VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Three Applied Economic Studies in Collaboration with Government Policymakers

This manuscript features three independent applications of contemporary/ntechniques in applied economics conducted in collaboration with three different/ngovernments. In the first essay, I present findings from an experimental/nintervention conducted in collaboration with the government of the Dominican/nRepublic in which the government varies whether front-line volunteer/ncommunity workers are recruited through a public advertisement or through/nlocal staff referrals. I find that governments likely face tradeoffs in selecting/noptimal recruiting mechanisms as publicly recruited candidates demonstrate/nsuperior observable characteristics to referred candidates across a wide variety of/nindicators except for the key indicator of cognitive skills. I also find public/ncandidates are more likely to accept job offers and attend trainings conditional/non being hired. To my knowledge, this is the first study to rigorously test the/nimpacts of an open public recruitment process versus a private targeted/nrecruitment process./nIn the second essay, my co-author and I evaluate impacts of a World Bank/nfunded road improvement and employment generation intervention in/nNicaragua. We employ a difference-in-difference research design, matching/nproprietary road building data from the government of Nicaragua’s Ministry of/nTransportation with three rounds of a publicly available household survey. We/nfind strong evidence that the World Bank’s Fourth Roads Rehabilitation and/nMaintenance Project fulfilled its primary goal of improving road infrastructure/nand suggestive evidence of select economic and social impacts. Notably, we do/nnot observe impacts on the likelihood of employment or incidence of poverty./nIn the third essay, I collaborate with the City of San Francisco’s Office of/nthe Treasurer to investigate mechanisms that potentially mediate household/ndecisions to save for distant future expenditures with particular relevance for/neducation-oriented savings. Employing a randomized experiment in the natural/nsetting of the Kindergarten-to-College school district-wide college savings/nprogram, I vary the messages of postcard savings reminders with information/nabout either the availability of college financial aid or the increasing cost of/ntuition. My results suggest that savings reminders may overcome inattention to/nlumpy future expenditures, but only among those who intended to save. I find/nno evidence that manipulating the salience of college cost affects savings/nbehavior.

Advisor: de Janvry, Alain
Fundamentals of Music Perception in the Human Brain: Insight from Electrophysiological Recordings

Music perception has fascinated neuroscientists and psychologists for over a century. Ever since the advent of neuroimaging techniques in the second half of the 20th century, the scientific community has benefitted from a wealth of research studying the cortical mechanisms that facilitate one of the basic forms of human cognition. While hemodynamic techniques and lesion studies provide insight to the cortical structures implicated in distinct aspects of music perception, non-invasive electrophysiological equipment provides the temporal resolution necessary to track the processing of music. However, observations are usually constrained to either the spatial or temporal domain due to the limitations of each experimental method. As a result, the combined spatial and temporal dynamics of both sensory and cognitive processing of musical stimuli remain largely unknown. Intracranial recordings in neurosurgical patients have high spatial and temporal resolution, thereby providing a means to investigate some of the many unanswered questions in the music neuroscience literature. As few music perception studies to date have tapped on this valuable resource, this dissertation provides one of the first attempts at utilizing both electrocorticography (ECoG) and EEG to understand the fine-grained cortical dynamics of auditory stimulus processing and music perception at the fundamental level. Specifically, the studies reveal that: 1) the superior temporal gyrus exhibits differential processing of consonance and dissonance at a spatial resolution of 1cm; 2) the ventral temporal cortex, conventionally involved in visual recognition and categorization, exhibits neural representations of auditory target identification; 3) selective attention to either pitch direction changes or the consonant/dissonant properties of musical chords implicates a wide range of cortical networks that scale with task complexity.

Advisor: Knight, Robert T
The Commitment Credibility of Public-Employee Pensions

Public-employee pensions have grown significantly in cost in recent years, and will continue to be one of the central policy problems that state and local governments confront in the 21st Century. Pensions show United States' federalism at work: they vary tremendously across and within states. I examine the causes and consequences of this variation. Specifically, I ask how democratically-elected politicians can commit to pension performance, and what are consequences do pensions and politicians' decisions have?/nThis dissertation presents three separate empirical papers using data from 103 plans across all 50 states from 2001-2011. I also include introductory, transitional, and concluding sections. As discussed both here and in prior literature, politicians have clear incentives to compensate employees through pensions, while disguising expenses and skipping payments. This has led to significant costs and increased attention to pensions./nThe first paper focuses on the factors leading to variation in pensions' financial performance, or funding ratios. Centrally, I find that as management board personnel is increasingly insulated from political control, performance improves. The second paper focuses on politicians' contributions into funds. There, I uncover evidence that politicians prefer to commit to pensions covering police and fire employees. They also tend to skip payments when prior economic performance and investment returns are higher. This shows that elected officials prefer to keep taxes low when possible, even at the cost of underfunding pensions./nThe third paper pivots to examine a consequence of pensions: how they affect public-employee retirement rates. I present a simple theoretical model showing how reductions in commitments from employers might make public-employees less likely to believe they will receive their full pension benefits, and in turn, more likely to retire. I then present empirical evidence that as pensions are more controlled by politicians, retirements increase. Poorer funding from the prior year also is associated with increased retirements, providing evidence that performance generates feedback effects for human capital. Jointly, my papers provide broad and novel insight into the causes and consequences of variation in public pensions.

Advisor: Gailmard, Sean
First-principles Simulations of Minerals in Earth and Planetary Interiors

In the deep interiors of planets, the pressures and the temperatures are significantly higher than at ambient condition. The interplay between compression and thermal expansion leads to complexity in the chemistry and physical properties of minerals. Improved knowledge of the behavior of dominant minerals inside the Earth and other planets is essential for understanding the structure, dynamics, and evolution of planetary systems./nIn this dissertation, I study materials in environments ranging from the deep mantle of the Earth to the core boundary of Jovian planets and to stellar interiors, using computer simulation with first-principles methods. The contents of this dissertation are as follows: Chapters 1-2 provide an overview of Earth and planetary minerals, and a background of first-principles computer simulation methodology. Chapter 3 discusses the thermoelasticity of iron- and aluminum-bearing MgSiO$_3$ in the Earth's lower-mantle. Chapter 4 is about novel phases of hydrogen-oxygen compounds at giant-planet interior conditions. Chapter 5 presents an equation of state of warm dense sodium. We conclude that lower-mantle mineralogy is in accord with the pyrolite model; we demonstrate that minerals can have counter-intuitive stoichiometry and phases at high pressure; and we provide a coherent first-principles equation of state table of sodium in a wide range of density and temperature conditions. This work illustrates the importance of first-principles simulations as powerful tools in Earth and planetary science studies. Finally, chapter 6 discusses possible directions for future work in the field of computational mineral physics.

Advisor: Militzer, Burkhard
Quantales and Hyperstructures

We present a theory of lattice-enriched semirings, called \emph{quantic semirings}, which generalize both quantales and powersets of hyperrings. Using these structures, we show how to recover the spectrum of a Krasner hyperring (and in particular, a commutative ring with unity) via universal constructions, and generalize the spectrum to a new class of hyperstructures, \emph{hypersemirings}. (These include hyperstructures currently studied under the name ``semihyperrings'', but we have weakened the distributivity axioms.)/nMuch of the work consists of background material on closure systems, suplattices, quantales, and hyperoperations, some of which is new. In particular, we define the category of covered semigroups, show their close relationship with quantales, and construct their spectra by exploiting the construction of a universal quotient frame by Rosenthal./nWe extend these results to hypersemigroups, demonstrating various folkloric correspondences between hyperstructures and lattice-enriched structures on the powerset. Building on this, we proceed to define quantic semirings, and show that they are the lattice-enriched counterparts of hypersemirings. To a quantic semiring, we show how to define a universal quotient quantale, which we call the \emph{quantic spectrum}, and using this, we show how to obtain the spectrum of a hypersemiring as a topological space in a canonical fashion./nFinally, we we conclude with some applications of the theory to the ordered blueprints of Lorscheid.

Advisor: Baker, Matt
Olsson, Martin
(Dis)Plazas and (Dis)Placed Danzas: Space, Trauma, and Moving Bodies in Mexico City

Through an interdisciplinary lens, my dissertation examines how painters (Frida Kahlo in the 1920s-50s), installation/performance artists (Proceso Pentágono in the late 1960s-early 1970s), choreographers (danza callejera in the mid 1980-1990s), and activists (PosMeSalto in 2013) respond to crisis in pivotal moments of Mexico City’s postrevolutionary history through embodied, social and metaphoric movement. Mapping the city’s multiple spatial constraints that structure movement, I show how these artists and activists choreographically and performatively resist, are supported by, and disrupt violent structural limitations to their mobility. Examining how these subjects negotiate the constraints of state power in Mexico City involves troubling stable borders between binaries such as threat and security, public and private, male and female, mobility and immobility. Foregrounding choreography and improvised dance as a metaphor for resistant urban politics in Mexico City, I make an intervention into site-specific theory, space theory, trauma studies, and feminist theory. Locating these discourses within the context of postrevolutionary Mexico City alters the terrain upon which many of these dialogues have rested. Employing multidisciplinary methodologies from dance, critical dance studies, performance studies, visual arts theory, and trauma theory, I bridge important disciplinary gaps by explaining site-specificity as inherently choreographic and performative, and political activism as site-specific choreography. These urban Mexican works resonate with, complicate, and nuance similar radical artistic movements within the Western art canon.

Advisor: Kwan, SanSan
An Empirical Study of Homicide Cases and Criminal Justice System in Taiwan

This is a first-ever longitudinal study of Taiwan’s homicide cases and the practice of Taiwan’s criminal justice system. For portraying the practice of criminal justice system, this study adopts longitudinal research method to study a cohort of homicide cases known to police department of Taipei City, the capital of Taiwan, from 2006 to 2012, and to follow the cohort of sample cases throughout the legal system./nThis study focuses on four aspects. First, to present homicide case mortality as the cases went through the legal system, from police investigation, prosecution, to court adjudication and punishment. The attempt is to show the picture of how the legal system may exclude cases from the system by the end of each phase and the reasons of the exclusion. Second, this study discovers how legal agencies, mainly police, prosecutor, and judge, may dispose of homicide cases before them by two indexes: time and energy. This part provides us an understanding of what kinds of homicide practically cost more resources of Taiwan’s legal system, and this study tries to figure out why it was like this. Third, this study compares the decisions of each legal agency to see how similar or different their decisions of the same cases may be, and analyzes the reasons behind. Last but not least, this study attempts to discover how, if any, the decision of one legal agency in homicide cases may have influence on those of other agencies./nBy incorporating all the dimensions above, the true mission of this study is to reveal how Taiwan’s criminal procedure practically works thoroughly, from investigation, prosecution, adjudication, to punishment. By comparing how major and minor homicide cases were processed by the system, we will learn representative empirical features of Taiwan’s criminal justice system and criminal procedure.

Advisor: Zimring, Franklin E.
Quasinormal modes of anti-de Sitter black holes

Quasinormal frequencies are the damped modes of oscillation associated with linearized perturbations of a black hole. In this thesis we study the distribution of these frequencies in the complex plane for a class of solutions to the Einstein equations with negative cosmological constant; these are the so-called anti-de Sitter spacetimes. Particular emphasis is placed on the family of rotating Kerr--AdS black holes.

Advisor: Zworski, Maciej
Productive Design of Extensible On-Chip Memory Hierarchies

As Moore’s Law slows and process scaling yields only small returns, computer architecture and design are poised to undergo a renaissance. This thesis brings the productivity of modern software tools to bear on the design of future energy-efficient hardware architectures./nIn particular, it targets one of the most difficult design tasks in the hardware domain: Coherent hierarchies of on-chip caches. I have extended the capabilities of Chisel, a new hardware description language, by providing libraries for hardware developers to use to describe the configuration and behavior of such memory hierarchies, with a focus on the cache coherence protocols that work behind the scenes to preserve their abstraction of global shared memory. I discuss how the methods I provide enable productive and extensible memory hierarchy design by separating the concerns of different hierarchy components, and I explain how this forms the basis for a generative approach to agile hardware design./nThis thesis describes a general framework for context-dependent parameterization of any hardware generator, defines a specific set of Chisel libraries for generating extensible cache-coherent memory hierarchies, and provides a methodology for decomposing high-level descriptions of cache coherence protocols into controller-localized, object-oriented transactions./nThis methodology has been used to generate the memory hierarchies of a lineage of RISC-V chips fabricated as part of the ASPIRE Lab’s investigations into application-specific processor design.

Advisor: Patterson, David
Investigating Ion Solvation in Electrolyte Solutions via X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy

X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) is a powerful atom-selective probe of the local chemical environment of a target atom. Streaming liquid microjets, created by forcing liquid at high pressures (ca. 20-100 atm.) through a capillary tube of inner diameter 30-100 µm, allow for liquids to be introduced into a vacuum chamber and interrogated with soft X-rays generated by synchrotron light sources. This technique has enabled the study of many liquids and solutions. In this dissertation, the use of soft X-ray XAS for the study of the solvation of ions in electrolyte solutions is discussed. The majority of chemical reactions occur in the solution phase. The thermodynamics and kinetics of these reactions are explicitly dependent upon the local chemical environments of the reactants. Consequently, knowledge of the solvation of ions in solution is critical to understanding their chemistry in this phase. By interpreting XAS measurements with ab initio Density Functional Theory (DFT)-based electronic structure calculations, it is possible to acquire valuable knowledge about the local chemical environment of ions and molecules in solution, such as the solvation number and geometry and propensity to form ion pairs./nCommercial lithium ion batteries typically contain a liquid electrolyte comprising a lithium salt dissolved in a mixture of alkyl carbonates such as propylene carbonate, dimethyl carbonate, and ethylene carbonate. The solvation environment of the lithium ion in these solutions is thought to direct the formation of the Solid Electrolyte Interphase (SEI), which in turn is believed to play a critical role in determining essential cell properties including power output, recharging rate, and cycle life. Consequently, understanding this solvation environment is of critical importance. Here I report the a study of the solvation of Li+ in solutions of LiBF4 in alkyl carbonates via XAS on the carbon and oxygen K-edges. In collaboration with Dr. David Prendergast, we have performed electronic structure calculations within the eXcited electron and Core Hole (XCH) approximation and extracted a solvation number for Li+ in propylene carbonate./nI also report the study of aqueous solutions sodium nitrate and nitrite on the nitrogen K-edge utilizing similar experimental and theoretical methods. Aqueous nitrate and nitrite salts are important commercial reagents and play a critical role in the global nitrogen cycle. A detailed understanding of their chemical environment of solution would be beneficial in understanding and modeling reactivity. Unfortunately, the nitrogen K-edge XAS spectra of these species are found to be largely insensitive to ion pairing and solvation geometry around the anion, such that limited chemical information was extracted from this study.

Advisor: Saykally, Richard J
Development and Application of Theoretical Methods for the Description of Reactions in Zeolite Catalysts

Zeolites containing Brønsted or Lewis acid sites are extensively used catalysts in industrial processes. In this study, force field parameters are derived for the quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) simulations of reactions in zeolites by reducing the deviation between QM/MM calculations and experimental data over a range of adsorption energies. The accuracy of the thermal correction for adsorption enthalpies determined by the rigid rotor-harmonic oscillator approximation (RRHO) is examined and shown to be improved by treating low-lying vibrational modes as free translational and rotational modes via a quasi-RRHO model. With the quasi-RRHO scheme, the QM/MM simulations can accurately reproduce experimental adsorption energies for both nonpolar and polar molecules adsorbed in MFI, H-MFI, and H-BEA./nThe anharmonic effects of intramolecular nuclear motions, namely torsions and vibrations, are also examined in this study. Comparing with the harmonic oscillator approximation, the accuracy of the calculation of molecular partition functions, heat capacities, entropies, and enthalpies can be improved with an uncoupled mode (UM) model, where the full-dimensional potential energy surface for internal motions is modeled as a sum of independent one-dimensional potentials for each mode. However, the extent of improvements is very limited if the one-dimensional potentials are determined by the energy as a function of displacement along each normal mode. Significant improvement can be achieved by constructing the potentials for internal rotations and vibrations separately using the energy surfaces along the torsional coordinates and the remaining vibrational normal modes./nThree reactions catalyzed by BEA zeolite are investigated in this study using the QM/MM model, including the formation of p-xylene from ethylene and 2,5-dimethylfuran (DMF) in H-BEA as well as the isomerization of glucose to fructose and the synthesis of 4-(hydroxymethyl)benzoic acid (HMBA) from ethylene and 5-(hydroxymethyl)furoic acid (HMFA) in Sn-BEA. The pathways and energy barriers of these reactions derived by QM/MM simulations agree well with the available experimental results, which validates the realism of the QM/MM model. The influence of solvents and the effect of active site structures and heteroatoms on reaction barriers are investigated to derive criteria for future catalyst design.

Advisor: Bell, Alexis T
Threshold-based resurfacing policies in pavement management to minimize costs and greenhouse gas emissions

There is an increasing need for the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from pavement maintenance activities, which account for millions of tons of GHG emissions annually. By optimizing pavement resurfacing activities, there is potential for reducing the carbon footprint associated with pavements and users of pavements. We propose a framework for estimating the relationship between GHG emissions from pavement resurfacing activities and pavement cracking-threshold policies. Cracking threshold is defined herein as the maximum percent cracking level a pavement is allowed to reach before an asphalt overlay is applied. In this framework, a probabilistic model capable of predicting both crack initiation and progression over time for individual pavement segments is formulated. The model is applied to a population of pavement segments and, given a cracking-threshold value, can predict the amount of GHG emissions and costs incurred due to resurfacing activities over a specified planning horizon. The model also predicts the corresponding user costs and emissions. In order to obtain the relationship between cracking threshold and GHG emissions, the cracking threshold is varied within a practical range of values. We obtain the corresponding resurfacing interval from which GHG emissions values are computed. The dataset used in the case study is obtained from the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) in the United States. The results show that the optimal cracking thresholds for minimizing costs and GHG emissions are close to each other, and are both higher than those used currently by WSDOT.

Advisor: Madanat, Samer
Horvath, Arpad