VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
ESD design challenges and strategies in deeply-scaled integrated circuits [electronic resource]

It is the main objective of this work to address the scaling and design challenges of ESD protection in deeply scaled technologies. First, the thesis introduces the on-chip ESD events, the scaling and design challenges, and the nomenclatures necessary for later chapters. The ESD design window and the I/O schematics for both rail clamping and local clamping ESD schemes are illustrated. Then, the thesis delves into the investigation of the input and output driver devices and examines their robustness under ESD. The input driver's oxide breakdown levels are evaluated in deeply scaled technologies. The output driver's trigger and breakdown voltages are improved appreciably by applying circuit and device design techniques. The ESD device sections first discuss rail-based clamping, a widely used protection scheme. Two diode-based devices, namely the gated diode and substrate diode, are investigated in detail with SOI test structures. Characterization is based on DC current-voltage (I-V), Very Fast Transmission Line Pulse (VF-TLP), capacitance, and leakage measurements. Improvements in performance are realized. Technology computer aided design (TCAD) simulations help understand the physical effects and design tradeoffs. Then, the following section focuses on the local clamping scheme. Two devices, the field-effect diode (FED) and the double-well FED (DWFED), are developed and optimized in an SOI technology. Trigger circuits are designed to improve the turn-on speed. The advantages of local clamping is highlighted and compared with the rail-based clamping. The results show that the FED is a suitable option for power clamping applications and the DWFED is most suitable for pad-based local clamping. The thesis presents an ESD protection design methodology, which takes advantage of the results and techniques from pervious chapters and put each element into a useful format. Based on the correlation of package level and in-lab test results, a design process based on CDM target definition and device optimization, discharge path analysis, parasitic minimization, I/O data rate estimation and finally ESD and performance characterization is used sequentially to systematically realize the overall design goals.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering
Advisor: Dutton Robert W. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Nishi Yoshio
Saraswat Krishna advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in applied microeconomics [electronic resource]

This dissertation contains three papers in applied microeconomics. The first paper, is motivated by the observation that welfare programs are often implemented in-kind to promote outcomes that might not be realized under cash transfers. I use a randomized controlled trial of the Mexican government's Food Assistance Program ('PAL') to test whether this form of paternalism is necessary, comparing precisely measured consumption and health outcomes under both in-kind food and cash transfers. While other justifications for in-kind transfers may certainly apply, I find minimal evidence supporting the paternalistic one in this context. The second paper is motivated by the fact that students who would benefit from college may choose not to attend if they are unaware of all costs and benefits involved. I present evidence from the an information and awareness program - "GO Centers" - that shows such information does indeed increase college applications and enrollments. These results have important policy implications, suggesting that a relatively cheap intervention can induce investment in human capital by reducing informational asymmetries. The third and final paper presents evidence from a field experiment on the impact of inter-group competition on intra-group contributions to a public good. Solicitation postcards were mailed to political donors which contained either (i) past donation information about members of their own party (ii) past donation information about member of the competing party, or (iii) no past donation information. I show that both treatments increased donation rates and amounts, with a stronger effect when information was given about the competing party. This shows that competitive motives can help overcome the free-rider problem and can also be more profitable than the cooperative one in certain fund-raising situations.

Keywords: Economics
Advisor: De Giorgi Giacomo primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Hoxby Caroline Minter advisor. Thesis advisor
Jayachandran Seema advisor. Thesis advisor
Pistaferri Luigi advisor. Thesis advisor
"Essays in Formal Political Theory" [electronic resource]

This dissertation presents three chapters based on my papers entitled "Deliberative Democracy and Electoral Competition", "Policy Selection in Primaries and General Elections with Candidates of Heterogeneous Quality", and "Sequential Voting in Large Elections with Multiple Candidates".

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Shotts Kenneth W. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Baron David P. advisor. Thesis advisor
Bulow Jeremy advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in macroeconomics [electronic resource]

This thesis studies the effect of incompleteness in information and heterogeneity in preferences on two different aspects of macroeconomics: public communication and distortions implied by general equilibrium models with a representative agent. The first chapter builds a dynamic model of the information flow between heterogeneously partially informed financial institutions and a public agency. The financial institutions decide how to allocate their portfolio between a riskless technology with known payoff and a risky technology whose payoff is unknown. The public agency learns about the value of the unknown payoff by observing the actions of the financial institutions and decides whether to communicate the information at the agency's disposal. The work characterizes the optimal public communication plans and shows that they involve delayed communication. The second chapter studies the public communication problem in a abstract setting where agents want to match an unknown parameter evolving over time. A benevolent public authority learns about the fundamentals by observing agents' actions. Differently than in the first chapter, in any period the public authority decides how much of its knowledge to communicate in a public signal every period. Simulations of the model show that the welfare maximizing communication strategies involve opaque communication, that is adding noise to the public signal. In the last chapter, joint work with Aaron Bodoh-Creed, we show that in economies where agents have heterogeneous preferences that can be represented with Hansen and Sargent's multiplier preferences form, the representative agent will not have multiplier preferences. We consider the errors induced in model outcomes if an econometrician assumes the representative agent has a multiplier preferences form utility function in the context of exchange and production general equilibrium economies and provide conditions under which the two problems are the same. An appendix extends our results to a two period dynamic general equilibrium economy with savings.

Keywords: Economics
Advisor: Amador Manuel (Manuel A.) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Jaimovich Nir advisor. Thesis advisor
Schneider Klaus advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in macroeconomics [electronic resource]

This dissertation contains three essays that investigate aspects of the behavior of employment over the business cycle. I argue that employment, rather than other concepts of labor input, is the important margin of adjustment of labor input over the business cycle. This observation necessitates the use of explicit models of employment to address issues related to the behavior of labor input over the business cycle. I use the tools developed in the literature on "equilibrium unemployment'' -- namely the inclusion of a search and matching friction in the labor market -- and integrate them into the framework of Real Business Cycle models. The latter typically ignores the explicit analysis of employment and excludes involuntary unemployment. The integrated model is therefore suitable to analyze the behavior of employment. I use the integrated model to address the issue of synchronization of the business cycle. In the first essay I investigate the synchronization of changes in employment across sectors in the US economy. In the second essay I argue that from a modeling perspective, generating cross-sector employment correlation is closely related to generating high variability of aggregate unemployment. In the third essay I address the synchronization of business cycles across developed economies.

Keywords: Economics
Advisor: Hall Robert primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Jaimovich Nir advisor. Thesis advisor
Klenow Peter J. advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in macrofinance [electronic resource]

This dissertation covers issues related to macroeconomics and finance. As research disciplines, these two fields are often considered distinct in nature. However, my research has always considered them as interrelated. While many of the questions posed in macroeconomics and finance can be answered using the tools of their respective fields only, I find it useful to combine macroeconomics and finance when attacking questions related to business cycles and monetary policy. Ignoring the impact of movements in asset prices on the real economy and vice versa is plagued with issues, namely the inability to understand the causes of and propagation mechanisms within the business cycle. The two papers I present link macroeconomics, monetary policy, and the term structure of interest rates, and attempt to understand how risk premia embedded within the term structure can shape the economy and policy going forward.

Keywords: Economics
Advisor: Taylor John primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Jaimovich Nir advisor. Thesis advisor
Piazzesi Monika advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in Networks and Finance [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of three essays. "Asset Pricing Implications of Tunneling: Evidence from the Bombay Stock Exchange" develops a long-short equity portfolio that gives positive risk-adjusted returns. Moreover, the portfolio performs significantly better in down-market conditions as compared with up-market conditions. "Axiomatic Foundations of Centrality in Networks", provides an axiomatic characterization of Degree, Closeness and Decay centrality measures, and argues that such axiomatizations are the correct way to distinguish between centrality measures. Further, it shows that these three centrality measures belong to the same family of measures. In ``Long Run Effects of Colonial Education Policy" (with Latika Chaudhary) we document the historical persistence of differences in regional literacy rates in India. Moreover, we examine the long-term effects of colonial public spending in former British India on literacy rates in post-independence India.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Jackson Matthew O. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Bloom Nick
Mahajan Aprajit
Essays in portfolio credit risk [electronic resource]

This dissertation considers the measurement and management of portfolio credit risk. Collateralized debt obligations, which are securities with payoffs that are tied to the cash flows in a portfolio of defaultable assets such as corporate bonds, play a significant role in the financial crisis that has spread throughout the world. Insufficient capital provisioning due to flawed and overly optimistic risk assessments is at the center of the problem. In the first part of the dissertation, we develop stochastic methods to measure the risk of positions in collateralized debt obligations and related instruments tied to an underlying portfolio of defaultable assets. We propose an adaptive point process model of portfolio default timing, a maximum likelihood method for estimating point process models that is based on an acceptance/rejection re-sampling scheme, and statistical tests for model validation. To illustrate these tools, they are used to estimate the distribution of the profit or loss generated by positions in multiple tranches of a collateralized debt obligation that references the CDX High Yield portfolio, and the risk capital required to support these positions. The second part of the dissertation develops maximum likelihood estimators of the term structure of systemic risk in the U.S. financial sector, defined as the conditional probability of failure of a large number of financial institutions. The estimators are based on a new dynamic hazard model of failure timing that captures the influence of time-varying macro-economic and sector-specific risk factors on the likelihood of failures, and the impact of risk spillovers due to contagion or incomplete information about relevant risk factors. The estimation results, which cover the period January 1987 to December 2008, provide strong evidence for the presence of failure clustering not caused by variations in the observable explanatory covariates, which include the trailing return on the S& P 500 index, the lagged slope of the U.S. yield curve, the default and TED spreads, and other sector-specific variables.

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering
Advisor: Giesecke Kay primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Primbs James advisor. Thesis advisor
Weyant John P. (John Peter) advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on gender, marriage and inequality [electronic resource]

This dissertation explores issues of gender and inequality within marriage. In it I show that what a woman earns relative to her husband better predicts whether or not she will leave the labor force than her or her husband's absolute earnings. Additionally, I show that women who are married to men who spend more time in paid work (over 45 hours per week) are more likely to exit relative to women who are married to men who work fewer hours per week. I also show that marriage is associated with a slight increase in body mass index for women and men of all races. African American women, however, are the only group to be more at risk for obesity in marriage (compared to being single). Finally, I also find that a woman's last name choice in marriage affects how men of low education view her -- but only if her behavior is gender non-traditional as well. If her behavior is gender non-traditional and her name is non-traditional (in other words, different than her husband's or hyphenated), a man with a high school degree or less sees her as a less committed wife and holds her to higher standards than a woman whose name is gender traditional (the same as her husband's).

Keywords: Sociology.
Advisor: England Paula primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Correll Shelley Joyce advisor. Thesis advisor
Grusky David B. advisor. Thesis advisor
Rosenfeld Michael J.
Essays on horizontal mergers and antitrust [electronic resource]

This thesis contributes to understanding the economics of mergers and acquisitions. It provides new empirical techniques to study these processes, based on structural, game theoretical models. In particular, it makes two main contributions. In Chapter 2, I study the issues arising when mergers take place in a two-sided market. In such markets, firms face two interrelated demand curves, which complicates the decision making process and makes standard merger models inapplicable. In Chapter 3, I provide a general framework to identify cost synergies from mergers without using cost data. The estimator is based on a dynamic model with endogenous mergers and product repositioning. Both chapters contain an abstract model that can be tailored to many markets, as well as a specific application to the merger wave in the U.S. radio industry.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Reiss Peter C. (Peter Clemens) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Benkard C. Lanier advisor. Thesis advisor
Yurukoglu Ali advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on horizontal mergers and antitrust [electronic resource]

This thesis contributes to understanding the economics of mergers and acquisitions. It provides new empirical techniques to study these processes, based on structural, game theoretical models. In particular, it makes two main contributions. In Chapter 2, I study the issues arising when mergers take place in a two-sided market. In such markets, firms face two interrelated demand curves, which complicates the decision making process and makes standard merger models inapplicable. In Chapter 3, I provide a general framework to identify cost synergies from mergers without using cost data. The estimator is based on a dynamic model with endogenous mergers and product repositioning. Both chapters contain an abstract model that can be tailored to many markets, as well as a specific application to the merger wave in the U.S. radio industry.

Advisor: Reiss Peter C. (Peter Clemens) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Benkard C. Lanier advisor. Thesis advisor
Yurukoglu Ali advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on industrial organization in developing countries [electronic resource]

This dissertation presents three essays on industrial organization in developing countries. The first examines the causes of the large employer size-wage premium in Indian manufacturing. The second presents the strong empirical relationship between average manufacturing plant size and average labor productivity across industries and across countries. The third documents the effects of the 2004 enlargement of the European Union on firms close to the old economic border.

Keywords: Economics
Advisor: Klenow Peter J. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Bloom Nick
Jaimovich Nir advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on the statistical analysis of roll-call votes and judicial citations [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of one chapter exploring the statistical properties of idealpoint estimators and two chapters exploring the use of judicial citations to extend ideal-point estimation and advance our understanding of judicial opinions. Chapter one explores the statistical properties of ideal-point estimators. This chapter provides several theoretical results regarding ideal-point estimation. First, this chapter demonstrates a counterexample to consistency of common ideal-point estimators--even with regard to the rank of the ideal points. It then presents a simple estimator of the rank of unidimensional ideal points that is inefficient but also consistent for a generalization of most common ideal-point models. Chapter two--joint work with Robert Anderson and Stephen Jessee--introduces a method for estimating the ideology of judges and court cases based on the citations contained in judicial opinions that can directly estimate the ideological positions of cases from citations to precedent without using the votes in those cases. This chapter then uses this technique to address two important questions in judicial politics. The first regards whose ideology is reflected in a majority opinion. The second question focuses on the Supreme Court's decision to grant certiorari. The technique introduced in this chapter allows us to investigate previously untestable hypotheses regarding the relationship between the decision to grant certiorari and the lower court's opinion in the case. Chapter three uses judicial citation data for a different purpose--categorizing opinions. Citations explicitly link each opinion to other opinions--including the opinions of other courts--and legal documents. This chapter introduces a statistical model that assumes opinions are more likely to cite other opinions that deal with similar issues and allows issue areas to form a hierarchical structure. The results are analyzed to understand the relationship between different issue areas as well as changes in the Court's agenda over time. I also compare the results to a traditional hand-coding of these opinions.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Jackman Simon
Ferejohn John A. advisor. Thesis advisor
Quinn Kevin M.
Krosnick Jon A. advisor. Thesis advisor
Estimation and Prediction of Financial Contagion through Trade

This presents a panel estimation model to the contagious effects resulting from financial integration and investigates the channels and conditions under which contagion can be distinguished from interdependence and random shocks. The identification strategy for contagion is pursued by controlling for bilateral trade links among countries. To identify contagion effects in the presence of interdependencies and random shocks the equations for individual countries contain country specific forcing fundamental variables. These variables are applied towards the construction of a time series reflecting the Country Pressure Index. Linear regression and predictive estimation is applied towards understanding the financial linkages of the different countries with their trade partners. Evidence is found that trade is an important determinant of financial markets integration and can sufficiently explain extreme conditions. Several predictive results are drawn to show the trend toward financial globalization and drawing results on sources of contagion for the Southeast Asian and Pacific countries.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
Thesis
Advisor: Harding Matthew
Ethnic group rebellion in civil war [electronic resource]

Why do some ethnic groups involve themselves in civil wars, fighting in rebel groups against the state, while others do not? In particular, what explains variation in ethnic group involvement within the same country? The conventional wisdom is that poverty and political grievances are to blame for this involvement and participation in political violence more generally. Such conclusions tend to be based on studies of single cases or large-N studies that analyze a biased sample of ethnic groups. Countering these hypotheses, I propose a theory of ethnic group rebellion that predicts ethnic group involvement in civil war based on sub-national variation in the ability of the state to exercise a monopoly of control over territory and people, and its administrative strength in an area. Using original geographic, economic, and political data collected on an exhaustive set of ethnic groups from 48 African countries, I test hypotheses emanating from my theory and those of traditional explanations in the context of African civil wars between 1980 and 2006. I find that the distance between an ethnic group's inhabited region of the country and the capital city -- an important measure of the state's presence and capacity for control -- is positively related to the probability of involvement in rebellion. The periphery is a high risk region for involvement in both territorial (separatist/secessionist) rebellion and rebellion designed to take over the state and oust the government. The goals and organizational requirements for these two types of rebellion are quite different, and my theory proposes that these differences should attract ethnic groups from opposite ends of the economic spectrum. Territorial rebellions are likely to involve the poorest ethnic groups living in the periphery, as these movements do not require a high degree of organization or funding to continue a low-level insurgency against the state. In contrast, wealthier groups, which are likely to be better organized and better able to act collectively, are more likely to be involved in government takeover rebellions, which require a higher degree of rebel competence and strength to confront the forces of the state directly. The evidence from statistical analysis and case study examination is strongly supportive of the elements of my theory, suggesting that traditional emphasis on poverty, political representation, and transnational ethnic ties as central factors in this type of political violence is misguided and more focus should be placed on the ability of the state to administer its territory effectively and ethnic group responses to variation in this capacity.

Keywords: Political Science
Advisor: Fearon James D. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Rodden Jonathan advisor. Thesis advisor
Schultz Kenneth A. advisor. Thesis advisor