VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Envisioning the future can improve healthful behaviors : examining the role of emotionally connecting to future selves

Engaging in healthy lifestyles, including getting regular exercise and eating plenty of fruits and vegetables, is a key contributor to long-term quality of life. Despite widespread knowledge of these associations, Americans fall short. Studies show that people are emotionally disconnected from their future selves, and this may partially account for why people seem to lack the motivation to take steps today to prepare for their long-term futures. A growing body of literature suggests that people who feel more emotionally connected to their future selves are more motivated to financially prepare for the future. But less is known about whether emotional connections to future selves are associated with engaging in behaviors that contribute to good long-term physical health. Moreover, emotional connections with future selves are often confounded with vivid images of the future and it is unknown whether previous findings are due to emotional connections or to vivid images. In this dissertation, I examined relationships between emotional connections with future selves and health-related behaviors, and distinguished vivid images from emotional connections. In Study 1, participants who reported feeling more emotionally connected to their future selves reported engaging in more exercise in their daily lives, but not consuming fruits and vegetables. Associations between vividness and healthful behaviors were weaker and less consistent. In Studies 2 and 3, I tested the effectiveness of two approaches to strengthen connections with future selves and examined whether they improve physical activity. In Study 2, viewing vivid age-progressed images failed to enhance connectedness with future selves and led to maintenance in exercise relative to a same-age image comparison group, which reported a decrease in exercise. In Study 3, I developed and tested a novel guided imagery induction to strengthen emotional connections with distant future selves. The imagery induction led to large improvements in emotional connections with future selves and in vivid images of the future, and increases in immediate physical activity effort and reports of considering the long-term future. Moreover, I replicated Study 1 results. Findings suggest that envisioning the future in ways that strengthen connections with future selves may affect immediate physical activity and motivation to prepare for long-term physical health. However, more work needs to be done to improve behavior in daily life. Findings also point to the importance of distinguishing emotional connections from vivid images. Interventions that enhance emotional connections with future selves may have the potential to motivate people to better prepare for long lives.

Keywords: Psychology.
Advisor: Carstensen Laura L. 
Gross James J. (Professor of psychology)
Zaki Jamil
Epidemics and adaptive behavior as a coupled-human natural system : trust and response to the 2014-15 ebola epidemic in Liberia

Infectious diseases and the human response to their proliferation are components of a coupled human-natural system, characterized by complex interactions and dynamics. How humans react to infectious disease crises is a critical component of understanding how epidemics work, but we often neglect its consideration in our predictive modeling or empirical measurements. In this dissertation, we introduce a mathematical model that displays complex dynamic patterns from simple assumptions about the nature of epidemics and human adaptation; an empirical study in Liberia on perceptions of trust in government actions during the 2014-15 Ebola epidemic, and qualitative results from a set of nine focus-group discussions about how people weighed trust and behavior decisions during the Ebola epidemic in Liberia.

Advisor: Feldman Marcus W. 
Jones James Holland 
De Leo Giulio A. 
Luby Stephen
Epigenomic interrogation of development and regeneration

Mammalian development comprises the highly coordinated and robust processes of cellular proliferation, specification, and functionalization to form the diverse tissues of the adult body. A single cell, containing DNA from the mother and the father, divides and gives rise to increasingly specified stem and progenitor cells at controlled times during development. This process is driven by changes not to the DNA sequence itself, but to the activity of the DNA within each cell, and the genes that are turned on and off, through modifications to the epigenome. During adult regeneration these processes can be reversed and repeated to re-build tissue that has been lost due to aging or injury. Our understanding of these processes has accelerated over the last decade, as next-generation sequencing technologies have made it possible to measure the state of the epigenome and gene expression in diverse cell types and organisms. Despite the progress that has been made, there are still challenges to understanding the dynamics of the epigenome in developmental processes. These include both experimental challenges of making measurements in small numbers of homogeneous primary cells, and computational challenges including mapping the maternal and paternal genomes separately and mapping repetitive sequences in the genome. In this dissertation, we employ a technique for mapping regions of accessible DNA in the genome, the Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin with sequencing (ATAC-seq), to discover novel mechanisms of developmental allelic gene regulation, gene regulation in regeneration, and evolution of gene regulatory programs.

Keywords: Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.
Advisor: Chang Howard Y. (Howard Yuan-Hao)
Greenleaf William James 
Oro Anthony
Equilibria in two-settlement markets : market power, uncertainty, and risk aversion

Forward contracting can deliver benefits in terms of risk hedging, price discovery, and market power mitigation. Aiming to advance the understanding of its role in market design, I examine how the introduction of a forward market changes the strategic and hedging incentives of participants. I challenge the two common literature assumptions of (i) one-sided market power: the assumption that only sellers exercise market power and (ii) perfect arbitrage: the equivalence of forward and (expected) spot price. I provide a framework in which oligopolists face oligopsonists in two sequential markets and allow for a price premium to arise endogenously as the result of hedging and strategic considerations. The introduction of a forward market is found to increase efficiency but does not necessarily do so in a Pareto improving way. The distribution of potential benefits to sellers and buyers depends on their risk aversion and market power. Policy implications are discussed.

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Sweeney James L. 
Kolstad Charles D. 
Weyant John P. (John Peter)
Equipment Investment and Economic Growth in the 21st Century

It is widely held that the Industrial Revolution introduced a century of explosive economic growth on the back of machinery and equipment. Testing whether this conventional wisdom held for more advanced economies, DeLong and Summers found large equipment returns to economic growth of up to 20-30%. In this paper, I extend their analysis and attempt to estimate the impact of equipment investment on economic growth in the late 20th and early 21st century. Using a strategy of OLS regression of productivity growth on equipment investment and other drivers of growth, I find that equipment still produces large returns but reach a more modest conclusion than DeLong and Summers.

Keywords: Machinery
Economic Development
Growth Econometrics
Learning by Doing
Embodiment
and Externalities
Thesis
Advisor: Boskin Michael J
Erasing the Rohingya: The Historical Roots of Myanmar's Crimes Against Humanity

Located in the heart of Southeast Asia, Myanmar is a majority Buddhist country that recently transitioned from an authoritarian regime to a nominal democracy. Despite this, violence against the Muslim Rohingya minority of Rahkine State has only escalated. In August 2017, Myanmar’s military began a scorched-earth campaign against the stateless Rohingya, committing crimes against humanity and driving thousands of Rohingya into Bangladesh. One year later, the UN has recommended for Myanmar to be criminally investigated for the most egregious crime in international law: genocide. Though the Rohingya have been present in the Rahkine region for centuries, the military claims that they are illegal immigrants. From a contemporary human rights perspective, this thesis analyzes the historical, political and religious origins of today’s genocide of the Rohingya people. Employing history as a means to understand the Rohingyas’ current suffering, this thesis situates the Rohingya narrative in the larger context of post-colonial Burmese state-building and in comparison to other Burmese minorities in order to understand the Rohingyas’ vulnerability. Through historical analysis, this thesis strives to raise awareness of the Rohingyas’ erasure and human right to national belonging.

Keywords: International Relations
human rights
genocide
ethnic cleansing
crimes against humanity
Rohingya
Myanmar
national identity
Thesis
Advisor: Cohen David
Essays in applied microeconomics

This dissertation is a collection of three primarily empirical studies broadly concerned with how corporate decision making affects household labor market outcomes. In the first chapter, I study how business relocation affects the regional distribution of job creation within the United States, and I find that local economic booms on average lead to establishment and job outflows. The second chapter, coauthored with Bobak Moallemi and Ramana Ramakrishnan, studies the impact of firm human resource allocation decisions on the labor market value of workers. We find that online reports of promotions causally increase recruiter interest in workers. The third chapter, coauthored with Joshua Rauh, examines the impact of the 2012 California Proposition 30 income tax increase on the pre-tax income and migration decisions of high earning California residents. We find that high earners respond strongly to income taxation both along the intensive and extensive margins.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Bernstein Shai
Rauh Joshua 
Bloom Nick
Essays in development and public economics

This dissertation, Essays in Development and Public Economics, comprises three chapters of theoretical and empirical research investigating various topics in development and public economics. The first chapter explores a new welfare benefit of imposing conditions to send children to school on cash transfers in developing countries. The second chapter develops a method to decompose income inequality into differences in individual productivities vs. differences in individual preferences for consumption relative to leisure. Finally, the third chapter investigates why parents may optimally invest more in their first child relative to their later-born children, focusing on the context of India.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Dupas Pascaline 
Chetty Raj
Morten Melanie 
Persson Petra
Essays in financial economics

This dissertation consists of three essays which examine how asset prices are impacted by the behavior and constraints of financial market participants. Chapter 2 shows evidence that slow asset price reaction to information can be driven by constraints in investors' information processing, rather than by illiquidity and transaction costs, which are the current dominant explanations in academia. My core hypothesis is that investors cannot immediately read and understand all value-relevant information, so they have to choose where to allocate their attention, and that drives variation in price underreaction to information. The key testable prediction is that price underreaction will be information source-specific, with lower underreaction to sources that are more value-relevant. Corporate bond and stock return data are strongly supportive of this view. For instance, corporate bonds with higher credit risk respond more quickly to default-relevant news, and bonds with longer duration respond more quickly to interest rate news. These facts cannot be explained by traditional illiquidity mechanisms which only explain security-level variation. Chapter 3 shows that mutual fund flow-induced price pressures explain around 30% of Fama-French size and value factor movements. Throughout 1965 to 2015, mutual fund investors frequently made very large size and value style-level capital reallocations that amount to a few percentage points of the total equity market value. These flows induce fund man- agers to conduct corresponding trading in those factors, and such factor-level trading pressure creates price pressures that revert very slowly. Because size and value are major return factors, this means that price pressures can explain a significant fraction over overall price movements. Chapter 4, which is a joint project with Wenhao Li, examines the intermediation arrangements in institutional trading. When executing trades for institutional investors, intermediaries sometimes act as brokers (e.g. in equities) and earn commissions, and other times (e.g. in currencies) as dealers, taking risks and earning markups. What explains this variation in intermediation style? To this end, we propose a theory based on the trade-off between the cost of monitoring brokers and paying dealers for holding inventory. Brokers have incentives to misbehave so they need to be monitored. In contrast, dealers have aligned incentives, but charge customers for inventory costs. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, broker intermediation is more prevalent in liquid and transparent markets where monitoring is easier, and when intermediary inventory costs are higher.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Berk Jonathan B.
Lustig Hanno 
Krishnamurthy Arvind
Essays in historical and contemporary Chinese economy

This dissertation is a collection of three essays on historical political institutions and contemporary economic issues in China. In the first chapter, titled "State Formation and Bureaucratization: Evidence from Pre-Imperial China", I study the mechanisms of state-building in pre-imperial China. I develop an incomplete contract model of land ownership and military conflict, which produces three predictions. First, external military threat dampens state-building as the ruler needs to incentivize his agent to defend against invasion by giving out ownership to land. Second, military attacks are conducive to state-building as centralized states are more efficient at offense. Third, a decrease in the bargaining position of administrators also facilitates state-building. Empirical tests and historical examples are consistent with model predictions. In the second chapter, titled "Media Attention and Choice of Major: Evidence from Anti-Doctor Violence in China", we study the effect of media persuasion in the context of educational choices. We exploit plausibly exogenous variations in Chinese newspaper articles on anti-doctor violence to identify how media reports affect students' decision to study medicine in college. We collect articles from over 1,200 newspapers and match them with an administrative dataset containing the universe of students enrolled in Chinese colleges from 2005 to 2011. We find that one additional article on violence against doctors leads to a 0.5 percent decrease in the number of students choosing medicine majors, especially majors that train physicians and nurses. Students attending elite colleges and with above-median test scores are more responsive to media attention. Consequently, articles on violence reduce the quality of medical students, measured by their rank in the college entrance examination. In the third chapter, titled "Marital Preferences and Housing Prices in China: Evidence from Online Dating", we estimate the effects of China's surging house prices on individuals' marital preferences and equilibrium assortative matching patterns. Using data from China's largest dating website, we estimate mate preferences based on users' decision to reply to a first-time message from a contact. We find that (1) site users, in particular women, have strong preferences for home-ownership, and increases in housing prices are associated with higher reply rate by women; (2) compared to non-homeowners, homeowners have stronger preferences for home-ownership; (3) home-ownership increases users' competitiveness and this effect becomes more pronounced for men when as housing prices increase; (4) there is weak evidence on the impact of housing prices on equilibrium assortative matching patterns.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Greif Avner
Acharya Avidit 
Fearon James D. 
Jha Saumitra
Essays in industrial organization

The first chapter of my dissertation studies the costs and benefits of multi-outlet retails firms, or chains. Chains make up a large and growing part of the US retail sector, with significant variation across store category and geographic location. This paper quantifies the demand-side incentives to operate a network of stores as a chain: various forms of economies of scale allow chains to generate higher demand than independent firms, but at the same time chains are less flexible in customizing product selection or prices across locations. To quantitatively assess this tradeoff, I develop a simple model and estimate it using a large transaction-level dataset from a payment card company, focusing on restaurant purchases. I find that on average chains could earn 22\% more transactions if they could customize their product optimally to local tastes, but they would lose 13\% of their transactions if they were to operate as unconstrained independents. Policies that ban chain restaurants would result in a loss of consumer welfare equivalent to 1.5\% of restaurant spending and would disproportionately impact lower income consumers. Considering the endogenous entry of independent restaurants dampens the effects of chain bans by 30\%. The second chapter of my dissertation studies the potential for strategic default among borrowers during the financial crisis. Together with Nicola Pierri, we exploit a discontinuity in the eligibility criteria of the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), a large federal government program that incentivized lenders to renegotiate mortgages for borrowers who were more than 60 days delinquent on their loans. In contrast to prior literature, we find that HAMP increased rates of delinquency by about 0.5\% among eligible borrowers with much larger effects for underwater loans. At the same time, the program succeeded in its stated purpose of lowering foreclosure rates among borrowers that were already delinquent and increasing the likelihood that they return to making payments. Our results suggest that borrower strategic response is an important consideration in designing debt relief policies. Written with Johannes Dolfen, Liran Einav, Pete Klenow, Jon Levin, Larry Levin, and Wayne Best, the third chapter of my dissertation focuses on the role of e-commerce in the economy. E-Commerce represents a rapidly growing share of consumer spending in the U.S. We use transactions-level data on credit and debit cards from Visa, Inc. between 2007 and 2017 to quantify the resulting consumer surplus. We estimate that E-Commerce spending reached 8\% of consumption by 2017, yielding consumers the equivalent of a 1\% permanent boost to their consumption, or over \$1,000 per household. While some of the gains arose from saving travel costs of buying from local merchants, most of the gains stemmed from substituting to online merchants. Higher income cardholders gained more, as did consumers in more densely populated counties.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Einav Liran 
Bresnahan Timothy F. 
Gentzkow Matthew
Essays in market and mechanism design

This dissertation demonstrates three works to understand how specific markets work and how we can devise the rules to improve market outcome. Chapter 1 studies a two-period matching model where one side of the market (e.g. workers) have an option to invest and delay matching in the first period. Chapter 2 explores the optimal ordering of heterogeneous items in sequential auctions with unit-demand buyers. Chapter 3 analyzes the optimal ``screening'' mechanism of products with network externalities.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Kojima Fuhito 
Jackson Matthew O. 
Roth Alvin E.
Segal Ilya
Essays in over-the-counter markets

This thesis consists of three essays, which examine several issues in over-the-counter financial markets. The first essay shows that dealers build socially excessive inventories in order to compete for market share. The distortion in pricing is empirically identified using transaction level data in the U.S. corporate bond market. The second essay shows that the two roles of a dealer, immediacy provision and matchmaking, create a conflict of interest. A direct implication is that bid-ask spread is a misleading measure of immediacy provision. The third essay introduces reducible intermediation chains in order to quantitatively measure search frictions in over-the-counter markets. This allows us to categorize intermediation chains by their primary intermediation incentives. Specifically, the first essay shows that dealers in over-the-counter markets build socially excessive inventories in order to compete for market share and get the associated intermediation rents. Using the TRACE dataset for the U.S. corporate bond market, I find that, excluding the crisis, the incentive to build inventory raises dealers' bid prices for corporate bonds by an average of 5 basis points. During the crisis, this effect was reversed by 23 basis points of implied additional dealer balance-sheet costs. The second essay, co-authored with Zeyu Zheng, shows that the two roles of a dealer, immediacy provision and matchmaking, create a conflict of interest that leads dealers to hold inefficiently high levels of inventory in order to extract additional rents from customers. Because of this, bid-ask spread is a misleading measure of immediacy provision. Our model suggests the use of execution delays as an additional measure of immediacy provision. The third essay, co-authored with Yang Song and Xingtan Zhang, introduces reducible intermediation chains in order to quantitatively measure search frictions in over-the-counter markets. This allows us to categorize intermediation chains by their primary intermediation incentives. Using interdealer trades in the U.S. corporate bond market, we discover new types of intermediation chains that are not formed to mitigate search frictions or to facilitate liquidity provision. Instead, these chains arise when dealers intermediate trades for other dealers in order to unwind positions at a profit.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Duffie Darrell 
Hebert Benjamin 
Krishnamurthy Arvind