VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Macro, household and individual level explanations for the geographic differences in poverty levels in Indonesia, 2000–2009

Measuring and explaining poverty and its geographic differences in Indonesia is mostly confined to a single measure of poverty and to macro-level explanations. This thesis moves beyond these constraints to investigate regional poverty trends using multiple measures of poverty and to explore household and individual level explanations. The analyses in the thesis are undertaken using data from the SUSENAS core, covering the period 2000–2009.
Different measures of poverty produce different numbers of poor. Some 33 million additional Indonesians were identified as poor using the $1.25 a day poverty measure than the official measure used by the government. The differences between both measures of poverty are, however, driven by poverty trends in the early 2000s, following the devastating impact of the 1997–1998 financial crisis. In the latter part of the 2000s, poverty trends were converging between the two poverty measures, suggesting some degree of reliability of Indonesia’s official poverty measure.
At the macro level, on average, increasing GDP is significantly associated with falling levels of poverty. The association is reduced marginally when the share of the informal workforce is taken into account, but in general the negative relationship remains robust. Regional analyses, however, reveal that GDP has a very small, insignificant negative association with poverty in the poorest region.
At the individual level, education strongly determines poverty, independently of employment status. A substantial share of the primary and lower secondary qualified population is employed in informal work, yet their risk of poverty is substantially lower when compared to those with no formal qualification engaging as informal workers. More importantly, the highest risk of poverty exists among the unemployed who lack a formal education. This finding is highlighted because unemployment is often seen as having little relevance to poverty, since a higher proportion of the unemployed are tertiary educated. The 'penalty' on poverty for those occupying the lower tiers of educational qualification is heavier in less developed regions.
Household level analysis show that the different groups of female-headed households (de facto, widows and divorcees) are less likely to be in poverty than male-headed couple households. After controlling for socioeconomic characteristics and the number of young children within households, however, female-headed divorcee households are found to be marginally poorer than male-headed couple households. Regional level analyses reveal that poverty is significantly higher in female divorcee-led households than in male-headed couple households in all regions, except in the most and least developed ones, where poverty is comparable between both groups.

Keywords: Female headship and poverty
Measuring subnational poverty
Level of education and poverty
Geographic differences in poverty in Indonesia
Informal employment and poverty
Economic growth and poverty
Advisor: Monden, C
Excitation delocalization in porphyrin nanorings

This thesis is concerned with the photophysical properties of porphyrin nanorings. In particular, the impact of symmetry, conformation and structure on electronic delocalization, radiative rate and emission polarization memory loss are investigated and exciton migration is probed on a number of porphyrin nanorings. Ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy techniques are used to study the fluorescence dynamics of these newly synthesized compounds.
First, photophysical implications of lifting the rotational symmetry are investigated using a number of small porphyrin rings specially modified for this purpose. For more severe symmetry distortions, increased optical transitions to the lowest excited state have been observed, which is dipole-forbidden due to symmetry reason. Also, the degeneracy in the allowed first excited state is lifted for broken symmetry, leading to a polarization switching effect.
The effect of conformation on emission depolarization memory loss is studied using a series of similarly sized porphyrin rings with rigid structures exhibiting various degrees of out-of-plane distortion. Excitations can access any segment on the nanoring and this is not affected by the conformation. However, severe out-of-plane distortions lead to lowered emission anisotropy; this conclusion is further supported by molecular dynamics simulation.
Finally, exciton migration within porphyrin ring complex is investigated. Russian doll complex which consists of two concentric porphyrin rings acts as a single emitter, even though spectral features of both ring components are found in the absorption spectrum. Lifetimes and radiative rates of the complex and the individual rings components further confirmed that excitons migrate from the outer 12-ring to the inner 6-ring within 40 ps. A nanotube consisting of two conjugated 6 porphyrin rings linked by dimers acting as staves also exhibits energy migration. Emission anisotropy measurements suggest that excitation is transferred from the staves of the nanotube to the ring plane effectively within 280 fs.

Advisor: Herz, L
Anderson, H
Essays on the determinants of firm productivity and openness, evidence from Tunisia

Economic growth per capita is ultimately driven by private sector growth; specifically, by productivity growth of existing firms and by improvements in allocative efficiency. Therefore, how to make firms more productive is an essential concern in the study of growth and development. This thesis consists of three essays that explore the determinants of firms' productivity using Tunisian firm surveys from 1997 to 2007. First, I evaluate the role of technology distance and exports in explaining productivity growth of manufacturing firms. I find strong evidence of convergence in productivity at the firm-level, both unconditionally and conditionally, whereas there is little evidence of such at the macro-level. While exporters' productivity premium is explained by self-selection, the further a firm lies behind the frontier, the greater the potential for technologies to be transferred through exporting. Second, I test whether internal (create) and external (buy) sources of innovation have different effects on productivity, and whether firms benefit from using both. I find that buying has a positive effect on productivity, whereas creating does not. There is no synergy from using both simultaneously. I consider the possibility that "creating" and "buying" substitute for each other when the effect of innovation requires a minimum investment. The estimation result using the Tobit model supports this assumption. Finally, I investigate how to measure service performance and whether the variation in service firm performance can be explained by foreign ownership. Using two related measures, total factor productivity (TFP) and markup, I demonstrate Tunisian service firm performance across subsectors and over time. I show that foreign-owned firms have higher TFP but lower markups than local firms, as foreign ownership serves as a channel of knowledge transfer and brings more competition into the market, but with large sectoral variations. All chapters are closely linked to each other as they conclude that economic openness, obtained through exporting, outsourcing innovation, and acquiring foreign ownership, is a major driver of productivity and support the predictions of endogenous growth theory.

Advisor: Fu, X
Adam, C
Encoding and detecting properties in finitely presented groups

In this thesis we study several properties of finitely presented groups, through the unifying paradigm of encoding sought-after group properties into presentations and detecting group properties from presentations, in the context of Geometric Group Theory.
A group law is said to be detectable in power subgroups if, for all coprime m and n, a group G satisfies the law if and only if the power subgroups G(m) and G(n) both satisfy the law. We prove that for all positive integers c, nilpotency of class at most c is detectable in power subgroups, as is the k-Engel law for k at most 4. In contrast, detectability in power subgroups fails for solvability of given derived length: we construct a finite group W such that W(2) and W(3) are metabelian but W has derived length 3. We analyse the complexity of the detectability of commutativity in power subgroups, in terms of finite presentations that encode a proof of the result.
We construct a census of two-generator one-relator groups of relator length at most 9, with complete determination of isomorphism type, and verify a conjecture regarding conditions under which such groups are automatic. Furthermore, we introduce a family of one-relator groups and classify which of them act properly cocompactly on complete CAT(0) spaces; the non-CAT(0) examples are counterexamples to a variation on the aforementioned conjecture. For a subclass, we establish automaticity, which is needed for the census.
The deficiency of a group is the maximum over all presentations for that group of the number of generators minus the number of relators. Every finite group has non-positive deficiency. For every prime p we construct finite p-groups of arbitrary negative deficiency, and thereby complete Kotschick’s proposed classification of the integers which are deficiencies of Kähler groups. We explore variations and embellishments of our basic construction, which require subtle Schur multiplier computations, and we investigate the conditions on inputs to the construction that are necessary for success.
A well-known question asks whether any two non-isometric finite volume hyperbolic 3-manifolds are distinguished from each other by the finite quotients of their fundamental groups. At present, this has been proved only when one of the manifolds is a once-punctured torus bundle over the circle. We give substantial computational evidence in support of a positive answer, by showing that no two manifolds in the SnapPea census of 72 942 finite volume hyperbolic 3-manifolds have the same finite quotients.
We determine examples of sizeable graphs, as required to construct finitely presented non-hyperbolic subgroups of hyperbolic groups, which have the fewest vertices possible modulo mild topological assumptions.

Keywords: one-relator groups
computational group theory
group theory
profinite completions
non-positive curvature
CAT(0) spaces
power subgroups
finitely presented groups
deficiency
hyperbolic 3-manifolds
geometric group theory
varieties
laws
Advisor: Bridson, M
The role of the forward capacity market in promoting electricity use reduction

Electricity use reduction is at the heart of an energy policy landscape increasingly defined by climate change, security and affordability. With its potential of peak demand reduction, it can be used as a cost-effective alternative to generation for contributing to capacity adequacy. In many restructured electricity markets, the forward capacity market is established as a solution to ensure capacity adequacy, with some of them allowing electricity use reduction to compete against other resources. To promote electricity use reduction, financial incentives for investment in end-use electric energy efficiency (EE) are crucial.
This thesis focuses on one novel approach of relying on the forward capacity market to incentivise electric efficiency investment, which is trialled in the Electricity Demand Reduction (EDR) Pilot in the UK. It aims to examine the role of the forward capacity market in promoting electricity use reduction, by asking two broad research questions: 1) whether the forward capacity market can serve as a primary policy vehicle to give financial incentives to support electricity use reduction; and 2) whether, as one mechanism for ensuring capacity adequacy, it can promote electricity use reduction as a capacity resource.
Case studies are conducted of the EDR Pilot, the Great Britain Capacity Market, ISO New England (ISO-NE), PJM and international electric efficiency schemes. They demonstrate that the forward capacity market, with its focus on peak savings and a savings-based approach for providing financial incentives, only plays a minor role in advancing the objective of incentivising investment in electric EE measures. The general design features of the forward capacity market pose higher requirements of participation, which may create barriers for some key customer segments to access financial incentives or target specific efficiency measure. The capacity payment, under the current market structure, may only provide a lukewarm incentive for customers to strengthen their capabilities to access support from the forward capacity market. However, it is valuable to integrate electricity use reduction in the forward capacity market. It is a viable mechanism to reward the capacity value of electricity use reduction, which requires the appropriate definition of capacity product, regulatory support for electricity use reduction and the removal of participation barriers.

Keywords: Energy efficiency
Advisor: Eyre, N
Darby, S
Are interpretations of syntactic ambiguities under working memory load "good-enough"? Evidence from eye movements

Syntactically ambiguous sentences offer an insight into how sentences generally are processed, by examining how readers recognise and reanalyse the ambiguity. However, it is only more recently that the comprehension product of syntactic analysis has been adequately tested, demonstrating that ambiguities are not always fully processed. This work has led to the good-enough approach to language processing and comprehension (e.g., Ferreira & Patson, 2007), which argues that sentence processing is merely good enough for the current task, and that our comprehension may not exactly match the content of what has been read. The work presented in this thesis set out to examine what it means for syntactic ambiguity processing to be good enough, by monitoring patterns of eye movements as people read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity. Comprehension questions probed the extent to which the syntactic ambiguity had been resolved. Across six experiments, it was demonstrated that both online sentence processing and comprehension are influenced by the presence of an extrinsic memory load, the presence or absence of comprehension questions, the length of texts being read, and the age of participants. Eye movement patterns were more superficial if the task permitted it; similarly, syntactic ambiguities were misinterpreted more commonly as the task demands increased. The results support a good-enough, adaptive sentence processing system, where initial misinterpretations can linger in the product of syntactic analysis, and which is affected by task demands and individual differences.

Keywords: Psycholinguistics
Psychology of reading
Cognitive psychology
Psychology and ageing
Advisor: Nation, K
Modelling angiogenesis: a discrete to continuum approach

Angiogenesis is the process by which new blood vessels develop from existing vessels. Angiogenesis is important in a number of conditions such as embryogenesis, wound healing and cancer. It has been modelled phenomenologically at the macroscale, using the well-known 'snail-trail' approach in which trailing endothelial cells follow the paths of other, leading endothelial cells. In this thesis, we systematically determine the collective behaviour of endothelial cells from their behaviour at the cell-level during corneal angiogenesis. We formulate an agent-based model, based on the snail-trail process, to describe the behaviour of individual cells. We incorporate cell motility through biased random walks, and include processes which produce (branching) and annihilate (anastomosis) cells to represent sprout and loop formation. We use the transition probabilities associated with the discrete model and a mean-field approximation to systematically derive a system of non-linear partial differential equations (PDEs) of population behaviour that impose physically realistic density restrictions, and are structurally different from existing snail-trail models. We use this framework to evaluate the validity of a classical snail-trail model and elucidate implicit assumptions. We then extend our framework to explicitly account for cell volume. This generates non-linear PDE models which vary in complexity depending on the extent of volume exclusion incorporated on the microscale. By comparing discrete and continuum models, we assess the extent to which continuum models, including the classical snail-trail model, account for single and multi-species exclusion processes. We also distinguish macroscale exclusion effects introduced by each cell species. Finally, we compare the predictive power of different continuum models. In summary, we develop a microscale to macroscale framework for angiogenesis based on the snail-trail process, which provides a systematic way of deriving population behaviour from individual cell behaviour and can be extended to account for more realistic and/or detailed cell interactions.

Keywords: Volume Exclusion
Multiscale Modelling
Chemotaxis
Cellular Automata
Partial Differential Equations
Advisor: Byrne, H
Maini, P
Gaffney, E
Dress, Feminism, and British New Woman Novels

This thesis examines the close and complex relationship between dress, feminism, and British New Woman novels. It provides in-depth analysis of six New Woman novels and draws comparisons with numerous other works. The case study texts are Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man: Or Perhaps Only... (1926, posthumously), Sarah Grand's Ideala: A Study from Life (1881) and The Heavenly Twins (1893), and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895) and The Type-Writer Girl (1897). I explore why dress was so important to such novels, and examine the diverse, individual, developing, and shared ways in which authors engaged with dress as a feminist strategy and feminist concern. Areas considered include From Man to Man's use of functional clothes and dress production to celebrate female labour, Grand’s interest in both dress reform and dressing to impress, Allen’s shift in focus from the white-clad free lover to the sensibly-dressed working woman, and authors' use of deceptively clean clothes to address male immorality and disease. The thesis looks beyond as well as within New Woman narratives, demonstrating that writers, and publishers, were broadly concerned with dress in its various literal and more metaphorical manifestations. Focuses include self-styling, authorial cross-dressing, and bindings.
Dress does not, however, always seamlessly support these texts' feminisms, I argue. For example, Grand elevated cross-class feminism, but she belittled middle-class women's taste, side-lined poor women’s most pressing sartorial concerns, and dressed to impress. I also stress that dress, being so closely bound up with New Woman novels' feminisms and their ambiguities, is a revealing lens through which to read such texts, and one often capable of prompting re-readings. Attention to Allen's rejection of sartorial realism in parts of The Woman Who Did problematises the dominant conception of this novel as straightforwardly pro-free union, for instance.
The thesis, as well as gesturing towards dress's centrality to the production and interpretation of literary feminisms and anti-feminisms broadly, emphasises the importance of dress to New Woman literature and its analysts, and uses dress to provide fresh readings of various novels and genre-wide issues.

Advisor: Eltis, S
Local religious life in England, c. 1160-1210

This is a thesis about the ideas and relationships which shaped local religious life, particularly the quotidian religious experiences of ordinary lay people, in late twelfth- century England. Local religious life was not primarily a product of developing ecclesiastical structures, nor of systematic pastoral reform, but rather of ministry relationships, in which one person or group received some kind of religious ministry from another. These relationships were coloured by the beliefs and practical interests of clerical and lay participants.
The elite clerical idea of prelacy—in which a prelate, endowed with the burden of pastoral care, spiritually governs subjects—was an old idea which reflected the relationship-based structure of religious life, and which writers adapted in response to local realities. The principal manifestation of this interaction between idea and practice was the claiming of certain lay people as the parishioners of religious houses and local churches: priests and parishioners were analogous, in the minds of ecclesiastics, to prelates and subjects. This grated against the reality that lay people actively shaped their own religious experiences. Local practices, as well as factors such as lordship, geography and association, influenced the ways in which laity and clergy in a given locality thought about their ministry relationships. Lay people in late twelfth-century England were not merely parishioners: they received ministries from the religious, anchorites, saints, and other lay people.
This thesis is intended as a corrective to the historiographical field of pastoral care: firstly for a particular historical moment, the second half of the twelfth century in England, but also as a model for future inquiry into other periods and regions. It builds a new conceptual foundation which demands, in turn, a reevaluation of local religious life beyond the late twelfth century and beyond England.

Advisor: Forrest, I
Improving learning of typical and atypical populations using cognitive training and transcranial electrical stimulation

The ability to learn is critical, whether to survive or to thrive. Research suggests that cognitive training and transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) could modulate neuroplasticity and improve learning and cognition. However, the key challenge of both fields lies in their translational research. In particular, the translational potential of both methods is restricted by the use of training tasks that lacked ecological validity. Using more realistic training tasks, the current thesis explored the effects of cognitive training alone on healthy children, and the combination of cognitive training and tES, compared to training alone in typical (healthy adults and elderly) and atypical populations (children with learning disabilities). Findings demonstrate that cognitive training and tES could improve learning and cognition of typical and atypical populations across different age groups, as modelled using the numerical domain. Specifically, the current thesis highlights the role of content in training outcomes, and the synergistic effects of combining tES and cognitive training on learning, compared to training alone. Furthermore, findings suggest that the combined approach of tES and cognitive training could offer long-term positive outcomes that benefit those with lower baseline cognitive abilities, effects that are meaningful to the real-world, and the possibility of mitigating cognitive trade-offs from training alone. Further optimisation of training design and tES parameters, with the consideration of individual differences and underlying mechanisms are warranted to improve the translational potential of these methods. Given the ethical concerns raised by the use of tES for cognitive enhancement, both scientific research and bioethical discussions are required to guide future directions on improving learning and cognition of the individual and for all.

Advisor: Kadosh, R