VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
International Taxation and Income-shifting Behaviour of Multinational Corporations

This thesis examines the income-shifting behaviour of multinational corporations when they are facing international corporate income tax rate differentials. Multinational corporations may apply tax-planning strategies in order to shift their pre-tax profits from a high-tax country to a low-tax country; therefore, the same amount of money would be subject to a lower tax rate. By doing so, multinational corporations minimize their global tax liabilities without changing their total income. The first essay develops a simple general equilibrium model by which to explore the effect of tax planning on the host country in terms of social welfare and optimal taxation. We endogenize multinational corporations’ investment decisions by allowing the user cost of capital to be affected by shifting decisions. We find that if tax rates are not excessively high, then an increase in tax planning activity causes a rise in optimal corporate tax rates, and a decline in multinational investment. Thus, fears of a “race to the bottom” in corporate tax rates may be misplaced. Also, we find that the residents in high-tax countries may be better off with (some) income shifting. We prove that there is an interior optimal thin capitalization rule (a restriction on the debt-to-equity ratio) that is lower than the degree of tax planning preferred by multinational firms. The second essay empirically examines the evidence of income-shifting behaviour of Canadian multinational corporations. The results are consistent with the income-shifting hypothesis that multinationals are inclined to shift their pre-tax profits to low-tax jurisdictions. I find that having non-arm’s length transactions with related parties in tax-haven countries has a significant negative impact on the taxable income that is reported in Canada. Further, I compare the different roles between small havens and large havens and find that the effect of having transactions with small havens is significantly negative, while the effect of having transactions with large tax havens is not significant. Also, I find that if Canadian corporations control their foreign-related corporations with whom they had non-arm’s length transactions, then they are more likely to report lower taxable incomes in Canada than are those that have other types of relationships with their foreign-related corporations.

Keywords: income shifting
international taxation
Advisor: Smart, Michael
A Critical Modern-spelling Edition of John Fletcher's "Rule a Wife and Have a Wife"

This dissertation is a fully-annotated scholarly edition of John Fletcher's 1624 play <i>Rule a Wife and Have a Wife</i>. Fletcher's comedy of intrigue about two couples who wed under false pretenses was his final non-collaborative play and represents the culmination of his achievements as a comic dramatist. It has received surprisingly little attention for a play that remained a staple of English and American theatres into the 1860s. The introduction to this edition is the most comprehensive study of the play to date. The critical examination of the domestic politics and structural patterning of the play argues that <i>Rule a Wife and Have a Wife</i> presents marriages that become protective spheres to shield spouses from the twin depredations of economic necessity and tyrannical power once the spouses have given up the urge to dominate each other. A section on Fletcher's language and style explores what Dryden praised as its imitation of the "conversation of gentlemen." The study of Fletcher's source material considers not only the two Spanish narratives he adapted, but also the resources of the King's Men and their theatres which influenced the play's composition. The introduction then contextualizes the play in its initial historical moment and the ways it reacts to England's preparations for war and the marriage negotiations for Prince Charles. The final two sections of the introduction examine the play's circulation in print and on stage. The stage history is supplemented by two appendices: a calendar of nearly 800 known performances and a collation of changes made in acting editions of the play. A recognition of the style and ubiquity of <i>Rule a Wife and Have a Wife</i> will aid scholars in understanding continuities of taste and repertoire in English drama.

Keywords: John Fletcher
Renaissance Drama
Advisor: Thomson, Leslie
Circuit Timing and Leakage Analysis in the Presence of Variability

Driven by the need for faster devices and higher transistor densities, technology trends have pushed transistor dimensions into the deep sub-micron regime. This continued scaling, however, has led to many challenges facing digital integrated circuits today. One important challenge is the increased variations in the underlying process and environmental parameters, and the significant impact of this variability on circuit timing and leakage power, making it increasingly difficult to design circuits that achieve a required specification. Given these challenges, there is a need for computer-aided design (CAD) techniques that can predict and analyze circuit performance (timing and leakage) accurately and efficiently in the presence of variability. This thesis presents new techniques for variation-aware timing and leakage analysis that address different aspects of the problem. First, on the timing front, a pre-placement statistical static timing analysis technique is presented. This technique can be applied at an early stage of design, when within-die correlations are still unknown. Next, a general parameterized static timing analysis framework is proposed, which supports a general class of nonlinear delay models and handles both random (process) parameters with arbitrary distributions and non-random (environmental) parameters. Following this, a parameterized static timing analysis technique is presented, which can capture circuit delay exactly at any point in the parameter space. This is enabled by identifying all potentially critical paths in the circuit through novel and efficient pruning algorithms that improve on the state of art both in theoretical complexity and runtime. Also on the timing front, a novel distance-based metric for robustness is proposed. This metric can be used to quantify the susceptibility of parameterized timing quantities to failure, thus enabling designers to fix the nodes with smallest robustness values in order to improve the overall design robustness. Finally, on the leakage front, a statistical technique for early-mode and late-mode leakage estimation is presented. The novelty lies in the random gate concept, which allows for efficient and accurate full-chip leakage estimation. In its simplest form, the leakage estimation reduces to finding the area under a scaled version of the within-die channel length auto-correlation function, which can be done in constant time.

Keywords: process variations, parameterized static timing analysis, variation-aware performance analysis
Advisor: Najm, Farid N.
Tracing the Itinerant Path: Jishū Nuns of Medieval Japan

Medieval Japan was a fluid society in which many wanderers, including religious preachers, traveled the roads. One popular band of itinerant proselytizers was the jishū from the Yugyō school, a gender inclusive Amida Pure Land Buddhist group. This dissertation details the particular circumstances of the jishū nuns through the evolving history of the Yugyō school. The aim is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the gender relations and the changing roles women played in this itinerant religious order. Based on the dominant Buddhist view of the status of women in terms of enlightenment, one would have expected the Buddhist schools to have provided only minimal opportunities for women. While the large institutionalized monasteries of the time do reflect this perspective, schools founded by hijiri practitioners, such as the early Yugyō school, contradict these expectations. This study has revealed that during the formation of the Yugyō school in the fourteenth century, jishū nuns held multiple and strong roles, including leadership of mix-gendered practice halls. Over time, as the Yugyō school became increasingly institutionalized, both in their itinerant practices and in their practice halls, there was a corresponding marginalization of the nuns. This thesis attempts to identify the causes of this change and argues that the conversion to a fixed lifestyle and the adoption of mainstream Buddhist doctrine discouraged the co-participation of women in their order.

Keywords: Medieval Japan
Advisor: Keirstead, Thomas
Frank Nunan and the Guelph Bookbindery: A Documentary Investigation

The History of the Book in Canada / Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada and other national book history projects have been a catalyst for research into the local production of print and have highlighted the need for more study of the print trades in smaller centres. In Ontario during the nineteenth century independent weekly newspapers were printed in most villages, while larger towns boasted more than one print shop and often one or more booksellers and stationers. Bookbinders were active members of the book trades selling books and stationery, ruling paper, binding local pamphlets, periodicals, and books, and manufacturing blankbooks for a variety of purposes. Since much local printing was ephemeral in nature, the only evidence of its existence is found in the record books kept by printers and binders. Partial business records and other surviving artifacts of the Guelph Bookbindery, which operated from 1855 to 1978, are both a rich source of evidence of the day-to-day operations of the bookbindery and a key to the intersection of print trades in Guelph, Ontario, and the surrounding counties. This study uses local imprints, blankbooks, authors’ papers, newspapers, directories, maps, assessment records, photographs, museum artifacts, and oral history accounts to reconstruct a history of the bookbindery and its place in the print culture of nineteenth-century Guelph. It documents the transformation of a business selling books, stationery, and wallpaper into a commercial bindery, which along with local printers produced large numbers of pamphlets, ubiquitous then but increasingly rare today. It is a view into the microcosm of a dynamic community where print was a vital medium for communication reflecting the cultural, commercial, and entrepreneurial discourse in nineteenth-century Canadian society that reached far beyond its borders.

Keywords: book history
print culture
nineteenth century
print trades
bookbinding
Guelph
Canada
Frank Nunan
Advisor: Fleming, Patricia
Constant-RMR Implementations of CAS and Other Synchronization Primitives Using Read and Write Operations

We consider asynchronous multiprocessors where processes communicate only by reading or writing shared memory. We show how to implement consensus, all comparison primitives (such as CAS and TAS), and load-linked/store-conditional using only a constant number of remote memory references (RMRs), in both the cache-coherent and the distributed-shared-memory models of such multiprocessors. Our implementations are blocking, rather than wait-free: they ensure progress provided all processes that invoke the implemented primitive are live. Our results imply that any algorithm using read and write operations, comparison primitives and load-linked/store-conditional, can be simulated by an algorithm that uses read and write operations only, with at most a constant-factor increase in RMR complexity.

Keywords: distributed computing
theory
shared memory
algorithms
compare and swap
synchronization
Advisor: Hadzilacos, Vassos
Surface and Crustal Response to Lithospheric Removal Processes: Insights From Numerical and Analogue Modeling

Geological, geophysical, and geochemical evidence indicates that a significant portion of the continental mantle lithosphere may be absent in a number of regions near plate boundaries or plate interiors. Delamination and viscous Rayleigh-Taylor instability (“dripping”) are widely cited to account for the missing lithosphere, however these removal processes are poorly constrained. This thesis examines the dynamics of delaminating and dripping mantle lithosphere, in particular focusing on the response of the crust to underlying lithospheric removal. Using forward computational models, I explore whether certain (surface) geological observables may be diagnostic of either removal mechanism. Surface topography associated with delamination has a broad zone of uplift above the lithospheric gap and a mobile zone of subsidence at the delamination hinge, whereas with dripping lithosphere, the topographic expression is symmetric and fixed above the mantle lithosphere downwelling. The pattern of crustal deformation is also distinctly asymmetric with delamination compared to dripping lithosphere. Expanding on these results, I investigate whether present day geological geophysical observables in Eastern Anatolia are consistent with delamination of the mantle lithosphere. Experimental results demonstrate that well-developed plateau uplift, syn-convergent extension, and crustal thinning in the central part of the Anatolian plateau are consistent with a topographic profile at longitude 42ºE and a geologically interpreted zone of syn-convergent extension in eastern Anatolia. With three-dimensional physical scaled analogue modeling experiments, I consider the process of oceanic plate subduction evolving into continental delamination. Model results show that slower plate convergence with retreating ocean lithosphere subduction can develop into delamination,whereas for the experiments with higher plate convergence, the crust above the consumed mantle lithosphere becomes accreted on the retro-plate similar to flake tectonics. The results suggest that delamination is a process analogous to subduction retreat; however, delamination involves decoupling of the retreating mantle lithosphere slab from the buoyant continental crust.

Keywords: Lithosphere
Delamination
Advisor: Pysklywec, Russell
Transition Metal Complexes and Main Group Frustrated Lewis Pairs for Stoichiometric and Catalytic P-P and H-H Bond Activation

Stoichiometric and catalytic small molecule activation reactions are vital for the synthesis of new materials. The activation of phosphorus-hydrogen or phosphorus-phosphorus bonds allows for the facile synthesis of new phosphorus-containing molecules for a wide variety of applications.1 An investigation of the P-H dehydrocoupling reaction was undertaken utilizing two rhodium(I) based catalysts. Over the course of this investigation it was found that the Rh(I) systems were also active catalysts for the reverse reaction: phosphorus-phosphorus bond hydrogenation (and hydrosilylation). This reaction was exploited for the synthesis of novel phosphines from P-P bound species. Molecules with P-P bonds were reacted in a stoichiometric fashion with the catalyst precursor, producing a variety of novel species with interesting bonding features which shed some light on the reaction mechanism. Following the discovery in 2006 that a linked phosphine-borane system could reversibly activate hydrogen2 a tremendous effort has been put forth to understand and expand this unprecedented reactivity.3,4 This new archetype for metal-free small molecule activation, containing a bulky Lewis acid and Lewis base which are unable to bond directly due to steric repulsion, has been termed a “frustrated Lewis pair” (FLP).3,4 The FLP concept is expanded to include bulky P-P bound species, pyridines and P-O bound Lewis bases as partners for B(C6F5)3. In some cases small molecule activation produced ion pairs or zwitterions related to those found for reactions with tertiary phosphines,3,4 but in others novel reaction pathways were discovered including phosphorus-phosphorus bond cleavage, catalytic hydrogenations and the formation of novel intramolecular FLPs. An unexpected situation was observed for the pair of 2,6-lutidine with B(C6F5)3, where adduct formation was observed along with free Lewis acid and base, but H2 activation by the FLP proceeded smoothly. Covalently bound phosphinoboranes of the general formula R2PB(C6F5)2 are synthesized. While systems with small R groups dimerized, monomers existed for cases with bulkier R groups. These monomers were found to exhibit extraordinarily short phosphorus-boron bonds yet were still capable of H2 activation analogous to bimolecular phosphine-borane systems. These systems also showed unique reactivity with Lewis acids and Lewis bases. This work further demonstrates the broad and general utility of the FLP concept in the synthesis of new materials and in catalytic transformations.

Keywords: frustrated Lewis pairs
small molecule activation
Advisor: Stephan, Douglas
Predicting the Use of Aggressive Behaviour among Canadian Amateur Hockey Players: A Psychosocial Examination

In the wake of 21 year old Don Sanderson’s death (January 1st, 2009), the direct result of head injuries sustained during an on-ice hockey fight, the social and political appetite for eliminating violence in amateur hockey appears to be at an all time high. Unfortunately, due to a variety of methodological and conceptual limitations previous research is currently unable to provide a unified and valid explanation for sport-specific aggression (Kirker, Tenenbaum, & Mattson, 2000). One of the primary impediments facing our understanding of sport-specific aggression is the descriptive and fragmented nature of the current body of literature. Over the years a number of independent lines of research have been undertaken, through which several psychological and social factors have been identified as potential determinants. However, in many cases these constructs have yet to be tested against athletes’ actual aggressive behaviour in sport and thus their predictive contribution to our understanding is still unknown. Consequently, the purpose of the current investigation was to assess the predictive influence of several commonly cited psychosocial constructs on amateur hockey players actual within-competition use of aggressive behaviour over a competitive season. A trait aggressive personality disposition emerged as the strongest and most stable predictor of athletes’ aggressive behaviour, accounting for 10 – 40% of the statistical variance depending upon the age and competitive level of the athletes under investigation. Differences in the overt expression of the this trait aggressive disposition between age cohorts (bantam / midget) and competitive levels (house league / rep) suggests that environmental and contextual factors also play a significant role in facilitating or repressing athletes’ aggressive behaviour. As such, the results of the current study support an interactive explanation for hockey-related aggression, whereby situational (e.g., team norms, perceived reinforcement) and personal factors (e.g., trait aggressive disposition, ego orientation) interact to either increase or decrease an athlete’s likelihood for committing aggressive penalty infractions over a competitive season. The current results are plotted and discussed within the parameters of Anderson and Bushman’s (2002) General Aggression Model (GAM), which is a frequently cited interactionist framework used in the broader study of human aggression.

Keywords: aggression
violence
hockey
predictive
framework
Advisor: Leith, Larry
Essays in Strategy

My research examines how different organizational phenomena function under psychological and cognitive constraints. My first study examines how audiences evaluate an established or taken-for-granted category in negative moods. Categories facilitate exchange by serving as mental models or schemas that substitute for an organization’s attributes to help audiences make sense of what they see. Established categories are further postulated to be legitimized and taken for granted by audiences. Both organizations and audiences are thought to place a high value on category membership, preferring the schema-based category to the individual attributes underlying the category. Considering the preferences of a broad audience segment about an established category, I examine the boundary conditions that can cause the schemas of a legitimized category to fail. I propose that negative mood or affect will blur the category boundary causing it to no longer be preferred to the individual attributes. I further hypothesize that negative affect will induce a reversal of preferences, and offer a unified theory as to why negative affect can cause audiences to prefer the attributes underlying the category over the category itself in their evaluations. Results from data on a representative sample of individuals support these hypotheses. In my second study, I examine how social capital accrues to individuals who were part of a group from which a member achieved prominence only after the dismantlement of the group. I employ a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to identify endogenous social effects in the context of the Hollywood film industry and find significant positive results for egos who worked with ex-post Oscar winning alters within four to six years prior to the alters’ Oscar win. Social capital effects break down, however, for length of prior years in either the too recent or too distant past. I attribute these findings to individuals’ incorrect recall of past events.

Keywords: categorization
social networks
negative affect
cognition
Advisor: Sorenson, Olav
"Sounding Nature, Sounding Place": Alternative Performance Spaces, Participatory Experience, and Ritual Performance in R. Murray Schafer’s Patria Cycle

R. Murray Schafer (b. 1933, Sarnia, Ontario, Canada) is a seminal voice in Canadian music, due not only to the often controversial, but widespread international reception of his extensive spectrum of works, but also, due to his distinct approach to composition. Schafer’s Patria cycle (1966- ) employs unorthodox performance locales and contexts, a confluence of art forms and sensory experiences, and demands active audience participation, defining Patria as one of the most ambitious stage works. In this dissertation I explore two essential frameworks that are seminal in the discussion of Patria; firstly Schafer’s compositional processes, broadly defined, that come into play in Patria, and secondly, the performative and theatrical aspects in Patria. Through four ethnographic case studies, I suggest that the use of alternative performance spaces, participatory performance, and ritual performance foster an artistic and social environment that has the potential, if participants choose to fully engage in the experience, to alter participants’ perception of the importance of the environment, community, spirituality, and artistic and sensorial experience in contemporary society. In Chapter 1 I provide a discussion of Schafer’s concepts of soundscape and the theatre of confluence and how they are applied in Patria, and outline my research methodology, including my fieldwork experiences from working onsite during Patria productions from 2003 through 2007. In Chapter 2 I examine and contextualize four aspects of performance that reoccur throughout Patria and are specifically detailed in my four case studies: alternative performance space, participatory experience, and ritual performance. My four case studies, Chapter 3 The Princes of the Stars, Chapter 4 Asterion, Chapter 5 The Enchanted Forest, and Chapter 6 And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon, argue that my participatory approach to Patria comprehensively illustrates how site, work, environment, and community interact, forming a distinctive performance experience.

Keywords: Canadian Music
Opera
Ritual
Ethnography
Participatory Performance
Performance Space
Soundscape
R. Murray Schafer
Community
Canadian Identity
Advisor: Elliott, Robin