VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays on indeterminacy [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of two independent essays, each of which is concerned with the phenomenon of indeterminacy, or situations in which there is no fact of the matter. The first essay provides a precise account of W. V. Quine's understanding of "no fact of the matter, " as that phrase features in his indeterminacy theses. In doing so it explores connections with Quine's notion of compatibility (or its correlative, determination) and also his physicalism. The second essay provides a comprehensive framework for theorizing, in a principled way, about the nature of indeterminacy. The guiding thought behind this framework is that indeterminacy essentially involves some sort of underdetermination by more basic facts. The framework breaks into two parts. The first part provides a minimal characterization of the generic concept of indeterminacy. The second part uses this minimal characterization to identify and give precise definitions of a number of different types or conceptions of the nature of indeterminacy. Some of these types are semantic, locating the source of indeterminacy in the meaning of our words or concepts; the others are metaphysical, locating the source of indeterminacy in the mind-independent world.

Keywords: Philosophy.
Advisor: Crimmins Mark primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Burgess Alexis
Hussain Nadeem J. Z. advisor. Thesis advisor
Taylor Kenneth Allen
Essays on the economics of disability and disability insurance [electronic resource]

This dissertation comprises three essays on the economics of disability and disability insurance. Modern societies have developed a wide array of insurance arrangements intended to protect individuals from the economic consequences of work disability. My dissertation research examines how individual and firm behavior responds to the administration, financing, and benefit design of three disability insurance system. Chapter 1 estimates how sickness insurance claiming behavior among Chilean workers covered by private insurance responds to the threat of claim rejections. It also uses diagnosis specific-estimates of this deterrent effect to test whether the private health insurance companies that administer sickness insurance benefits in Chile choose the stringency with which they evaluate claims in a way consistent with social optimality. Chapter 2 provides new evidence on the extent to which workers bear the cost of Workers' Compensation insurance through reduced wages. Chapter 3 investigates the role of private information in coverage choice in an employer-provided Short-Term Disability insurance plan.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Pistaferri Luigi primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Einav Liran advisor. Thesis advisor
Hoxby Caroline Minter advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on top income inequality [electronic resource]

Top income inequality, defined as the income gap within the top 1% income group, has been rising in the United States since the 1980s but remained low and stable in economies like France and Japan. Why? This dissertation studies what might have affected the widening income gap in the United States as well as the cross-country differences. The first chapter considers the most natural candidate: the effect of the top marginal tax rate on the high-income taxpayers. Identifying endogenous human capital accumulation as a link between top marginal tax rates and top incomes, this chapter shows that a decline in the top marginal tax rate can increase top income inequality as well as top incomes. We develop an infinite-horizon, heterogeneous agent model, where human capital accumulation is endogenously characterized by a proportional random growth process. If the top marginal tax rate declines, the benefit of human capital investment will increase, thereby increasing the growth rate of human capital. Since this growth rate pins down the Pareto inequality measure of the top income distribution, a decrease in the top marginal tax rate will lead to a more unequal Pareto income distribution, while simultaneously increasing every top income. When calibrated to the U.S. income data, the model finds that the reduction of the top marginal tax rate from 60% to 35% can account for 46.6% of the increase in top income inequality and 41.0% of the increase in the top 1% income share between 1980 and 2010. The second chapter theoretically examines three other candidates: the rise in the rate of top income growth, the direction of technological change, and misallocation of top talents to firms. The first model shows that if the growth rate of top incomes increases either by the rise in the returns to experience or by the rise in human capital accumulation effort, the top income inequality increases. The second model studies the direction of technological change and shows why the technological changes can be "talent-biased" at least along a transition path. The last model shows that top income inequality can increase when the matching between firms and talent becomes more efficient. This suggests that the rise in top income inequality in the United States may reflect an improvement in the allocation of talent.

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Jones Charles primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Weyant John P. (John Peter) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Klenow Peter J. advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on uncertainty analysis in energy modeling [electronic resource] : capacity planning, R&D portfolio management, and fat-tailed uncertainty

The characterization and analysis of uncertainty are central components of decision-making, especially in the energy sector; however, there is currently a gap in the energy modeling community between the recognition of uncertainty's importance and its incorporation in large-scale models. This dissertation explores how the explicit inclusion of uncertainty through sequential decision-making approaches like stochastic programming can provide insights to energy planners in different domains. The dissertation first investigates the dynamics of capacity planning and dispatch in the electric power sector under technological, economic, and policy-related uncertainties. Metrics like the expected value of perfect information and the value of the stochastic solution quantify the benefits of reducing uncertainty and of incorporating uncertainty explicitly in modeling efforts. Model results highlight risks associated with shale gas and climate policy, offer policy guidance in these areas, and indicate that planners are likely underestimating the impacts of uncertainty. Hedging and strategic delay are explained in terms of the optionality of energy investments, leading to insights about uncertainty, learning, and irreversibility. A second application presents a framework for allocating investments across a portfolio of energy technology research and development (R& D) programs, which incorporates uncertainties in the effectiveness of investments and in diffusion markets. This work analyzes how R& D valuations vary in different decision-making settings and shows how wait-and-see valuation approaches, by not explicitly accounting for exogenous market uncertainties, may undervalue the hedging potential of technologies. The results indicate that R& D is more valuable in suboptimal planning and policy environments. The final section discusses policy and modeling questions about low-probability, high-impact risks in climate change economics. This analysis examines the impacts of fat-tailed uncertainty about the climate sensitivity parameter on near-term abatement using a sequential decision-making framework. The results demonstrate how policy prescriptions from integrated assessment models are highly sensitive to the specifications of uncertainty, learning, and damages. Fat tails alone do not merit stringent mitigation immediately, which also requires strongly convex damages and slow learning. The analysis illustrates the potential value of midcourse corrections on reducing consumption risks imposed by uncertain damages and focuses attention on the dynamics of learning.

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Weyant John P. (John Peter) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Infanger Gerd
Sweeney James L. advisor. Thesis advisor
Estimation of errors-in-variables models with no auxiliary data [electronic resource]

This paper considers estimation in the context of regression models where some of the regressors are measured with errors. The regression model is identified under the assumption of strict exogeneity in the regression equation and classical errors. The structural model is equivalent to a certain infinite set of moment conditions, which allows me to construct a CGMM (continuous GMM) estimator for the parameters of the model. Alternatively, I also construct a finite-dimensional GMM by selecting a subset of moment conditions. Both frameworks are discussed in the paper, as they need to be augmented in order to allow for complex-valued moments. Monte-Carlo simulations show that my proposed estimation technique is several times better in terms of MSE than the alternatives proposed in the earlier literature.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Hong Han primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Romano Joseph P.
Wolak Frank A. advisor. Thesis advisor
Evaluation and application of novel tools for musculoskeletal and body MRI [electronic resource]

Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease for which there is currently no cure. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a promising non-invasive imaging method for early detection of osteoarthritis because it can assess joint physiology before irreversible damage occurs. Despite current advances in MRI technology, there remains a significant need for validation and application of novel techniques in order for quantitative MRI parameters to be used as a tool for evaluating the effectiveness of new therapies in early osteoarthritis. The purpose of this dissertation is to measure, evaluate and apply novel techniques for in vivo knee cartilage studies of osteoarthritis progression using quantitative MRI parameters. First, we validated three novel quantitative MRI techniques in the knee cartilage of healthy volunteers at 3T, and we found they were sufficiently reproducible to measure changes expected in osteoarthritic cartilage. Next, we applied these three new sequences to ACL-injured patients who are at risk for premature osteoarthritis, despite surgical reconstruction. We measured significant changes in quantitative MRI parameters over time, which support the potential of these MRI techniques to detect and quantify early molecular changes in cartilage degeneration leading to osteoarthritis. Finally, we measured the relaxation times of musculoskeletal knee tissues at ultra-high field strength, 7T, and compared them with those at standard clinical field strength, 3T. We used these measurements as design parameters for potential clinical pulse sequences at 7T that achieved both high spatial resolution and similar fluid-to-cartilage image contrast as that of standard 3T clinical protocols, providing tools for musculoskeletal research at ultra-high field strength.

Keywords: Bioengineering.
Advisor: Hargreaves Brian Andrew primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Gold Garry E.
Pelc Norbert J. advisor. Thesis advisor
Evasion paths in mobile sensor networks [electronic resource]

Suppose that ball-shaped sensors wander in a bounded domain. A sensor doesn't know its location but does know when it overlaps a nearby sensor. We say that an evasion path exists in this sensor network if a moving evader can avoid detection. In "Coordinate-free coverage in sensor networks with controlled boundaries via homology", Vin de Silva and Robert Ghrist give a necessary condition, depending only on the time-varying connectivity graph of the sensors, for an evasion path to exist. Can we sharpen this result? We show that the existence of an evasion path depends not only on the fibrewise homotopy type of the region covered by sensors but also on the ambient isotopy class of its embedding in spacetime. For planar sensors that also measure weak rotation and distance information, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an evasion path. Furthermore, we study the entire space of evasion paths using a homotopy spectral sequence for diagrams of spaces due to Emmanuel Dror Farjoun and Alexander Zabrodsky.

Keywords: Mathematics.
Advisor: Carlsson Gunnar
Cohen Ralph L.
Guibas Leonidas J. advisor. Thesis advisor
Evolution of whole protein and peptide microarray platforms for biological discovery and personalized medicine [electronic resource]

Since the advent of microarray technology in the early 1990's, the development of highly multiplex genomics tools has greatly outpaced the field of proteomics in terms of the generation of useful platforms for basic research and clinical analysis. Yet, to deliver on the great promise of genomics tools that analyze nucleic acids, technologies that permit the analysis of protein-protein interactions on a comparable scale need to be developed. Our group and others have shown that whole-protein and peptide microarrays can provide large amounts of information about the protein interactions that underlie the human immune response in health and disease. Here we describe three novel proteomics microarray platforms and demonstrate that the arrays can be used to gain insight into the antibody-mediated immune response in a spectrum of human diseases. In the first study, we detail the generation of a protein microarray that allows the detection of antibodies that bind to the molecular communication factors of the immune system: cytokines, chemokines, growth factors, and other circulating proteins. Using these arrays, we identified novel targets of autoantibodies in systemic lupus erythematosus, which may delineate a unique subgroup of patients within the spectrum of lupus. In the second study, we describe influenza antigen microarrays that permitted the identification of antibody reactivity to specific influenza hemagglutinin epitopes associated with poor or effective response to the seasonal influenza vaccine. These arrays have potential for development into a clinical diagnostic tool capable of predicting an individual's ability to mount an effective antibody response to vaccination. Finally, we report the development of a silicon-based peptide microarray developed in collaboration with researchers at the Intel Corporation. These "Intel arrays" hold great potential for ultimately enabling highly parallel, real-time measurement of protein-protein interaction with myriad possible downstream applications. The technologies we have developed move the field of multiplex proteomic analysis forward on many fronts, and constitute valuable additions to the proteomics toolkit available to researchers and clinicians. Moreover, our work demonstrates that detailed analysis of protein-protein interaction is required to make more informed models of different states of human health and disease.

Keywords: Immunology.
Advisor: Utz Paul primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Lewis David advisor. Thesis advisor
Robinson William (William Hewitt) advisor. Thesis advisor
Steinman Lawrence advisor. Thesis advisor
Exchange Rate Pass-Through on EBay

In this paper, I measure exchange rate pass-through based on eBay transactions. I focus on “seller experiments,” exploiting situations in which a seller lists an item multiple times. I start with U.S. import pass-through from Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. I calculate an average short-run pass-through of 0.2, which is comparable to estimates in the literature. I then measure pass-through at the monthly, weekly, and daily level. I find monthly pass-through decreases over time, while daily pass through peaks after about seven days before decreasing. Next, I examine how an item’s uniqueness, its seller volume, and its price affect pass-through. I find that unique items garner a higher pass-through than mainstream, that items from high-volume sellers have a higher pass-through than from low, and that item price has no effect on pass-though. Finally, I measure both import and export pass-through for a variety of OECD countries. I find weak evidence that the two are inversely related, and that the greater a country’s currency’s influence on the world or other countries, the lower its import pass-through and higher its export pass-through. I examine pass-through between country pairs and find similar pass-through estimates between a country and a group of countries similar to each other.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
pass-through
pricing to market
internet markets
Thesis
Advisor: Einav Liran
Executive stock options, firm performance and risk [electronic resource]

This dissertation comprises two essays on the use of stock options as compensation. In the first I examine the implementation of stock option plans in the 1950s as a natural experiment through which to examine the incentive implications of stock options. In the 1950 Revenue Act, Congress created "restricted stock options" that received favorable tax treatment compared to other forms of compensation. Immediately prior to change in tax law, there was almost no use of stock options for compensation. Over subsequent years, the majority of firms in my sample implement stock option plans. I find evidence that executives appear to respond to stock option plans by increasing firm risk and decreasing dividend payments. However, I do not find that firms implementing stock option plans subsequently perform better, and in fact find that in terms of ROA, they perform worse over the two years after putting a stock option plan in place. The second essay examines the economic consequences associated with the board of director choice of whether to adhere to proxy advisory firm policies in the design of stock option repricing programs. Proxy advisors provide research and voting recommendations to institutional investors on issues subject to a shareholder vote. Since many institutional investors follow the recommendations of proxy advisors in their voting, proxy advisor policies are an important consideration for corporate boards in the development of programs that require shareholder approval such as stock option repricing programs. Using a comprehensive sample of stock option repricings announced between 2004 and 2009, we find that repricing firms following the restrictive policies of proxy advisors exhibit statistically lower market reaction to the repricing, lower operating performance, and higher employee turnover. These results are consistent with the conclusion that proxy advisory firm recommendations regarding stock option repricings are not value increasing for shareholders.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Larcker David F. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Beyer Anne advisor. Thesis advisor
Rajan Madhav V. advisor. Thesis advisor
Exogenous migratory therapy [electronic resource] : investigating ex vivo-derived dendritic cell migration and delivery of anti-inflammatory therapy after stroke

Stroke is the fourth leading cause of death in industrialized countries and is a major cause of disability in the United States. Protein therapy shows promise for the reduction of brain damage following stroke; however, current delivery methods lack the ability to efficiently deliver therapeutic proteins to the brain without invasive methods. It is possible to exploit normal inflammation in the brain, and the resultant immune cell migration following stroke, by injecting modified leukocytes such as dendritic cells that act as carriers of protective transgenes in a non-invasive, ischemia-targeted manner. With this solution in mind, my thesis focused on investigating the mechanisms of ex vivo-derived dendritic cell (exDC) migration to the stroke brain and using exDCs as vehicles for the delivery of anti-inflammatory proteins. I determined that the number of exDCs that migrate to the brain after stroke is positively correlated with the level of inflammation 6 hour after stroke. Tissue damage is also positively correlated with inflammation at this same time point. Finally, I investigated whether exDCs could be modified to deliver anti-inflammatory therapy after stroke. ExDCs were successfully transduced to constitutively express soluble TNF receptor 1 (sTNFR1) secrete functional protein that does not alter the phenotype or migratory ability of the cells. Importantly, when sTNFR1-exDCs are delivered after stroke they reduce inflammation and damage in vivo. These studies indicate that the use of cell-mediated protein delivery may be a promising new approach to reduce brain damage following acute neurological insult.

Keywords: Biology.
Advisor: Sapolsky Robert M. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
McConnell Susan K. advisor. Thesis advisor
Michie Sara advisor. Thesis advisor
Wyss-Coray Anton advisor. Thesis advisor
Experiences in the form of packets [electronic resource] : an epi-hedonic framework of active versus passive experiences

Conventional wisdom suggests that to maximize a hedonic experience (e.g., vacations, concerts, movies), one ought to actively prepare for those experiences (e.g., , by planning, anticipating, savoring). However, in situations ranging from creating music playlists to watching TV shows to studying art, I find that not preparing for experiences (having passive experiences) yields greater pleasure, while preparing for experiences (having active experiences) can reduce pleasure. This occurs because information processing before an experience distorts how that experience is consumed. Unlike basic stimuli, experiences are structured events that flow and unfold over time, and are often composed of ordered sequences of information-packets (e.g., scenes in a movie). Since not all packets are remembered or promoted equally, active experiences (which can depend on memory and/or exogenous cues for information) result in focalism on focal packets and derogation of non-focal packets. In other words, passive versus active modes of experiencing can change the relative experienced utility of the individual packets of an experience. However, preparing for experiences (active experiencing) is not strictly hedonically detrimental; active experiences can enhance pleasure when 1) the worst packets are considered along with the best packets, or 2) when there is no information on the structure of the experience (e.g., , you do not know when the focal packet will come). Experimental findings contribute to a conceptual framework of Epi-hedonics (the impact of pre-experiential cognitive processes on experiencing hedonic experiences) that has theoretical implications and an integrative framework for conceptualizations of utility and reward, and practical implications for repeat consumption, service design, promotional strategies, and the validity of marketing.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Shiv Baba
Khan Uzma (Professor of marketing)
Tormala Zakary L. advisor. Thesis advisor