VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays in monetary policy and international finance

This dissertation consists of three essays that examine aspects of monetary and exchange rate policy choices in developing and emerging market economies.
The first essay models limited financial market participation in less-developed economies to present a counterpoint to Milton Friedman’s well-known case for exchange rate flexibility. I analyze the welfare-maximizing choice of monetary policy in a small open economy with high financial exclusion and nominal rigidities. My findings suggest that the optimality of flexible exchange rates depends on whether agents are able to smooth consumption. When most households in an open economy are unable to hedge against international relative price fluctuations through the financial markets, nominal exchange rate targeting mitigates the resulting consumption volatility and approximates the optimal monetary policy.
The second essay analyzes the appropriate choice of an exchange rate regime in agricultural commodity-exporting economies with limited labor, product, and financial market development. Welfare analysis suggests that flexible exchange rates are preferred in well-functioning domestic markets as they allow for greater relative price fluctuations, which amplify the efficient transmission mechanism of labor re-allocation in response to commodity price volatility. When labor and product markets are inflexible, however, international relative price adjustments exacerbate currency and factor misalignments. Nominal exchange rate targeting, by mitigating relative wage and price fluctuations, is preferred to exchange rate flexibility.
The third essay investigates the effectiveness of restrictions on capital account transactions during periods of nominal exchange rate pressures. Using an event study approach, the paper examines the actions of the Bank of Tanzania which augmented its conventional monetary policy instruments by tightening capital account regulations three times from 2011 to 2015 in an attempt to stabilize the Tanzanian shilling. I show that while initially successful, at least over the short-run, the effectiveness of the controls declined the more they were used, raising concerns about the value of these instruments as part of the monetary policy toolkit.

Advisor: Adam, C
Ferrero, A
Simple Bayesian approaches to modelling pleiotropy in genetic association data

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have become one of the most common types of genetic studies, due to their success at finding markers associated with diseases and other traits of interest. With thousands of these studies performed in the last decade, a variety of methods have been developed to meta-analyze their results to search for variants that affect multiple traits. This thesis introduces one such method, based on approximate Bayes factors (ABFs), which relies only on effect size estimates and standard errors from GWAS. Through application to simulated data as well as three different datasets, we demonstrate the statistical properties, strengths, and limitations of our approach.
We show that only can this method be applied to the meta-analysis of a single trait across multiple studies, but because it does does not make strong assumptions about the similarity of effect sizes across traits, it can also be used to detect effects across multiple traits at a single marker. Additionally, it can account for confounding due to things like shared samples and can be applied exhaustively across all possible combinations of associations to determine the subset of traits or studies that are most likely to be associated with a given variant. This affords the opportunity to make statements about which traits explicitly are and are not associated with a marker, and these patterns can be explored over the whole genome to learn about the genetic relationships between different traits. We also discuss some of the individual markers highlighted by our analyses—some known, and some potentially novel—and the traits associated with them.

Advisor: Spencer, C
McVean, G
ORCA - towards an integrated noise-free quantum memory

Light is an ideal information carrier for quantum networks: its quantum properties are not degraded by noise in ambient conditions and it has a large information capacity owing to its high bandwidth. However, quantum technologies based on photonic networks have been hampered by the exponentially poor scaling of the underlying probabilistic quantum operations. Quantum optical memories, devices that store, manipulate, and release on- demand quantum light, have been identified as an indispensable network component, because they facilitate scalability. Noise-free operation of the memory is critical, since even small additional noise can render the memory classical by destroying the quantum character of the light.
Here I introduce a new broadband quantum memory protocol - the off-resonant cas- caded absorption (ORCA) memory - that is inherently noise-free and operates in ambient conditions. I model ORCA theoretically, after which I characterise the classical perfor- mance of a proof-of-concept implementation in warm caesium vapour, using weak near- infrared coherent states. In order to verify quantum operation of the ORCA memory, I interface it with a broadband heralded single-photon source. I measure and compare the quantum statistics of the stored and retrieved light, observing for the first time their full preservation in a room-temperature atomic quantum memory. Finally, I make headway into integrating the ORCA vapour memory by investigating an alkali-filled hollow-core fibre platform. I use light-induced atomic desorption (LIAD) to demonstrate record- breaking alkali vapour densities in fibre, a prerequisite for efficient memory operation.
Because of its technical simplicity and integrability, its high bandwidth and its low noise, ORCA provides a viable route towards next generation, photonic quantum network technologies.

Advisor: Nunn, J
Walmsley, I
The pathophysiological role of TDP-43 in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis due to C9orf72 mutations

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative condition that affects corticospinal and spinal motor neurons and leads to death within 30 months of symptom onset in half of all cases. It remains incurable and treatment is supportive. The genetic and molecular understanding of ALS has gone through a rapid expansion in recent years, notably with the discoveries of TDP-43, a heterogeneous ribonucleoprotein as a major component of neuronal inclusions in ALS, as well as the discovery of the C9orf72 hexanucleotide expansion as the most common genetic cause of this disease.
This first part of this thesis addresses the question of which of the various pathological hallmarks of the C9orf72 Hexanucleotide Repeat Expansion (HRE) in autopsy material correlates best with the clinical presentation. The main finding is that TDP-43 distribution, rather than C9orf72 RNA foci or dipeptide aggregation in the brain, corresponds best with the areas relevant to the clinical subtype of ALS-FTD. Subsequently the role of TDP-43 was investigated in induced pluripotent stem cell derived motor neurons, and no evidence of the hallmarks of TDP-43 dysfunction, were seen in this model of the disease. No mislocalisation is found on immunofluorescence, and biochemical analysis shows no differences in insoluble species between the patient and control cell lines. In the final section, RNA sequencing was used to study the transcriptome of a BAC transgenic mouse carrying a human M337V transgene expressed at low levels, to identify early presymptomatic differences in gene expression. Interestingly, no changes were found in genes known to be associated with ALS through mutations, and the constitutive nuclear functions of TDP-43 in the regulation of splicing was maintained, prior to the emergence of a clinical phenotype in the mouse. This favours a gain of function mechanism for TDP-43 mutations in ALS.

Keywords: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
C9orf72
TDP-43
Motor Neuron Disease
Advisor: Talbot, K
Extensions of Presburger arithmetic and model checking one-counter automata

This thesis concerns decision procedures for fragments of linear arithmetic and their application to model-checking one-counter automata. The first part of this thesis covers the complexity of decision problems for different types of linear arithmetic, namely the existential subset of the first-order linear theory over the p-adic numbers and the existential subset of Presburger arithmetic with divisibility, with all integer constants and coefficients represented in binary. The most important result of this part is a new upper complexity bound of NEXPTIME for existential Presburger arithmetic with divisibility. The best bound that was known previously was 2NEXPTIME, which followed directly from the original proof of decidability of this theory by Lipshitz in 1976. Lipshitz also gave a proof of NP-hardness of the problem in 1981. Our result is the first improvement of the bound since this original description of a decision procedure.
Another new result, which is both an important building block in establishing our new upper complexity bound for existential Presburger arithmetic with divisibility and an interesting result in its own right, is that the decision problem for the existential linear theory of the p-adic numbers is in the Counting Hierarchy CH, and thus within PSPACE. The precise complexity of this problem was stated as open by Weispfenning in 1988, who showed that it is in EXPTIME and NP-hard.
The second part of this thesis covers two problems concerning one-counter automata. The first problem is an LTL synthesis problem on one-counter automata with integer-valued and parameterised updates and with equality tests. The decidability of this problem was stated as open by Göller et al. in 2010. We give a reduction of this problem to the decision problem of a subset of Presburger arithmetic with divisibility with one quantifier alternation and a restriction on existentially quantified variables. A proof of decidability of this theory is currently under review.
The final result of this thesis concerns a type of one-counter automata that differs from the previous one in that it allows parameters only on tests, not actions, and it includes both equality and disequality tests on counter values. The decidability of the basic reachability problem on such one-counter automata was stated as an open problem by Demri and Sangnier in 2010. We show that this problem is decidable by a reduction to the decision problem for Presburger arithmetic.

Keywords: Presburger arithmetic
reachability problems
p-adic numbers
one-counter automata
Advisor: Worrell, J
The politics of procedural choice: regulating legislative debate in the UK House of Commons, 1811–2015

All democratic organisations operate under a particular set of rules. Such procedures are implemented by the very individuals that create and maintain them, usually under a majority voting rule. This research project engages with the question of why and how members of parliament "abdicate" procedural power, focusing on the evolution of the rules of debate in the UK House of Commons. Working from newly collected data on the reform of Standing Orders of the House spanning 205 years (1811–2015), as well as records of over six million speeches, it provides a new perspective on procedural choice. Framing debate as a platform for speech-as-filibuster behaviour, I develop a formal model where the decision to support an anti-dilatory reform is primarily a function of polarisation. I show that legislators adopt restrictive rules when they are more likely to share policy preferences with colleagues within their party. The presence of shared views, then, motivates MPs to prioritise responsible use of the common resource of plenary time over individual policy influence. Both empirically and theoretically, my research offers new insights into the process of parliamentary reform in the absence of party discipline, and studies how the dynamics of procedural choice change as political parties enter the stage. Methodologically, it makes a contribution to the text-as-data field, exploring the use of novel machine-learning techniques in the measurement of political preferences.

Keywords: Rules of debate
Parliamentary debate
Computational text analysis
UK House of Commons
Advisor: Zubek, R
Respect and criminal justice: the policies and practices of policing and imprisonment

Respect is a value whose importance in contemporary criminal justice many would endorse in principle. It is well-established that every person, by virtue of his or her humanity, has a claim to respect that need not be negotiated and cannot be forfeited. As the principal means by which to recognise a person's intrinsic worth, respect is attitudinal but also requires a degree of expressive action. The core claim of the thesis is that at two defining points in the criminal process – policing and imprisonment – there is an overwhelming preoccupation with instrumental outcomes, with the result that respect is understood reductively and, at best, as a weak side-constraint on the pursuit of those outcomes.

The thesis takes the form of a sustained critique of the respect deficit in policing and imprisonment. It is especially concerned with the ways in which both institutions are merely constrained and not characterised by respect. Respect shows great flexibility as a concept of critical enquiry, in particular, in its striking capacity to sharpen our critique of a diverse range of policies and practices. It swiftly emerges, for example, that both institutions appeal to the word 'respect' – relying on its inclusive ethos in official documentation when it is expedient to do so – but rarely and only superficially address the prior question of what it is to respect and be respected. Despite much criminological activity on the 'democratic design' of these institutions in recent decades, respect is more akin to a slogan than a foundational value of criminal justice practice.

Yet respect is not only of analytic merit. It is also a matter of material significance. The dominant institutional approach to respect would prove difficult to correct, sustained as it is by intuitive understandings, convenient fictions and a preoccupation with outcomes. With a sense of modest realism, the thesis concludes by considering how best to embed respect in policing and imprisonment, anticipating the challenges – as well as the advances that could be made – in inscribing respectful relations between state and subject.

Keywords: Law
Criminal justice
Respect
Moral values
Instrumentalism
Institutional practice and design
Policing
Imprisonment
Advisor: Loader, I
Characterization of the effect of dopamine on the neural coding of reward-based learning and decision-making

Dopamine has an important role in normal cognition and reward processing, both of which are impaired in disorders involving dopamine dysfunction such as addiction, schizophrenia, and Parkinson’s disease. However, our understanding of the interplay between different aspects of the dopamine system and reward-guided behavior in humans is limited. Food is an important type of reward that is critical for survival and impacts the decisions we make every day. Here, we characterize the relationship between two food-reward related phenotypes and dopamine synthesis capacity (related to tonic dopamine) as well as dopamine D1 and D2 receptor availability in healthy humans.
First, we examined the link between dopamine synthesis and receptor availability and body mass regulation in 117 individuals with body mass index (BMI) values ranging from normal to obese. We found that current BMI was related to a pattern of increased dopamine synthesis in the hypothalamus, a region important for homeostatic control of appetite, but decreased dopamine D2 receptor availability in the midbrain, where D2 autoreceptors regulate dopamine release throughout the brain. This suggests that increased BMI is related to a dopamine imbalance between homeostatic drivers of appetite and reward system regulatory control mechanisms that could result in an overactive, unregulated intake of food.
Building on this finding, we studied the link between dopamine synthesis capacity and receptor availability and an important food-reward related behavior, foraging. Fifty-seven healthy volunteers completed a computer-based foraging task where we measured their threshold for leaving one group of rewards to search for another in four different reward environments varying from a low to high rate of reward receipt. We found that two particular patterns of dopamine synthesis and receptor availability in the anterior cingulate cortex and basal ganglia were linked to the amount that individuals changed their threshold based on the reward rate of the environment.
Finally, since the prefrontal cortex is known to be important for reward-guided behavior, we implemented two methodological advancements aimed to address limitations that make it difficult to measure cortical dopamine in humans with PET imaging. The first method involves partial volume correction and surface-based smoothing in order to increase the signal to noise in the cortex. The second method is a data-driven PET data parcellation and automated reference region selection algorithm to optimize the voxels included in the reference region.
In conclusion, we have characterized the dopaminergic contribution of two different foodreward guided phenotypes and have developed two techniques that will aid future research on the role of cortical dopamine. Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying these rewardguided behaviors helps us to not only understand normal behavior, but also serves as a reference for comparison when studying related pathological states.

Keywords: body mass index
foraging
dopamine
Advisor: Behrens, T
The catalytic properties of Fe-S cluster containing enzymes

Many enzymes contain iron- sulfur (Fe-S) clusters which have a huge impact on their catalytic properties. These clusters may form part of the active site or form an electron relay system from the surface of the protein to the active site. Protein film electrochemistry (PFE) was utilized to elucidate the properties of some Fe-S cluster enzymes, namely, Hyd-1(a hydrogenase with an Fe-S electron relay), PceA (a reductive dehalogenase containing Fe-S clusters to facilitate electron transfer with redox partner) and CODH ICh and CODH IICh (carbon monoxide dehydrogenases with Fe-S electron relay systems and Ni-incorporated Fe-S clusters as active sites). The role of a proline residue at the active site in Hyd-1 was investigated and it was concluded that some local instability and adverse effect on H2 activation were introduced upon replacement of proline with an alanine residue. The PceA dehalogenase was studied with PFE in terms of their interactions with various substrates and inhibitors. Furthermore, a method for performing 'film correction' for liquid substrates as that of the dehalogenase was established. Aspects of the catalytic cycle and effects of oxygen (O2), peroxide (H2O2) and hydroxylamine (NH2OH), a nitrogen-containing peroxide analogue on CODH ICh and CODH IICh were investigated with PFE. Finally, Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS), a technique involving application of alternating current (AC), was added to the portfolio was PFE techniques to compare CpI and CrHydA1 (hydrogenases with and without Fe-S electron relay system, respectively) in terms of time-dependent and time-independent processes within them. A novel term, exchange catalytic rate, for expressing inherent proficiency of the enzyme at zero-current potential was proposed and quantified. A means for measuring electroactive coverage and theoretical turnover during catalysis in PFE experiments was developed.

Advisor: Armstrong, F
Consequence-based reasoning for SRIQ ontologies

Description logics (DLs) are knowledge representation formalisms with numerous applications and well-understood model-theoretic semantics and computational properties. SRIQ is a DL that provides the logical underpinning for the semantic web language OWL 2, which is the W3C standard for knowledge representation on the web.
A central component of most DL applications is an efficient and scalable reasoner, which provides services such as consistency testing and classification. Despite major advances in DL reasoning algorithms over the last decade, however, ontologies are still encountered in practice that cannot be handled by existing DL reasoners.
Consequence-based calculi are a family of reasoning techniques for DLs. Such calculi have proved very effective in practice and enjoy a number of desirable theoretical properties. Up to now, however, they were proposed for either Horn DLs (which do not support disjunctive reasoning), or for DLs without cardinality constraints. In this thesis we present a novel consequence-based algorithm for TBox reasoning in SRIQ—a DL that supports both disjunctions and cardinality constraints. Combining the two features is non-trivial since the intermediate consequences that need to be derived during reasoning cannot be captured using DLs themselves. Furthermore, cardinality constraints require reasoning over equality, which we handle using the framework of ordered paramodulation—a state-of-the-art method for equational theorem proving. We thus obtain a calculus that can handle an expressive DL, while still enjoying all the favourable properties of existing consequence-based algorithms, namely optimal worst-case complexity, one-pass classification, and pay-as-you-go behaviour.
To evaluate the practicability of our calculus, we implemented it in Sequoia—a new DL reasoning system. Empirical results show substantial robustness improvements over well-established algorithms and implementations, and performance competitive with closely related work.

Keywords: OWL 2
Ontologies
Semantic Web
Classification
Advisor: Horrocks, I
Grau, B
Motik, B
Discourses of heroism in Brezhnev’s USSR

This thesis examines propaganda and educational campaigns in the Brezhnev-era USSR, where the Party-state continued the longstanding Soviet attempt to form the country's youth into conscientious builders and defenders of communism. Focusing on the military, military-historical and physical-cultural activity that the state identified as areas of strategic importance in a period of intensifying competition with the capitalist world, the thesis analyses the interactions between propaganda and its producers, and the ordinary and extraordinary young people at whom it was aimed. It finds that state agencies and organisations of the Brezhnev era followed tradition in employing heroic motifs and discourses to elicit heroic behaviour amongst the population, often seeking to apply themes and material from earlier periods directly to the situation of late-1960s and 1970s youth. In particular, propaganda emphasised the importance of both models of wartime heroism, and the characteristics articulated in the 1961 Moral Code of the Builder of Communism – but in a political and social environment now much changed from those in which they had originally emerged.
The thesis begins with a study of material surrounding the reinstatement of universal conscription after Khrushchev's army reforms, before examining youth involvement in one of the flagship military-patriotic education campaigns of the period. The second part of the thesis then shifts the focus to a more symbolic, yet no less significant site of the 'defence of the honour of the Motherland': the international sporting arena, particularly during the 1972 Olympiads in 'hostile' West Germany and Japan. Through a case study of coverage of the gymnast Olga Korbut, the thesis argues that, while propaganda-makers still sought to control the Soviet definition of 'heroism', conditions increasingly allowed for the emergence of celebrity and a popular heroism based more on self-advancement and public acclaim than on established Soviet ethical models.

Keywords: Communist Youth League (Soviet Union)
Komsomol
USSR under Brezhnev
propaganda (Soviet)
heroism
late socialism
youth policy (USSR)
Advisor: Kelly, C