VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays on firm productivity and macro development

My dissertation centers around the following questions: why is manufacturing productivity in India lower than in the U.S. and how large are the potential gains from Indian economic reforms? I focus in particular on the effects of frictions which distort firm behavior, and on the importance of linkages between firms and sectors through intermediate inputs. The first chapter studies how easily plants are able to substitute between intermediate inputs sourced from different sectors of the economy. We argue that this is an important determinant of whether economic development policies should target specific sectors of the economy or follow a 'big push' approach of advancing all sectors together. The second chapter studies the importance of misallocation of inputs across manufacturing plants in India and the U.S. We propose a way to estimate the gaps in true marginal products across plants even in the presence of measurement error in survey data. The third chapter studies the importance of the Indian distribution sector as a constraint to the growth of Indian manufacturing plants. We document that larger plants spend a larger share of their sales on distribution, and investigate how productivity improvements in distribution services would impact the manufacturing sector.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Klenow Peter J. 
Bloom Nick
Jones Charles I. (Charles Irving)
Essays on firms and networks in the economy

In today's highly interconnected world, business networks play a critical role in promoting prosperity and innovation across the world economy. This thesis examines the role of these networks, arising either between-firms or within-firms, to explore important questions spanning climate change, natural disasters, and the prevalence of large informal sectors in developing countries. The first chapter quantifies the indirect effects of hurricanes by studying spatial linkages within multi-plant firms, between their disrupted and undisrupted establishments. Using confidential establishment-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I show that the effects of hurricanes spatially propagate via firm internal networks. For a typical county hit by a hurricane, for every job lost in the disaster county, an additional 19% to 25% of those direct losses also occur across non-disaster counties in the economy. These results indicate that we potentially underestimate the adverse consequences of hurricanes by focusing only on the direct impact and overlooking such inter-regional linkages emerging via firms' internal networks. The second chapter studies between-firm supply chain linkages in the context of the Value Added Tax (VAT) system in Karnataka, India; and illustrates that such networks incentivize small informal sector firms to join the formal VAT regime. These incentives arise because downstream firms inside the formal VAT supply chain have incentives to buy inputs only from formal upstream suppliers to collect input tax rebates. Therefore, informal upstream businesses in the supply chain may want to formalize in order to sell to the downstream firms in the VAT. Using administrative records from the state of Karnataka, India, the empirical exercise documents that small firms are willing to pay 1% to 4% higher taxes to join the VAT regime. Consistent with the mechanism explored in this chapter, only firms operating in upstream sectors, such as manufacturing and wholesale, are paying this "VAT Premium". Overall, the findings highlight the vast potential of between-firm VAT networks to help developing countries increase their tax base by reducing the size of the informal sector. The third chapter analyzes stock market responses to natural disasters. The extent to which markets respond to disaster onsets depends on the extent to which stock prices incorporate key information on the firms' adaptive capacity, in the midst of increasingly calamitous and uncertain disaster patterns and reduced insurability. Employing daily stock data of publicly listed firms in the United States and their responses to the top US natural disasters between 1980-2014, I find that exposed companies are associated with lower stock market valuations relative to the returns of non-exposed companies. The estimated impact translates into US million to US

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Bloom Nick
Bernstein Shai
Klenow Peter J.
Essays on information disclosure and auction theory

This dissertation consists of three essays on information economics and auction theory. The first chapter studies the question of what information consumers should disclose to firms. A consumer discloses information to a multi-product firm, which learns about his preferences, sets prices, and makes product recommendations. While the consumer benefits from disclosure as it enables the firm to make accurate recommendations, the firm may use the information to price discriminate. I show that the firm prefers to commit to not price discriminate, which encourages the consumer to provide information that is useful for product recommendations. However, nondiscriminatory pricing hurts the consumer, who would be better off by precommitting to withhold some information. In contrast to single-product models, equilibrium is typically inefficient even if the consumer can disclose any information about his preferences. The second chapter studies the problem of restricting the information available to the sender in a game of strategic communication. Assuming that the receiver has a binary choice, I characterize the "optimal information restriction, " which maximizes the equilibrium payoff of the receiver among all the information restrictions for the sender. The final chapter studies the optimal timing of an auction in a setting where bidders arrive and depart stochastically over time. First, we compare the revenue-maximizing timing and welfare-maximizing timing. We show that sellers hold auctions too late or too early whenever (censored at 0) virtual values are more or less right-skewed than values. In particular, we show that sellers typically hold auctions inefficiently late. Second, we prove that the use of simple timing rules (i.e., a fixed deadline chosen in advance) can lose an arbitrarily large fraction of the revenue from the optimal stopping rule.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Milgrom Paul R. (Paul Robert)
Carroll Gabriel 
Gentzkow Matthew 
Segal Ilya
Essays on liberal norms, public opinion, and the law of war

Political leaders in democratic societies often invoke international institutions like the UN Security Council and the Geneva Conventions to justify their foreign policies. Motivated by this observation, the three papers within this dissertation explore whether and how international law, norms, and organizations affect public opinion on war and wartime conduct. The first two papers explore how NATO and the Security Council mobilize mass support for humanitarian wars by the United States. They jointly develop and test a novel social-cue theory for how these organizations sway citizens to approve military intervention, and in doing so, overturn the dominant wisdom in the field that focuses on materialist/legal rather than social rationales. The final paper turns to the conduct of warfare and investigates how norms of reciprocity and international humanitarian law influence opinions about the mistreatment of POWs. It finds that the American public is substantially conditional on the enemy's behavior, and that rather than eliminating reciprocity, people's knowledge of the law can enhance their willingness to endorse committing reciprocal acts humanitarian violations. These papers speak to the promises and limits of relying on international institutions in fostering legal and liberal norms in democratic societies.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Schultz Kenneth A. 
Tomz Michael 
Krasner Stephen D.
Essays on social norm perception

Research on social norms has demonstrated that perceived social norms can be a powerful force that shapes behavior, however in order to understand the how to best use social norms to guide behavior change, research must first examine how social norms themselves are perceived. This dissertation examines how individuals infer social norms when they enter a new group or situation. Across three chapters, this dissertation presents a framework (Chapter 1) and two investigations (Chapters 2 and 3) of social norm perception in small groups and teams.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Miller Dale T. 
Halevy Nir
Neale Margaret Ann
Essays on the behavioral political economy of authoritarian regimes : historical and contemporary evidence from China

My dissertation aims to understand the forces of stability in authoritarian regimes. I investigate three distinctive forces — historical experiences, indoctrination, and media censorship — and their roles in shaping citizens' political beliefs, attitudes, preferences, and behaviors. I focus on the case of Mainland China, one of the largest and longest standing authoritarian regimes in recent history. I show that the Chinese regime over the past seventy years represents a history of information control, from an age of tight control, to an era of gradual reform and open-up, and to the Internet age. I find that the Chinese regime is often effective when it uses reinterpretation of history, school indoctrination, and media censorship to affect its citizens so that the regime remains stable.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Abramitzky Ran 
Gentzkow Matthew 
Bernheim B. Douglas 
Dupas Pascaline 
Niederle Muriel
Essays on the political economy of nondemocratic practices

This dissertation examines nondemocratic practices through the lens of political economics. Politicized courts are pivotal to guaranteeing the impunity of nondemocratic actions, and in Chapter 1 I start by documenting how the takeover of courts systematically affects the average citizen who uses courts to solve a dispute. I then proceed to studying campaign finance and its effects on legislative voting. In Chapter 2, I examine whether legislators change their votes based on the monetary influence of private interests. This would entail that legislators favor powerful interest groups while ignoring the constituents who voted them into office. Finally, in Chapter 3 I examine partisan redistricting and voter turnout. Also known as gerrymandering, partisan redistricting weakens voters' ability to elect their representatives by protecting incumbents and diluting the electoral strength of minorities.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Casey Katherine Elizabeth 
Shotts Kenneth W. 
Yurukoglu Ali
Etching techniques to enable device fabrication of single-crystal thin silicon

The unique material properties and relative abundance of silicon has made it the element most responsible for the technological revolution that has occurred in the past several decades. Wafers of silicon, anywhere from 150 um to 900 um thick, are the primary substrates used in the fabrication of electronic devices such as computer processors, CCD image sensors, and photovoltaic solar cells. Research has been done to investigate the benefits and challenges of using drastically thinner Si wafers, down to the range of 2 um to 30 um. My PhD study focused on efforts into enabling device fabrication of single-crystal thin Si, specifically by means of certain etching techniques. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I will give a brief introduction of the current thin silicon work and explain why single-crystal silicon is the best choice for current and future electronic device needs. In the second chapter, I will detail my work with metal-assisted chemical etching (MACE) of silicon, a type of anisotropic etch technique that was discovered less than 20 years ago. I explored the prospect of producing a very deep, high-aspect ratio slice into silicon for application in the wafering process. I quickly learned that MACE needed more fundamental understanding to utilize properly in the manner that I wanted. Because of this, I investigated the basic mechanism of gold MACE on silicon and how it depended on factors like dopant type, dopant concentration, crystallographic direction, and etching solution composition. I will discuss various applications of this MACE technique for the structuring of the silicon surface. In the third chapter, I will detail my work with direct fabrication of thin Si using a process developed previously in our lab and improved upon here. A hot solution of potassium hydroxide (KOH) is used to etch a silicon wafer down until only a very thin membrane is suspended in the middle of a thicker handling ring. Multiple improvements were made to this technique, including the use of tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH), which is directly CMOS-compatible. In the fourth chapter, I will discuss and show how I successfully fabricated working electronic devices on the thin Si handling ring structure, on not only one side but both sides of the thin Si. I will detail the challenges encountered, and solutions found, along the way, as well as the characterization of the devices fabricated. I will also briefly address potential new applications that are enabled by this type of fabrication.

Keywords: Materials Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Cui Yi
Chueh William
Dionne Jennifer Anne
Evaluating the Impact of the Presence of Higher Education Institutions on the Spread of Information Technology

This paper explores the relationship between a firm’s technology adoption and its proximity to a university. Specifically, I perform a county level analysis where I evaluate the impact of the presence of a university in a county on the average PCs per employee for firms within that county over 1989-2014. I use the Harte Hanks dataset of firm technology usage to attain this measure, and the National Center for Education Statistics dataset on universities. I test my results with additional controls, including education levels, median household income, population density, industry distribution, and the exclusion of large counties. I find that the presence of a university is not significantly correlated with initial adoption of PCs, but is significantly and strongly correlated with the spread of PCs. As PCs get closer to saturation, the presence of a university again becomes unimportant, as similar levels of technology are present across counties.

Keywords: Technology
universities
innovations
school
computers
PCs
technology adoption
Economics
Thesis
Advisor: Shoven John
Evaluating the Massachusetts Metco Program to Understand the Effects of Desegregation Busing

The paper evaluates the effects of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (Metco) program, a program implemented in 1966 that buses minority students from Boston and Springfield to school districts in the surrounding suburbs. It is often claimed that the program, commonly known as Metco, is excessively burdensome on recipient schools, imposing uncontrolled costs on suburban schools and diverting teacher attention from non-Metco students. Consequently, I aim to use data from the Newton Public Schools district, a Metco-receiving district, to answer the question: how does the Metco program affect non-Metco achievement in recipient school districts? Ultimately, I find that increasing the share of Metco students in a given cohort slightly reduces achievement on state math exams overall, but raises achievement in some grades among black and Hispanic students. These results contrast with prior research suggesting Metco students have little, if any effect on their peers.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
peer effects
desegregation
segregation
busing
Boston
education
METCO
Thesis
Advisor: Hoxby Caroline
Clerici-Arias Marcelo
Evaluating the WHO Criteria for Acute Malnutrition: Stunting and Growth Rates in Malawian Treatment Programs

Acute malnutrition directly accounts for over 2 million deaths of children under five each year. However, its interaction with other nutritional disorders and the efficacy of the World Health Organization’s criteria for its diagnosis and are not well understood. I conduct a secondary analysis of two clinical trials in southern Malawi to examine the effects of chronic malnutrition and the rates of growth of anthropometric measures for patients in acute malnutrition treatment programs. The results show that chronically malnourished children presented for treatment with low baseline measurements and demographic makers of food insecurity. These children had worse clinical outcomes than non-chronically malnourished children, but they experienced more height gain over the treatment course. Children with severe acute malnutrition grew at a faster rate than children with moderate acute malnutrition and ratios between growth rates of the two diagnostic measures were similar in these populations. These findings indicate that chronically malnourished children should be targeted for increased attention in screening and supplemental feeding programs for acute malnutrition, and that therapeutic feeding can counteract the growth faltering caused by chronic malnutrition. Findings do not provide evidence that either diagnostic marker for malnutrition is superior based on growth rate.

Keywords:  Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy
CDDRL
nutrition
malnutrition
World Health Organization
Thesis
Advisor: Maldonado Yvonne
“Everyone Wants a Seat at the Table”: High School English Teachers’ Engagement and Challenges with Multicultural Education

This thesis explores ten public high school English teachers’ attitudes toward multicultural education and literature. Specifically, the study attempts to discover common points of engagement and challenge for teachers to make greater use of multicultural literature. Data was collected through in-person interviews with English teachers in the Bay Area and Orange County, California. A majority of teachers reported engaging with multicultural education by: being aware of cultural differences among groups of students; including shorter, multicultural texts; and connecting literature to contemporary social and political issues. All teachers reported challenges, which included (from most to least prominent): department politics; the pressure of standardized testing and traditionalized English curriculums; multiculturalism not being prioritized; lack of multicultural knowledge and sensitivity; and funding. The findings suggest that English teachers feel pressured to teach Western literature—having studied those same texts in high school and college. In addition, the findings suggest that if English teachers have a desire to change their reading lists, then they should reach out to similarly-minded colleagues to mobilize change within their English departments. English teachers interested in increasing their multicultural pedagogy should commit time to research multicultural texts and acquire content knowledge about marginalized groups—even if it necessitates that less curriculum time is spent on more traditional texts.

Keywords: multicultural education
multiculturalism
multicultural literature
high school
English teachers
interviews
attitudes
engagement
challenges
Thesis
Evolution of gene expression in humans and yeast

Examples of evolution are both the inspiration and the validation for the theories of evolutionary biology. To identify examples of evolution, genetic data are often used because evolution acts on genetic variation. But despite the utility of genetic data, we are limited in depth of our understanding of evolution because of the challenge in connecting genetic variation with phenotypes. One key strategy to overcome this challenge is to investigate gene expression. In this dissertation, I present two frameworks for identifying genetic variants that associate with gene expression and how we used these frameworks to identify new examples of evolution. Chapter 2 presents a framework for studying gene-by-environment interactions using gene expression. This approach was applied to sun-exposure-dependent gene expression data in humans and ultimately identified a genetic variant under local adaptation. Chapter 3 investigates high-resolution mapping of regulatory variants in yeast. This approach was used to identify gene expression evolution in clinical and non-clinical isolates of yeast. Together, these chapters present frameworks for studying the connection between DNA variation, gene expression, and their evolutionary consequences.

Keywords: Biology.
Advisor: Fraser Hunter B. 
Feldman Marcus W. 
Montgomery Stephen
Sherlock Gavin
The evolutionary dynamics of rapidly adapting intra-patient pathogens through space and time

At the beginning of the HIV epidemic, drug resistance to treatment evolved quickly and predictably across all patients. Now we treat HIV with combination therapies of three drugs so any single HIV mutation is insufficient for viral replication. The rate of drug resistance evolution has plummeted in response. Despite these advances, a minority of viral populations become resistant nonetheless. Why and how do certain populations overcome efficacious combination therapy? In answer to the first question, I analyze how the mode of drug resistance evolution changed within patients throughout the epidemic using historical HIV sequences. I find evolution has shifted from multiple origins of drug resistance ("soft sweeps") to single origins ("hard sweeps") as treatments have improved. This observation suggests that while drug resistance was once inevitable, now patients that fail combination therapy are merely unlucky, and not predestined to fail due to factors like poor adherence. However, questions remain about how hard sweeps of drug resistance can occur at all under combination therapy. Theory suggests that spatial structure of the intra-patient population drive multidrug resistance through creating pockets of spatial monotherapy whereby mutations can be acquired sequentially instead of simultaneously (Moreno-Gamez et al., 2015). However within-body population structure remains unknown. To bridge this gap, I analyze Simian-HIV-infected macaques sampled spatially and temporally during drug resistance evolution. I observe that populations from different organs (gut, plasma, lymph node, vagina) within the same macaque can be significantly different although the magnitude of the difference varies through time as drug resistance emerges. From these data, I quantify the population genetic parameters of the intra-patient environment to aid modeling efforts such as the spatial-monotherapy hypothesis. Notably, I develop a new ABC framework for estimation in adapting populations that can estimate migration rates much larger than those possible to estimate from tracking neutral alleles. This represents the first quantitative description (to our knowledge) of the within-patient spatial structure of HIV that accounts for adaptation.

Keywords: Biology.
Advisor: Petrov Dmitri Alex
Feldman Marcus W. 
Pennings Pleuni
Pritchard Jonathan (Jonathan K.) 
Rosenberg Noah
Exchange rate as a monetary-fiscal phenomenon

I develop a framework that connects exchange rates to monetary and fiscal policies. In my framework, government is like a company. On the one hand, each government has liabilities, which are mostly debt denominated in local currency. On the other hand, each government also has earnings, which are tax revenues net of government spendings. The government's liabilities are affected by its monetary policy, while its earnings are affected by its fiscal policy. Because the government uses its earnings to pay back its local currency debt, the value of the local currency reflects the present value of government surpluses per unit of government debt. This relationship predicts that exchange rates comove with fiscal conditions, and that currency risk premia are determined by the cyclicalities of government earnings, both of which are validated in the data.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Cochrane John H. (John Howland)
Lustig Hanno
Bryzgalova Svetlana 
Duffie Darrell