indexes have characteristics of both informed and uninformed traders. They are like uninformed traders as they diversify away all idiosyncratic risk, and so do not seek costly information, but they are alike informed traders as their presence causes any informed trading to be more quickly disseminated into prices. I provide some empirical justification for this model using a regression-discontinuity design around Russell 2000 index inclusions with institutional holding data./n/nThe third chapter explores the asset pricing properties of cryptocurrencies, an emerging type of digital transaction that utilizes decentralized, cryptographic methods to verify ownership. This chapter is co-authored with my dissertation chair Professor Christine Parlour. We provide summary statistics on cryptocurrency return properties and measures of common variation for over 200 digital coins. Secondly, we provide investment characteristics of initial coin offerings (ICOs), a method of crowdfunding that utilizes cryptocurrencies as legal tender. We reconcile these statistics with traditional finance theories and develop a set of empirical facts for this new asset class.

Advisor: Parlour, Christine
Ultra-Low Power Inductively-Coupled Wireless Transcranial Links

Recent advancement in brain-machine-interface (BMI) technology has made tremendous impact on both clinical treatment and neuroscience research. It enables neural scientists to record and study signals fired by an individual neuron. To decode simple actions such as open and close a hand or rudimentary movements of an arm, signals from close to a hundred neurons must be examined [Hochberg06]. The large amount of collected neural data must be transmitted out of the skull to an external processer to translate into action or to be analyzed. To minimize the risk of infection to the patients, wireless data transmission is the preferred option. A next-generation 1024-channel implanted neural recorder that uses 20KS/s 8b Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) to capture neural signals can generate up to 164Mb/s data, which imposes a stringent requirement on the communication throughput of the implanted wireless transmitter (TX). In addition, TX power consumption must be kept as low as possible for longer battery life or safe wireless power delivery, while the power consumption of the external receiver (RX) chip outside the skull can be relaxed. The current state-of-the-art implantable transmitters that use backscattering, pulse harmonic modulation (PHM), or ultra-wide-band (UWB) communication suffer either from limited throughput or low TX energy efficiency. Although other techniques such as ultrasound have the potential to achieve ultra-low power, they suffer from low data-rate (tens to hundreds of Kb/s) and severe loss through the skull bone. To overcome these issues, inductive coupling technique is adopted in this work. The proposed transmitter only consists of an inductor driver, which significantly simplifies the TX architecture and lowers power. Inter-symbol-interference (ISI) caused by the ringing of the coupled inductors is alleviated by series de-Q resistors. To further reduce power, the entire TX uses a single 0.5V supply. To generate low jitter TX clock under such low supply and stringent power requirement, injection locked phase-locked loop (PLL) with fully-digital background frequency tracking and spur suppression is utilized. To demonstrate the proposed architecture, a 200Mb/s transceiver is implemented in 65nm CMOS process. The 10mmX10mm coupled inductors are fabricated on standard 2-layer FR-4 PCBs, on which the chips are directly bonded. The prototype achieves 5e-11 bit-error-rate (BER) over 11mm-thick scalp and skull bone of an 8-week primordial piglet and less than 1e-12 BER over 11mm air gap. The TX PLL rms jitter is 59ps. Including PLL, the entire TX chip consumes 300uW, achieving 1.5pJ/b energy efficiency. The power consumption of the external RX chip is 37.2mW. To the author’s best knowledge, the prototype achieves the highest data-rate and lowest BER among all cm-range wireless transceivers for biomedical implant applications.

Advisor: Rabaey, Jan M
Engineering CRISPR-Cas9 Systems to Expand Functionality

CRISPR-Cas9 is a RNA-protein complex from adaptive bacterial immune systems that has been repurposed to enable convenient and specific alteration of any genome via the introduction of a double-strand DNA break. By its complementarity to a corresponding DNA sequence, the guide RNA directs the Cas9 protein, a DNA endonuclease, to a target site where it binds to and cleaves the DNA. In this dissertation, the Cas9 ortholog of Streptococcus pyogenes was studied. First, detailed structural insights and knowledge about the biochemical requirements of Cas9-mediated cleavage were exploited to generate a method to efficiently bind a single-stranded RNA target rather than double-stranded DNA. Thus, Cas9 can be used as an RNA-guided RNA-binding protein. Second, methods were devised and implemented to improve and expand the function of Cas9 as an RNA-guided DNA endonuclease, especially means to control its activity spatially and temporally. Systematic unbiased and comprehensive exploration of sites within Cas9 that can tolerate insertions of various protein functionalities, yet retain overall Cas9 activity, had not been undertaken. To engineer more complex and dynamic control over Cas9 action, such as allosteric regulation and location-sensitive molecular scaffolding, I developed a ratiometric analysis protocol that is able to identify one functional Cas9 protein out of tens of millions, which permitted the screening of large libraries of engineered Cas9 proteins. These methods were used to successfully modify Cas9 via the insertion of various protein-protein and protein-ligand binding domains that confer new functionalities. Three distinct types of protein domains were inserted into Cas9 with minimal disruption of its core binding and enzymatic functions. In particular, insertions of the ligand-binding domain of a mammalian estrogen receptor generated a Cas9 derivative whose activity is specifically activated upon addition of the synthetic estrogen 4-hydroxy tamoxifen. This particular Cas9 derivative has no detectable background activity in the absence of the hormone analog, thus providing a fine-tuned mechanism to control genome editing and modification with a small molecule. Overall, the methods described in this thesis can be applied to engineer any programmable DNA-binding protein and thereby confer the ability to be activated or deactivated in response to specific molecular signals.

Advisor: Savage, David F.
Doudna, Jennifer A.
2-D Materials: Low Power Electronics and Novel Device Possibilities

2-D Materials: Low Power Electronics and Novel Device Possibilities/nby/nVarun Mishra/nDoctor of Philosophy in Engineering – Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Sayeef Salahuddin, Chair/nSemiconductor modeling assumes a critical role in understanding the physics of nanoscale devices as semi-classical approaches start breaking down for highly scaled devices. In this thesis, a quantum transport simulator is designed within the non-equilibrium Greens function (NEGF) formalism to explore the application of layered materials in low-power electronic and novel spintronic devices./nThe quantum transport simulator is used to calculate the optimal performance of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD) field effect transistors at the ultimately scaled limit of 5 nm gate lengths. MoS2 based transistors are studied in further detail using a rigorous tight binding Hamiltonian in order to include the effects of non-parabolicity of the electronic structure on the transistor performance. Large band gaps and effective masses were shown to result in excellent switching performance with ON/OFF ratios of 10 5 even at 5 nm gate lengths showing potential applicability in low power electronics, while screening effects were found to affect the drive current in few-layer devices. Possibility of a one-dimensional spin channel is also discussed at the junction of a lateral heterostructure of two dimensional TMDs when the system is in non-equilibrium in the absence of any external magnetic field. The one-dimensional spin channel arises out of spin-orbit splitting in conjunction with the in-plane electric field that exists in the heterojunction of two materials with a conduction band offset. A spin polarization of 0.1 % was calculated at the junction of MoS2 /WSe2 , while the effect of effective mass and spin diffusion on the above is discussed. Such one dimensional spin channel could open up the possibility to probe spin dynamics in confined phase spaces while contributing to spintronics applications.

Advisor: Salahuddin, Sayeef