VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays in development economics

The thesis comprises three chapters on the microeconomics of development.
The first chapter consists of a lab-in-field experiment in rural Pakistan. I test whether anticipated changes in individuals' liquidity constraints can cause individuals spuriously to appear "present-biased" or "future-biased". The design uses experimental windfalls to create fully exogenous variation in subjects' liquidity constraints. The results suggest that the effect of liquidity constraints on "present-bias" and "future-bias" in monetary tasks exists, is large, and does not operate via changing cognitive function or risk preferences. Importantly, and in contrast with other recent studies, I establish that the causation runs from tighter liquidity constraints to appearing "present-biased"—rather than truly present-biased individuals making choices which lead to tighter liquidity constraints. The findings have important implications for the measurement of time preferences, and for interventions offering commitment.
The second chapter — co-authored with Marije Groot Bruinderink, Wendy Janssens and Karlijn Morsink — describes a field experiment in the slums of Matola, Mozambique. We model and test how intra-household bargaining affects adoption of dual-protection contraceptive technologies, when women place a greater weight than men on the health costs of unprotected sex. To do so, we evaluate an intervention which provides women with information about and free access to male and female condoms. We find strong impacts on adoption of female condoms, using both survey data and data from weekly coital diaries. As predicted by the model, take-up of female condoms is higher among women with low household bargaining power at baseline, including women who are unable to convince their partner to use male condoms.
The third chapter — co-authored with Marcel Fafchamps — reports the findings from a survey of Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) in Malawi. We ask whether some individuals adopt VSLAs as a commitment savings technology, and whether they sort into groups with borrowers. Using dyadic regression analysis we find evidence of negative assortative matching on a measure of "present-bias", which suggests that this is the case. This may increase financial intermediation, and welfare, in villages with low access to formal banking.

Advisor: Quinn, S
Dercon, S
Searches for dijet resonances using √s = 13 TeV proton-proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider

This thesis presents three searches for new resonances in dijet invariant mass spectra. The spectra are produced using √s = 13 TeV proton-proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS detector. New dijet resonances are searched for in the mass range 200 GeV to 6.9 TeV in mass. Heavy new resonances, with masses above 1.1 TeV, are targeted by a high mass dijet search. Light new resonances, with masses down to 200 GeV, are searched for in dijet events with an associated high momentum object (a photon or a jet) arising from initial state radiation. The associated object is used to efficiently trigger the recording of low mass dijet events. All of the analyses presented in this thesis search for an excess of events, localised in mass, above a data-derived estimate of the smoothly falling QCD background. In each search no evidence for new resonances is observed, and the data are used to set 95% C.L. limits on the production cross-section times acceptance times branching ratio for model-independent Gaussian resonance shapes, as well as benchmark signals. One particular benchmark signal which is considered in all of the searches is an axial-vector Z' dark matter mediator model whose parameter space is reduced due to the results presented in this thesis.

Keywords: dark matter mediator
limit setting
BumpHunter
ATLAS Experiment
CERN
13 TeV proton-proton collisions
initial state radiation
jets
LHC
dijet resonance
Advisor: Huffman, T
Issever, C
Polydisperse chaperone proteins and the mechanisms by which they inhibit aggregation

The small heat-shock proteins (sHSPs) are ATP-independent molecular chaperones, found in all kingdoms of life. In humans their malfunction is associated with neurodegenerative disease, cataracts, myopathies and cancer. Their molecular mechanism is contentious as sHSPs are challenging experimental targets: they typically exist as large, polydisperse and exchanging oligomers. This heterogeneity is com- pounded by that of aggregating substrates.
Here I investigate the structure, dynamics and function of a major human sHSP, αB-crystallin (αBC), using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and native mass spectrometry (MS). Following the introduction, Chapters 2 and 3 focus on structure and dynamics of αBC. In Chapter 2, I elucidate an allosteric communication network between two interfaces of the core α-crystallin domain within the oligomers. In Chapter 3, I show that the connectivity of oligomer vertices is consistent with polyhedral architectures, and present size measurements of individual αBC stoichiometries within the polydisperse ensemble.
Chapters 4-7 link these insights to the chaperone function of αBC. Chapter 4 presents a new methodology to derive kinetic mechanisms of aggregation, using the model protein α-lactalbumin (αLac). I show that αLac aggregation proceeds along two pathways via an unstable dimeric nucleus. Chapter 5 derives a kinetic mechanism for the chaperone action of αBC on αLac. Remarkably, αBC disassembles the aggregation nuclei, and is in kinetic competition with αLac in large aggregates. In Chapter 6, I characterise the size and shape of these large αBC-αLac complexes. Chapter 7 identifies αBC residues affected by αLac, showing that the substrate engages a subset of the interactions regulating quaternary dynamics of αBC.
Thus I have exploited the complementarity of NMR and native MS to obtain insight into function of αBC, by studying its structure and dynamics from atomic- resolution to quaternary level. The results expand the arsenal of mechanisms by which molecular chaperones maintain cellular proteostasis.

Advisor: Baldwin, A
Benesch, J
Multi-scale modelling of the microvasculature in the human cerebral cortex

Cerebrovascular diseases are by far the largest causes of death in the UK, as well as one of the leading causes of adult disability. The brain’s healthy function depends on a steady supply of oxygen, delivered through the microvasculature. Cerebrovascular diseases, such as stroke and dementia, can interrupt the transport of blood (and hence oxygen) rapidly, or over a prolonged period of time. An interruption in flow can lead to ischaemia, with prolonged interruptions leading to tissue death and eventual brain damage.
The microvasculature plays a key role in the transport of oxygen and nutrients to brain tissue; however, its role in diseases such as dementia is poorly understood, primarily due to the inability of current clinical imaging techniques to resolve microvessels, and due to the complexity of the underlying microvasculature. Therefore, in order to understand cerebrovascular diseases, it is necessary to be able to resolve and understand the microvasculature. In particular, generating large-scale models of the human microvasculature that can be linked back to contemporary clinical imaging is important in helping plug the current imaging gap that exists.
A novel statistical model is proposed here that generates such large-scale models efficiently. Homogenization theory is used to generate a porous continuum capillary bed (characterised by its permeability) that allows for the efficient scaling up of the microvasculature. A novel order-based density-filling algorithm is then developed which generates morphologically accurate penetrating arterioles and venules, also demonstrating that the topology of the vessels only has a minor influence on CBF compared to diameter. Finally, the capillary bed and penetrating vessels are coupled into a large voxel-sized model of the microvasculature from which pressure and flux variations through the voxel can be analysed. A decoupling of the pressure and flux, as well as a layering of flow, was observed within the voxel, driven by the topology of the penetrating vessels. Micro-infarctions were also simulated, demonstrating the large local effects they have on the pressure and flux, whilst only causing a minor drop in CBF within the voxel.

Keywords: Cerebral cortex
Penetrating vessels
Micro-infarct
Continuum model
Microvessels
Homogenization
Capillary bed
Mathematical modelling
Murray's law
Perfusion
Cerebral Blood Flow
Microcirculation
Blood flow
Haemodynamics
Advisor: Payne, S
Exploration of proton transfer pathways in the oxygen-tolerant [NiFe]-hydrogenase from Escherichia coli

Hydrogenases catalyse the interconversion of molecular hydrogen with protons and electrons. Thus, they are of significance due to the growing interest in a hydrogen economy, which would serve to replace fossil fuels. Hyd-1 is a [NiFe]-hydrogenase from Escherichia coli and, unlike many hydrogenases, it is capable of hydrogenases oxidation in the presence of oxygen. Understanding the mechanism of hydrogen activation by Hyd-1 is, therefore, paramount to the rational design of synthetic analogues which may be used in hydrogen technologies. In this thesis, the role of several conserved carboxylate residues in [NiFe]-hydrogenases – E28, D118 and D574– has been explored using Protein Film Electrochemistry (PFE), solution assays and X-Ray crystallographic structures. PFE is a technique used in the study of redox proteins, including [NiFe]-hydrogenases. Precise potential control means that a detailed picture of an enzyme’s thermodynamic and kinetic characteristics can be elucidated.
D118 and D574 form a canopy above the NiFe active site with the conserved arginine R509, which has recently been implicated as the base in hydrogen oxidation. Although the high levels of conservation for these enzymes suggest an active role in hydrogen oxidation, the rates of variants D574N and D118N/D574N indicate that they are not crucial to Hyd-1. Instead, D118 appears to have a role in controlling gas access to the active site and D574 is important for ensuring a wide potential window for hydrogen oxidation in the presence of oxygen.
Previous studies with E28 variants in a standard [NiFe]-hydrogenases have indicated that this highly conserved residue is part of an extended proton transfer network. The variant E28Q has unusual activity at high potential, which suggests that the role of E28 is more complex. This work has raised some interesting questions that require further exploration.

Advisor: Armstrong, F
Age related tendon degeneration: The relationship between rotator cuff tears, shoulder pain and functional loss

Background
The shoulder is the third most common site of musculoskeletal symptoms with an estimated 20% of the population reporting symptoms at any given time. Rotator cuff tears are the most common shoulder disorder, and the major debilitation patients seek help for is pain. Full thickness rotator cuff tears have an estimated prevalence of between 7 and 27%, but studies have shown that not all of these are symptomatic. Many case series have been set in shoulder clinics and may have drawn false causality between rotator cuff tears and pain. This study uses a community population-based cohort to determine the epidemiology of rotator cuff tears and test the association between rotator cuff tears, pain, and functional losses.
Methods
463 consecutive subjects (926 shoulders) have undergone a multidisciplinary assessment of their shoulders including high-definition ultrasound, the Oxford shoulder score and myometric strength testing. Individuals were part of the Chingford 1000 women cohort, which is a 20-year-old longitudinal population study comprising 1003 women aged between 64 and 87, and is representative of the population of the UK.
Results
The population prevalence of full-thickness tears was 22.2%, of which 4.6% were bilateral which increased significantly with age. The prevalence was greater in the dominant arm with a 1.64 increase in relative risk. The population prevalence of all tendon abnormalities was 59.3%, of which 30.2% were bilateral, increasing with age.
Although 48.4% of full-thickness tears were asymptomatic there was an association between rotator cuff tears and patient reported symptoms. The relative risk of symptoms compared to normal tendons was 1.97 for abnormal tendons, 2.20 for full-thickness tears&LT;2.5cm, and 4.74 for full-thickness tears &GT;2.5cm (p&LT;0.001). Individuals with at least one full-thickness tear had a relative risk of symptoms 1.97 that of those with bilateral normal tendons (p&LT;0.001).
Quantitative shoulder strength reduced with age, (10.2-16.2%, p&LT;0.001), the non-dominant arm (4.9%, p&LT;0.001), and the presence of pain (10.8%, p&LT;0.001). Rotator cuff tears had no independent effect, but a significant interaction with age. Strength was preserved in the under 70's irrespective of rotator cuff tear, but in the over 70’s there was decrease in strength of between 33% and 39% irrespective of pain (p=0.004).
Conclusions
This study provides an epidemiological basis to the understanding of rotator cuff tears. The prevalence of full-thickness tears in a female population aged 64-87 was 22.2%. Although only half of all full-thickness tears are symptomatic there is a statistically significant increase in the likelihood of symptoms with increasing tear pathology. There is also an association with loss of strength but only in the over 70's.

Advisor: Carr, A
Arden, N
Nordic incidental music: between modernity and modernism

This thesis argues for the centrality of incidental music in early twentieth-century music history, based on a study of Swedish and Finnish theatre music between 1908 and 1926. The central claims made are firstly, that incidental music is an integral part of music history in this period, supporting a narrative about modernity that does not focus exclusively on "high art" concert music. Second, the Nordic countries were part of a cross-continental discourse concerning modernity that did not revolve solely around, or stem from, central European capital cities such as Vienna or Paris. Third, dramatic literature was fundamental to the development of twentieth-century music in Sweden and Finland.
Through an examination of productions with music by Jean Sibelius (Svanehvit, 1908, and Scaramouche, 1924), Wilhelm Stenhammar (As You Like It, 1920), and Ture Rangström (Till Damaskus III, 1926), the thesis demonstrates that the early 1900s in these countries were characterised by stylistic plurality. For the first two decades of the 1900s, when Sibelius composed the majority of his works, multiple modes of expression where referred to as 'modern' with no clear hierarchy between them. By the 1920s, however, 'modernism' was emerging as a term consistently used to refer to atonality and concurrent theatrical styles dominant in central Europe. Rather than adopt these stylistic languages, Stenhammar and Rangström used 'modernism' as a category to define themselves against, presenting themselves as modern but not modernist composers.

Keywords: Modernism
Theatre
Music history
Scandinavia
Incidental music
Advisor: Grimley, D
Outcomes of fertility treatments for children and families

A continued postponement of childbearing and the rapid technological development that have occurred in the last decades have led to a considerable increase in the demand and use of fertility treatments and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART). Since the first birth in vitro in 1978 an estimated 5 million babies have been born through ART worldwide, with the number of couples seeking fertility treatments continuously increasing (Calhaz-Jorge et al., 2016). In light of the great expansion in the use of ART and fertility treatments and of the intense debates about their regulation, funding and use, there is a growing urgency to understand the long-term outcomes of such treatments.
This thesis studies the outcomes of fertility treatments for children and families and specifically children’s cognitive development, parenting and couples’ stability. While there is evidence of increased health risks for children at birth such as multiple births and low birth weight, the literature has usually shown a good development of children and positive family functioning. However, the existing literature presents several limitations especially on the long-term outcomes. Furthermore, the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of couples accessing the treatments have been neglected. This is a crucial point, as people accessing the treatments tend to be older and from an advantaged socio-economic background, which is likely to affect the observed outcomes.
I rely on representative, longitudinal data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) and the US National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), which allow me to follow a consistent number of children and families to study their outcomes over time. An important focus is on how the observed outcomes might be affected by the selective background of individuals who can afford the expensive treatments in the UK and US.

Advisor: Mills, M
The role of nitric oxide and its redox variants in the regulation of vascular smooth muscle tone

The role of nitric oxide (NO) and its redox variant nitroxyl (HNO) in the regulation of vascular smooth muscle tone was investigated in isolated rat mesenteric arteries, using a combination of wire myography, electrophysiology and immunohistochemistry.
The suitability of the HNO donor isopropylamine NONOate (IPA/NO) as an alternative to Angeli's (AS) salt in organ bath studies was examined. Previous studies of IPA/NO have been primarily in vivo in nature. IPA/NO had a similar profile to AS for both vasorelaxation and hyperpolarization of rat mesenteric arteries and was therefore a suitable alternative to AS. In addition, the presence of a sGC/cGMP-independent pathway, through which HNO exerted a significant vasorelaxatory action, was confirmed together with the importance of K+ channels as the main component of this secondary pathway. Repeated applications of either AS or IPA/NO did not effect relaxation produced by these donors, but the hyperpolarization was significantly reduced.
Following the characterization of IPA/NO, the potential role of the HNO-TRPA1- CGRP pathway was investigated in isolated rat mesenteric arteries. The presence of TRPA1 was confirmed in perivascular nerves' using immunohistochemistry and a role in hyperpolarization of vascular smooth muscle cells was demonstrated. However, neither the TRPA1 antagonist HC030031 (50 μM), nor depletion of CGRP affected vasorelaxation, suggesting the HNO-TRPA1-CGRP pathway may not be physiologically important.
Finally, the role of HNO and NO in the regulation of vasomotion was examined. Addition of the NO synthase inhibitor L-NAME (100 μM) unveiled rapid, depolarizing spikes in the membrane potential of vascular smooth muscle cells. However, the complexity of membrane potential recordings in constricted arteries prevented a conclusive determination of which redox variant of NO is responsible for supressing these spikes. Tension studies suggest that the dominant redox variant involved in regulation of vasomotion is NO, but this remains to be confirmed.
Together these data confirm a role for NO and HNO as important regulators of vascular tone and as such they both provide potential as therapeutic agents in the treatment of cardiovascular disorders such as hypertension.

Advisor: Garland, C
Dora, K
Ancestral trees as weighted networks: scalable screening for genome wide association studies

Several haplotype-based methods have been developed to identify loci where multiple mutations of low to moderate frequency and effect size modulate disease susceptibility. Most such approaches either do not scale to hundreds of thousands of genomes or do not explicitly model recombination and the block-like structure of haplotypes. Using a novel checkpointing technique and a C-core, vectorized implementation of an Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based on the Li & Stephens Model, at each single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) along the genome, we obtain a local genetic distance between all pairs of haplotypes in a phased dataset. To rapidly test this local distance matrix for association with a phenotype, we derive two finite sample central limit type theorems for quadratic forms which do not require any further assumptions on the matrix other than it is free of outliers, for which we have an easily calculable, formal condition. We combine these results with a novel concentration inequality for Gaussian quadratic forms to upper and lower bound p-values for quadratic forms while avoiding a full eigendecomposition of each matrix. Applying our HMM implementation and quadratic form screening method, we recover known loci associated with malaria susceptibility and uncover new potential associations in a pilot dataset of 6,136 haplotypes.

Advisor: Holmes, C
Steinsaltz, D
Spencer, C
The Old English medical collections in their literary context

This dissertation examines the literary and historical contexts of four collections of medical material from Anglo-Saxon England. These collections are widely known under the titles Bald’s Leechbook, Leechbook III, the Lacnunga, and the Old English Pharmacopeia. As medical literature, these texts have tended to be primarily approached through the lens of the history of medicine or cultural history and folklore. However, as textual compositions carefully engaging with learned culture, these texts are relevant to the wider literary history of the period. The aim of this thesis is to examine these collections within specifically literary contexts, where they have been frequently overlooked. Towards this end, I take the approach of considering each of the four collections as individual, coherent texts, rather than treating them as simply as part of a general corpus of Old English medical literature, as has sometimes been done. This approach is reflected in the organisation of this thesis, which dedicates one chapter to each collection, with a final chapter on the characterisation of medicine within broader Anglo-Saxon literary culture. Each of these chapters details what I view as the distinctive qualities of a particular collection and considers what intellectual and literary milieux it may reflect. Chapter 1 discusses the strategies of compilation and translation employed in Bald’s Leechbook and the relation of some passages within the text to translations associated with the Alfredian revival. Chapter 2 considers the incorporation of liturgical material within Leechbook III, while at the same time exploring the relationship of ælfe (elves) and the Christian demonic in these texts. Chapter 3 explores the textual and manuscript relationships surrounding the Lacnunga and argues that this collection reflects interests consonant with early insular expressions of grammatica. Chapter 4 examines the translation style used in the Old English Herbarium (comprising the first half of the Old English Pharmacopeia) and the place of this collection within the context of the tenth-century Benedictine Reform movement. Finally, Chapter 5 considers the representation of medicine within the larger Old English literary corpus and suggests that the depiction of medicine in these sources is ultimately positive, something that perhaps encouraged the flourishing of vernacular medical production we see testified to in the Old English medical collections. It is my hope that by highlighting the literary and learned aspects of these collections this dissertation will bring a new appreciation of these texts to a wider readership interested in Old English literature.

Keywords: Leechbook
Medieval
Medicine
Anglo-Saxon
Herbarium
Old English
Bald's Leechbook
Advisor: Leneghan, F
O'Donoghue, H