VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Epicureanism and the death of the soul in the high middle ages

Epicureanism and the Death of the Soul in the High Middle Ages demonstrates that from the twelfth to the fourteenth century discussion and debates about the death of the human soul took place from the highest to the lowest social levels of Latin Christendom. The evidence examined reveals that the discussion tended to focus upon the moral consequences of holding that the human soul died with the body. Epicurus's famed mortalism, coupled with his ethic based on pleasure made him and his philosophy a touchstone within medieval conversations about these issues. In many sources, a belief that affirming the death of the soul would lead to amoral behavior on the part of mortalists is on display, as is the fear that the presence of contemporary mortalists—often branded "Epicureans"—would threaten key aspects of medieval society, such as politics, the church, and the universities. The sources analyzed exhibit a fear that new social, institutional, and economic developments taking place from the twelfth to the fourteenth century were leading their contemporaries to abandon the Christian faith and embrace a "worldly" and/or "carnal" life. The sources further show that Dante's decision to condemn Epicurus and all those who embraced his teachings in his Inferno X triggered a debate among early humanists that led to a renewed interest in the ancient Greek philosopher

Keywords: History.
Advisor: Findlen Paula
Dorin Rowan
Griffiths Fiona J.
Epidemiology, natural history, and cancer prevention of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is defined by the presence of excessive hepatic steatosis (> 5%) in the absence of other identifiable causes, including excessive alcohol use and viral hepatitis. It is a major cause of chronic liver disease globally with a prevalence of 29.8% and 35.7% for the United States. NAFLD also carries a substantial health, economic, and patient reported outcome burden. The overall goal of this dissertation is to use different statistical and epidemiological methods to study the epidemiology, natural history, and cancer prevention of NAFLD. In the first part of the dissertation, we applied the meta-analysis method to estimate the prevalence, incidence, clinical characteristics, and outcome of NAFLD in the Asian population. The evidence can assist stakeholders in understanding disease burden of NAFLD in Asia. In the second part, we investigated the prevalence and outcome data for non-obese NAFLD for the multiethnic US population and discovered that non-obese individuals with NAFLD had significantly higher all-cause mortality than obese individuals with NAFLD. Finally, we applied the causal inference method to determine the association between statin initiation and the risk of live cancer among patients with NAFLD. These chapters demonstrated NAFLD is truly becoming a global disease burden and future studies should be devoted to investigating the prevention and treatment of NAFLD

Keywords: Epidemiology and Population Health.
Advisor: Nguyen Mindie H.
Odden Michelle
Sainani Kristin
Wang Shan X.
Epigenetic and regulatory evolution in re-lapsed acute myeloid leukemia

In patients with acute myeloid leukemia ("AML"), ≥50% of cases patients who achieve a remission following initial therapy will experience disease relapse. Relapsed AML is a poorly understood entity with dismal outcomes and few treatment options. As mechanisms of AML relapse remain poorly understood, we sought to clarify the clonal dynamics of AML relapse using a cohort of previously published genotyped relapse pairs. We analyzed AML relapse cohorts and found that 40% of relapses occur without any change in driver mutations, suggesting that non-genetic mechanisms drive relapse in a large proportion of cases. To explore such mechanisms, we characterized epigenetic pat-terns of disease relapse in matched diagnosis-relapse samples using ATAC-seq. Chromatin accessibility data revealed a relapse-specific chromatin accessibility signature for mutationally stable AML, marked by activation of gene regulatory programs such as DNA damage response and cell cycle pathways, and associated with trans-regulatory factors including FOX and GATA. Analysis of cell subpopulations, including populations enriched for leukemia stem cells ("LSCs"), further revealed LSCs display epigenetic evolutionary patterns at relapse which were distinct from epigenetic evolutionary pat-terns occurring in associated blast populations, highlighting epigenetic heterogeneity during disease evolution. Single-cell ATAC-seq identified a subset of cells present at diagnosis that harbor the relapse-specific chromatin signature, suggesting that AML epigenetic evolution occurs in part by selection of pre-existing cells present at diagnosis. Finally, we used mitochondrial single-cell ATAC-seq (mtscATAC) to map clones from diagnosis into relapse along with their epigenetic features and found that distinct mitochondrially-defined clones exhibit similar chromatin accessibility at relapse, thereby demonstrating convergent epigenetic evolution in relapsed AML. Overall, our findings highlight patterns of non-genetic mechanisms of disease evolution in AML and indicate epigenetic mechanisms of AML relapse in the absence of genetic evolution

Advisor: Majeti Ravindra
Chang Howard Y. (Howard Yuan-Hao)
Gentles Andrew J.
Mitchell Beverly S.
Winslow Monte
Equivariant algebraic K-theory of profinite Bieberbach group actions

This thesis considers the equivariant algebraic K-theory of the actions of certain groups, which are profinite analogues of Bieberbach groups, on certain inverse systems of algebraic tori. The significance of these groups is that it is known that they can be used to approximate the absolute Galois groups of fields containing an algebraically closed subfield, due to work by G. Carlsson and R. Joshua, and these actions are used to build an object used to prove the representational assembly conjecture proposed by G. Carlsson. We prove an analogue of the Gersten spectral sequence in the case of a finite group action on a scheme, and develop a related technique, which is a modified version of the Gersten filtration, to handle these profinite group actions. We then carry out explicit calculations in equivariant algebraic K-theory using this technique

Keywords: Mathematics.
Advisor: Carlsson G. (Gunnar)
Vakil Ravi
Vasy András
Eroding Autonomy: An Analysis of Russian and Belarusian Media Coverage of the 2020 Belarusian Pro-Democracy Protests

This paper analyzes the evolution of Russian and Belarusian state-owned and state- influenced media coverage of the 2020 pro-democracy protests in Belarus. The pro-democracy protests came during a difficult time in Belarus-Russia relations, as President Lukashenka had become closer to the European Union and was blaming Russia for his declining popularity, but the two countries rapidly renewed close ties in the aftermath of the protests. My analysis finds that Russian coverage was overall consistently negative but shifted from focusing on the election and protests themselves to framing them as part of geopolitical conflict with the West. Belarusian media coverage shifted from positive to negative and converged with Russian media coverage as journalists were brought into Belarusian state media from Russia after hundreds of Belarusian journalists walked out in support of the pro-democracy protests.

Keywords: Stanford Global Studies, Center for Russian, East European Studies, Russia, Belarus, News Media
Text
Thesis
Advisor: McFaul Michael
Grossman Shelby
Essays in corporate finance theory

This dissertation consists of three pieces of research in theoretical corporate finance. The first one studies multi-agent design problems. Agents are concerned about each other's decisions and can communicate strategically with each other. The principal would like to motivate agents' participation decisions by affecting their communication. I employ such a multi-agent perspective on economic design to understand practices such as syndication. The second and the third ones take a more applied approach and study agency problems in specific corporate finance settings. They shed light on information design in corporate governance and dynamic interactions in special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), respectively

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: DeMarzo Peter M.
Zwiebel Jeffrey
Hebert Benjamin
Essays in economics : Finnish manufacturing development, optimal default choices, and occupational mobility after WW1

My dissertation covers contributions to several subfields of economics -- in Chapter 1, I study a pertinent question in labor economics and development economics (the trade-off between labor and capital in manufacturing development) through the lens of economic history, in Chapter 2 I turn to behavioral economic theory by solving for the optimal choice of defaults in situations where agents might be behaviorally biased, and in Chapter 3 I turn back to economic history and labor economics by studying occupational mobility after World War 1 in Britain. The unifying frame to this dissertation lies in an attempt to theoretically ground my empirical work and to make empirically relevant my theoretical work

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Abramitzky Ran
Bernheim B. Douglas
Bloom Nick
Niederle Muriel
Essays in financial economics

With quantitative easing (QE), central banks buy long-term government bonds to lower long-term interest rates. QE removes from the market both the investment risk associated with ownership of the bonds and also the transaction services conveyed by these bonds, which include facilitating the matching of buyers and sellers in the bond market. To the extent that it lends its stock of bonds back to market participants, a central bank replaces these transaction services. In contrast, by not lending its bonds, the central bank further lowers long-term rates by increasing the scarcity of these transaction services. This amplification of the impact of QE on long-term rates through reduced bond lending allows the European Central Bank to achieve its QE rate objective more easily because the alternative of even greater purchases of bonds could be politically contentious

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Duffie Darrell 
Krishnamurthy Arvind
Lustig Hanno
Essays in financial economics

This thesis investigates the role of financial intermediaries in asset markets from two complementary angles. In the first chapter, I study imperfect competition among intermediaries in a key funding market, and demonstrate the importance of intermediaries in monetary policy implementation. In the second chapter, I examine how the constraints faced by intermediaries affect prices across asset classes. This chapter is coauthored with Wenxin Du and Benjamin Hebert. In Chapter 1, I model and structurally estimate the equilibrium rates and volumes on the Triparty repo market to study how imperfect competition affects monetary policy implementation. Even in this systemically important market, where seemingly homogeneous repos trade, I document persistent rate differences paid by dealers. I therefore characterize the Triparty market as cash-lenders allocating their portfolios among differentiated dealers who set repo rates. I find that cash-lenders' aversion to concentrated portfolios gives dealers substantial market power: dealers borrow at rates that are 21 bps lower than their marginal benefit from intermediating borrowed funds, inserting a considerable wedge in wholesale funding rates. I show through counterfactual analyses the effect of the Federal Reserve's Reverse Repo Facility (RRP). Compared to its absence, the RRP raised the Triparty repo rate by 15 bps and tightened dealers' markdowns by 8 bps between 2014 and 2017; these effects were amplified by the Money Market Fund Reform. In Chapter 2, we explore the implication of intermediary constraints by noticing that violations of no-arbitrage conditions measure the shadow cost of intermediary constraints. Intermediary asset pricing and intertemporal hedging together imply that the risk of these constraints tightening is priced. We describe a ''forward CIP trading strategy'' that bets on CIP violations shrinking and show that its returns help identify the price of this risk. This strategy yields the highest returns for currency pairs associated with the carry trade. The strategy's risk contributes substantially to the volatility of the stochastic discount factor, is correlated with both other near-arbitrages and intermediary wealth measures, and appears to be priced consistently across various asset classes

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Krishnamurthy Arvind
Duffie Darrell 
Hebert Benjamin
Yurukoglu Ali
Essays in household finance

This thesis contributes to two significant recent advances in the field of household finance. The increased access to large datasets that has expanded researchers ability to test household behavior at the micro-level and the greater recognition of deviations of household behavior from the benchmark household decision making framework. The first chapter introduces the literature and ties in the two main works of this thesis. The second chapter studies the household consumption-savings problem in the context of unexpected automobile expenses. By making use of high-frequency household transaction level banking data, I document the size and frequency of large out-of-pocket automobile expenses. I estimate the consumption-smoothing costs to households and show that households that I identify as low in liquid wealth struggle to finance these expenses directly. Furthermore, I suggest that the observed consumption-smoothing response to automobile expense shocks is unlikely to be generated by the standard benchmark consumption-smoothing model without several augmentations. In particular, low liquid wealth households undersave relative to levels of risk aversion and discount rates typically assumed in the literature. As a result, low liquid wealth households fail to self-insure against an important category of household expense shocks. The third chapter introduces a framework for behavioral household decision making and demonstrates the equilibrium impacts on prices, as well as important distributional state variables such as wealth. We offer a computational and behavioral framework that studies the impact of limited household ability to predict equilibrium prices. We primarily focus on the ability of households to reconcile a long run stationary forecast of prices with the ability to forecast equilibrium prices over a short run finite horizon that is conditional on future aggregate histories (we call this foresight). We are able to offer a degree of computational tractability because of the nature of household optimization that requires only a finite horizon knowledge of equilibrium prices. In particular, we note that the degree of foresight on equilibrium prices can vastly change prices in equilibrium, especially when the degree of foresight is limited to a few periods

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Lustig Hanno
Bernstein Shai
Buchak Gregory
Essays in industrial organization

In Chapter 1, I study whether merchants impose surcharges for credit card transactions and how consumers respond after merchants have been allowed to impose surcharges. Before 2013, merchants were prohibited from imposing credit-card surcharges, but they were allowed to do so after a settlement between credit card companies and retailers and several court cases challenging state-level regulations. Using a consumer panel of shopping trips from 2013 to 2019, I construct a proxy for surcharges at the shopping trip level and examine how the distribution and mean value of the proxy change when merchants are allowed to impose surcharges. Due to noises in the underlying data, I am unable to provide evidence for or against an increase in the incidence of surcharges. Taking advantage of the settlement and court cases in four states afterward, I employ two research designs, a differences-in-differences design and a border design, to evaluate jointly whether merchants impose surcharges and whether consumers respond in the presence of surcharges. Overall, there are no large changes in the overall consumer usage of credit cards, but I find some evidence that consumers' usage of credit card has decreased for shopping trips with high spending. In Chapter 2, I study how the advertising of one product affects the sales of another product under the same brand name. Specifically, I examine how large the advertising spillover effect is using body wash and body lotion for a selected brand as a case study. Adopting a border strategy that takes advantage of the discontinuity in advertising across Designated Market Areas (DMA) borders and restricting the sample to border markets that only constitute a small part of the corresponding DMA, I find that the advertising spillover effect is positive but insignificant. I discuss possible reasons for the neutral results. In Chapter 3, I study the role of factors related to competition and market information in review manipulation. Using online reviews for restaurants in Santa Cruz County on Yelp, I examine how the number of negative filtered reviews that a restaurant receives per month varies with competition-related events (entry and exit, competitor experiencing a drop in rounded rating, and competitor receiving negative filtered review) and the degree that a restaurant may serve tourists using a panel data design. I find suggestive evidence that a restaurant may be more likely to receive negative fake reviews if it is more likely to serve tourists, experiences entries and exits of competitors, or its competitors receive a negative filtered review recently

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Einav Liran
Gentzkow Matthew
Larsen Bradley J.
Essays in machine learning in finance

The bond market is one of the largest financial markets, with $52.9 trillion of debt outstanding for the US market as of 2021. The implied interest rate for borrowing at different horizons is the fundamental object for this market. However, a complete set of interest is not observed and must be estimated from the noisy market data. In two papers, we develop machine learning methods to precisely estimate the term structure of interest rates and to understand and manage interest-rate related risks. In the first paper, we introduce a robust, flexible and easy-to-implement method for estimating the yield curve from Treasury securities. This method is non-parametric and optimally learns basis functions in reproducing Hilbert spaces with an economically motivated smoothness reward. We provide a closed-form solution of our machine learning estimator as a simple kernel ridge regression, which is straightforward and fast to implement. We show in an extensive empirical study on U.S. Treasury securities, that our method strongly dominates all parametric and non-parametric benchmarks, which positions our method as the new standard for yield curve estimation. In the second paper, we develop a sparse factor model for bond returns, that unifies non- parametric term structure estimation with cross-sectional factor modeling. Building on the modeling framework of the first paper, we estimate an optimal set of sparse basis functions, which maps into a cross-sectional conditional factor model. Our estimated factors are investable portfolios of traded assets, that replicate the full term structure and are sufficient to hedge against interest rate changes. In an extensive empirical study on U.S. Treasury securities, we show that the term structure of excess returns is well explained by four factors. We introduce a new measure for the time-varying complexity of bond markets based on the exposure to higher-order factors

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Pelger Markus
Filipović Damir
Giesecke Kay
Essays in microeconomics

This dissertation consists of three chapters that explore topics in behavioral economics and gender economics. In chapter 1, I study how motivated reasoning distorts the inference process about the signaling sources. In the experiment, two signal sources differ in terms of their stringency. Specifically, each source applies a different standard in deciding whether to send a favorable signal about an agent's task performance. Participants were more likely to guess that their favorable signals came from the stringent source relative to a Bayesian. Moreover, the bias is only present when the signal is ego-relevant, suggesting the role the bias plays in confidence management. A second experiment investigates the long-term implications of this bias. In Chapter 2 (joint work with Sarah Eichmeyer, Muriel Niederle, and David Yang), we evaluate the causal effects of gender portrayals in primary school textbooks on female education and labor market outcomes. In the context of China, we study a curriculum reform that reduced the use of gender stereotypes and induced a more equal representation of male and female characters in textbooks used in primary school grades 1-6. For identification, we exploit the staggered roll-out of the new textbooks across counties in the early 2000s, in combination with sharp changes in exposure to the new textbooks across cohorts. In Chapter 3 (joint work with Muriel Niederle, Markus Mobius and Emanuel Vespa), we study who comes to mind when agents have to rely on their memories to recommend candidates. We hypothesize that candidates that show up more frequently are more easily recalled than others. This sheds light on a new mechanism that can give rise to the `missing candidate' problem and homophily in hiring practices, distinct from statistical or taste-based discrimination against out-groups. We also vary whether the objective criteria are known to the agent before or after seeing the candidates. We expect to see better quality of recommended candidates in the former which may allow for more efficient memory encoding and retrieval. Lastly, we also vary how many candidates the agent needs to recommend. The hypothesis is that the requiring agents to recommend more people will force them to recall more candidates who would otherwise not be as easily recalled, leveling the playing field

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Niederle Muriel
Bernheim B. Douglas
Fafchamps Marcel
Essays in political economy and development

This dissertation contains three separate papers in the fields of political economy and development. The three papers are, however, all connected by their focus on media—whether print newspapers, news websites, or social media. The first chapter in the dissertation is from a paper titled "Journalist Ideology and the Production of News: Evidence from Movers, " which is joint work with Jacob Conway and is still a work-in-progress. In this paper, we examine the role journalists play in determining the political slant of the news they produce. The second chapter in the dissertation is from a paper titled "Slanted Images: Measuring Nonverbal Media Bias During the 2016 Election, " which is sole-authored and is conditionally accepted at Political Science Research and Methods. In this paper, I use nearly one million images from the front page of news websites during the 2016 election period, I show how computer vision techniques can identify the faces of politicians across the images and measure the nonverbal emotional content expressed on each face. The third chapter in the dissertation is from a paper titled "Taxing Dissent: The Impact of a Social Media Tax in Uganda, " which is joint work with Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld and is published in World Development. In this paper, we examine the impact of a new tool for digital repression--a daily tax on social media use in Uganda

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Dupas Pascaline
Gentzkow Matthew
Sorkin Isaac