VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Is noise driving job creation?

This paper studies the effect of noise on the expected value of a firm-worker match in the labour market. In the data, such noise shocks would look like spontaneous increases in labour demand, which cannot rationally be justified by the current and future productivity of the employed worker. A significant amount of noise in the labour market would prevent the correct identification of the response of labour market variables with respect to news shocks. The paper applies the empirical approaches in Blanchard et. al. (2013) and Forni et. al. (2017) to the labour market to estimate the extent to which aggregate job creation is driven by noise rather than news. Based on the estimation of the DSGE model and the structural VAR model using US data, the paper finds that it is unlikely that noise shocks play a significant role in hiring and job creation, as on the aggregate level firms generally anticipate the future output produced by newly hired workers correctly.

Keywords: Information Frictions
Business Cycles
Labour Markets
News shocks
Search and Matching
Search for the decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson to muon pairs with the atlas detector at the LHC

The Standard Model predicts the Higgs boson to interact with all massive particles. At present, experimental evidence exists for the inter- actions with bosons and third generation fermions. This thesis focuses on the search for the decay of the Higgs boson to muon pairs, the most sensitive way of probing the interactions with second generation fermions. The search uses proton-proton collision data collected at the centre-of-mass energy √s = 13 TeV collected by the ATLAS experi- ment between 2015 and 2018 and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1. The analysis selects events with oppositely charged muon pairs and splits them in categories using a gradient boosting classifier to maximise the sensitivity. A simultaneous maximum-likelihood fit is performed in all analysis categories to extract the signal strength and evaluate the compatibility of the data with the background-only hypothesis. The signal strength is measured to be 0.5 ± 0.7, where the uncertainty is dominated by the statistical uncertainty on the data. The observed (expected) significance is found to be 0.8 (1.5) σ. The sensitivity projection for the 3000 fb−1 dataset collected at 14 TeV estimates that the signal strength will be measured to 13% and still limited by the statistical uncertainty on the data.

Keywords: mumu
Higgs
ATLAS
LHC
muon pairs
Advisor: Shipsey, I
The petrology and transformation history of continental crust in the Tso Morari complex, Ladakh, Himalaya

Ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) metamorphism has long been associated with deep subduction. UHP minerals, such as coesite and microdiamond, are often found in discrete mafic units, hosted in larger scale continental terranes, such as in the mafic eclogites of the Tso Morari complex, Ladakh, Himalaya. Terranes such as these have commonly been overprinted by amphibolite facies, Barrovian metamorphism, so their early history is difficult to decipher. Samples of mafic eclogite dykes hosted in low-strain metagranite were collected from the centre of the Tso Morari complex in Ladakh, Himalaya, where the granite has been observed to transition into granite gneiss towards the highstrain mafic–felsic lithological boundary. All three of these lithologies are shown to preserve high pressure metamorphism indicating that the entire unit must also have been subducted to high pressure conditions. Low-strain metagranites provide a window into the early history of the rocks, where feldspar, white mica and pseudomorphs after cordierite preserve evidence of hydrothermal alteration prior to high pressure metamorphism. Kyanite inclusions within garnet also indicate that the high-Al bulk composition of the granite gneiss must have been achieved prior to garnet growth, also indicating that hydrothermal alteration prior to garnet growth may have been significant. Palisade quartz microtextures after coesite in the matrix of a granite indicate that part of the dome transformed at ultrahigh-pressure conditions and preserves the first reported evidence of twinning in coesite recorded in quartz. Elemental zonation within garnets from mafic eclogite and granite gneiss protoliths show a similar zoning pattern in rocks of different bulk compositions, indicating that both rock types share a similar prograde high-pressure metamorphic evolution, where highest pressure conditions are preserved in the garnet rims. Previous modelling of mafic eclogites has shown that there are two possible isopleth intersections for garnet core growth at ca. 20-23 kbar, 520-550°C and 10-13 kbar, 575-625°C. However, alteration of inclusion assemblages has made it difficult to determine the actual conditions of core growth. Combined modelling of mafic and felsic protoliths, shows that the lower pressure intercept of 10-14 kbar, 410-460°C is common in both bulk compositions in water undersaturated conditions. A new and precise U-Pb age of zircon crystallisation at 46.9 ± 0.04 Ma is interpreted as the age of eclogite-facies metamorphism. U-Pb ages of xenotime, titanite and rutile are interpreted as ages representing crustal conditions, indicating that the Tso Morari complex was exhumed from ultrahigh-pressure to crustal conditions in <1 Myr before stalling in the lower crust.

Keywords: coesite
continental subduction
geochronology
petrology
metamorphism
Tso Morari
ultrahigh pressure
eclogite
Advisor: Waters, D
Roberts, N
Searle, M
First impression biases and the value of blind auditioning

Motivated by the performing arts, I investigate the repercussions of an evaluator's bias against a specific group of applicants, such as women, in a setting where the evaluator decides upfront between holding an informed or a blind audition. In the latter case, the evaluator learns neither the applicant's ability nor the gender. I show that a blind audition comes with a fundamental trade-off: it avoids misleading first impressions but prohibits the screening of applicants by ability. Above a threshold bias, the evaluator prefers a blind audition to provide high effort incentives exclusively for highly able applicants while low-ability applicants do not participate. For a low bias, requiring supplementary information about the applicant's type acts as an efficient screening device and, thereby, provides such targeted effort incentives. From a policy perspective, committing to no information can, therefore, be beneficial for the evaluator if he knows that he would otherwise not be impartial. Applicants' audition preferences differ by ability if the evaluator's bias against female applicants is low and differ by gender if the bias is large. Surprisingly, the preferences of a highly biased evaluator align with those of a highly able female. My model explains the empirical finding that blind auditions have increased the probability of women being hired via taste-based discrimination and challenges competing explanations grounded in statistical discrimination. Additionally, I show that uncertainty introduces the sizeable risk of market failure and may render informed auditions more profitable even if the evaluator is highly biased. From a policy perspective, ability-targeting interventions under uncertainty are, therefore, crucial to ensure equality of opportunity and to avoid zero-hour contracts.

Keywords: taste-based discrimination
blind audition
cognitive bias
first impression
Advisor: Kets, W
Mohammed goes house-hunting: an experimental study of discrimination

We conduct a field experiment in order to investigate discrimination against Muslims in the UK rental market. We find that Muslims are significantly less likely to receive a viewing, an extremely robust result that persists across genders, cities and landlord and property types. Further, there is evidence that even those landlords who do not formally discriminate are nonetheless less polite to Muslim applicants. Neither of the leading theories appear well suited to explain the discrimination observed in this study. On the one hand, discrimination completely disappears once we restrict attention to Muslim landlords, a fact that is difficult to reconcile with statistical models of discrimination. On the other hand, discrimination does not increase with interaction, in apparent contradiction of Becker’s ‘taste based’ model. We argue that a re-interpretation of the Becker model can explain our findings.

Keywords: field experiment
discrimination
Advisor: Abeler, J
Roads to development? The distributional effects of market access on wages: evidence from Kenya 

This thesis analyses the heterogeneous and distributional effects of changes in trans- port infrastructure on city level wages in Kenya. To do this I develop a consistent theory, dichotomising industries into tradeable and non-tradeable, and adopting a suffcient statistic approach, using market access. To empirically evaluate these questions, I construct two novel data sets digitising historical Statistical Abstracts and Michelin maps between 1992 and 2010. This new data on wages by industry by year by city allows unique insights into the spatial distribution of economic ac- tivity in a Sub-Sahara African country: Kenya. I find that transport investment positively affects wages in Kenya, but that most of the impact is attributed to in- creases in tradeable sector wages, and thus to already relatively more developed cities. I also consider the direct effect of market access on development indicators and find consistent evidence of negative impacts. These results indicate that trans- port infrastructure projects may not be the silver bullet they are often purported to be. Finally, I consider a counterfactual scenario: building the proposed Mombassa- Malaba standard gauge railway. I find that although the project will raise wages in Kenya, it will also increase the spatial wage inequality already present, with the lion's share of benefits going to Nairobi and Mombassa.

Advisor: Rauch, F
The matter of dust in Renaissance literature

This thesis investigates the paradox of Renaissance dust and its poetics. It examines how the seemingly insignificant matter of dust - the least of substances, barely visible, mundane and base - was considered by contemporary theology, anthropology, and natural philosophy to be intrinsic to mankind’s existence: how it figured as the very stuff from which man’s body was made, and into which it would disintegrate at death; how it was equivalent to the atoms which some theories of matter posited as the basis of the cosmos; and how in theology – especially Reformed theology – man’s dusty nature was both the root and result of sin, and a prompt to constant contemplation of human humility. It argues that it was this kind of dust that artistically engaged writers of the period, generating what this study will call a poetics of dust.
Dust is a difficult material to handle critically, as it is simultaneously everywhere, and only very rarely the explicit or sustained subject of discussion. In order to capture both its pervasive particulars and its cumulative significance in particular writers, the thesis first takes a broader look at the theological, cultural, and natural philosophical ideas that shaped the meaning of dust in a range of texts, from biblical commentaries to atomistic treatise. The thesis then considers how specific writers creatively engaged, or chose not to engage, with the poetics of dust, examining the figurative use of dust in the works of canonical figures such as John Milton, John Donne, George Herbert, Sir Thomas Browne, Lancelot Andrewes, Du Bartas, and Lucy Hutchinson.
The intention thereby is to provide a study of the paradoxes of dust – barely visible yet ubiquitous, the least of substances and yet the stuff of which man is made – revealing new perspectives on the interactions of literature, theology, and natural philosophy in the early modern period, unearthing the complex yet generative semantic textures from the mundane and minimal matter of dust.

Advisor: Murphy, K
The Hellenistic terracottas from Demetrias

This thesis provides a first contextual study of the terracottas from Hellenistic Demetrias. Focusing on the finds from the sanctuaries of the city (the Sanctuary of Pasikrata, of the Mother-of-the-Gods, the “Thesmophorion” and the Favissa on Hill 35), from the Anaktoron, from a Hellenistic house, and from the cemeteries, it covers the whole spectrum of life in the city, public and private, cultic and funerary. The material is presented by context, as it informs our understanding of the terracottas’ use and meaning. The main questions that this thesis addresses are the following: a) how typical was Demetrias as a Hellenistic city, through its terracottas? b) what can we learn about their use in the city? c) were specific types used in specific contexts? d) what can we learn about the cults and rituals in the city through the terracottas? e) what can we discern about workshops in the city? f) what can we learn about trade through the terracottas? g) did the coroplastic repertoire follow the general trends of the Hellenistic period? In order to address these questions, the thesis also focuses on re-contextualising the coroplastic material from the city that was considered lost (Sanctuary of Pasikrata, Sanctuary of the Mother-of-the-Gods, South Cemetery).
A case-study chapter focuses on the kausia-boy figurines from the city, which is a very important corpus of material, showing how the contextual approach informs us about the terracottas’ meaning.
Special focus is given to the city’s cults and rituals viewed through the terracottas. It is evident that at least two kourotrophic cults existed in the city, as well as possibly three cult spaces connected to the cult of the Mother-of-the-Gods. The terracottas used in the cemeteries are generally of higher quality than those in sanctuaries, indicating a conscious choice for more expensive specimens placed in graves.
Through the study of the diffusion of terracottas and the local production, it is clear that Demetrias, in terms of coroplastic production, was a cosmopolitan Hellenistic harbour with connections with much of the large coroplastic workshops of the Mediterranean, not just mainland Greece.

Keywords: Terracottas
Thessaly
cults
Demetrias
figurines
Advisor: Stamatopoulou, M
Musical monuments of Hungarian history: Ferenc Erkel’s pre-revolution operas

A rapidly shifting social and political climate characterised the period between the 1825 Hungarian Diet and the revolution of 1848. An inherited fear of nemzethalál, ‘nation death’, drove attempts to fight the spectre of obscurity through language cultivation, social-political reform, nation-building projects, and representing history artistically. Exemplified by the national theatre project, opera became embroiled in discourse surrounding the educative potential of Hungarian-language artforms. Anxieties stemming partially from imperialism shaped a cyclic understanding of a sinful past, punished present and uncertain future.
Erkel’s Bátori Mária which inaugurated the Nemzeti Színház, ‘National Theatre’, encapsulates an ambiguous representation of Hungary’s history. Abortive attempts to disrupt a series of calamities only reinforced the understanding of Árpád history as a cycle of trespasses with repercussions reverberating into the nineteenth century. As the 1840s progressed, the revolutionaries anticipated a rupture with the past. During the revolutionary year, the theatre staged a programme comprising musical-theatrical pieces embodying overt revolutionary messages. Numbers from Erkel’s second opera Hunyadi László, a work littered with anti-Habsburg textual and musical references, featured prominently in this repertoire. This study challenges traditional understandings of how Hunyadi László relates to revolutionary rhetoric, illuminating how the tropes of defeat, victimhood, sacrifice and resurrection are in tension in this medieval narrative.
Erkel’s operas composed in the pre-revolution decade illuminate how historical interpretation related to fears surrounding legacy. Operatic models familiar to the Pest-Buda audiences became vessels for presenting versions of history beholden to contemporary understandings of the past in relation to the future. The contrast between Bátori Mária and Hunyadi László not only reflects the rapid momentum radical ideologies gathered approaching 1848, but how historical interpretation shifted through political and artistic polemics. This study illuminates how anxieties relating to identity interpolate with presenting history on the stage in Erkel’s pre-revolution operas.

Keywords: National Opera
Hunyadi László
Ferenc Erkel
Bátori Mária
Hungarian Nationalism
Hungarian Opera
Advisor: Grimley, D
Imperialism and localism in provincia Asia: The development of Roman provincial administration, 133 BCE - c. 20 CE

This thesis contributes to the study of Roman imperialism, providing an investigation of the development of Roman provincial administration in western Asia Minor in the period between 133 BCE and c. 20 CE. It investigates the evolving institutional and ideological frameworks put in place by the Roman state and its representatives and local reactions to them.
Chapter 1 focuses on the institutions which the Roman state established in the province of Asia. Employing models of institutional dynamics from the social sciences, it argues that Roman approaches to provincial administration were initially ad hoc and situational and that ‘governance’ developed in an unplanned fashion. The critical role played by individuals such as L. Cornelius Sulla and C. Iulius Caesar, whose influence and power allowed them more flexibility in dealing with institutional constraints, is emphasised.
Chapter 2 examines the role of Roman official communication in creating an imperial ideology. It stresses that the establishment of Roman hegemony interrupted long-standing modes of interaction between poleis and Hellenistic rulers and argues that structural factors hindered the establishment of a new framework for negotiating power.
Chapter 3 shifts the perspective to the responses of Asian communities to these institutional and ideological realities of Roman rule. It argues that in the absence of a secure discursive framework and faced with an evolving institutional landscape, poleis experimented to maximise their own agency. Addressing the specific strategies of issuing honorific decrees, engaging in diplomacy and monumentalising Roman normative documents, it suggests that communities played a critical role in integrating themselves within a Roman administrative framework.
Overall, this thesis makes the case that the Roman state had minimal administrative ambitions vis-à-vis provincia Asia. Consequently, institutional and ideological developments establishing governance were driven by combination of individual Roman actors and, in the longer term, local responses to empire.

Keywords: political and social institutions
ideology
Asia Minor
Provincial government
Roman Republic
Advisor: Kantor, G
A study of non-linear thermochemical wave propagation in fixed-bed gas-solid reactors

The flow of a reactive fluid in a fixed-bed reactor, where a fluid-solid reaction takes place, can be described as a progression of thermal and thermochemical fronts that have a wave-like character. These waves are characterised by their dynamics such as their spatio-temporal patterns, constant pattern behaviour, temperature plateaus, and wave velocities.
A wave model is developed for determining approximate thermal and material profiles in the reactor, which is significantly simpler and less time-consuming to compute than the integration of a complete set of highly stiff, non-linear partial differential equations. The wave model can only be applied when the waves become coherent. Guidelines to predict the transient time to coherence are outlined for the specific reacting systems in the thesis.
A full numerical model for irreversible, exothermic and endothermic, and reversible exothermic, gas-solid reactions has also been developed and applied to the decoking of fixed bed reactors, reduction of iron pyrite and oxidation of magnetite respectively. The results of the numerical model reveal that, regardless of the combination of kinetic and transport parameters, wave propagation eventually assumes a stable, constant pattern form independent of time. The wave model matches the numerical simulations reasonably well; in particular, the width and position of thermal and thermochemical wave fronts, and the temperature plateau in the bed, are accurately predicted. The current work provides a simple and efficient tool essential to understanding, designing and controlling slowly reacting systems through non-linear wave theory and the theory of coherence. A new simple, mechanistic, and conceptually appealing way of looking at reactor dynamics in gassolid reactions. The wave model is a powerful tool for pre-design problems and screening potential operating schemes/strategies. The reduced heating strategy developed using the wave model saves 36.6% of the energy required to heat the injected oxygen in the decoking process. Pre-heat strategy involves injecting concentrated hydrogen whilst still pre-heating the fixed bed of pyrite particles with nitrogen. The strategy saves 10.4% of the energy required to preheat the pyrite.

Keywords: Coherence
Non-linear Wave Theory
Thermochemical waves
Reactive flow
Advisor: Hankins, N
Genotype imputation methods for next generation datasets

The advent of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) revolutionized the field of complex disease genetics. The primary goal of these studies is to achieve a better understanding of the biology of a complex disease and use this knowledge for prevention or better treatment of diseases. Genotype imputation is one of the key steps in such studies. The contribution of genotype imputation is to increase the power of study by boosting the coverage of genetic variation and to provide a natural framework for combining results across association studies that rely on different genotyping platforms.
Genotype imputation is the process of statistical inference of unobserved genotypes in a sample of individuals. In the typical scenario, a reference panel of haplotypes is used to infer ungenotyped variants in a set of study samples. Increasing the sample size in the reference panel improves imputation accuracy, especially for variants with low minor allele frequencies, but big reference panels are also a computational challenge for imputation methods. The goal of this dissertation is to develop methods and protocols that scale genotype imputation to very large next generation reference panels.
The main contribution of this dissertation is a genotype imputation method named IMPUTE5. It achieves fast, accurate, and memory-efficient imputation by selecting a small number of reference panel haplotypes using the Positional Burrows-Wheeler Transform. Imputation is performed only using the selected haplotypes, leading to a dramatic speed-up with no loss in accuracy compared to other methods. In order to facilitate other researchers to perform GWAS, a protocol to impute from a reference panel of phased haplotypes into a genome-wide association dataset is also described.
We also present an efficient C++ implementation of the Positional Burrows-Wheeler Transform which allows fast string matching in a set of haplotypes. An evaluation of previous state selection algorithms is provided together with a qualitative measure of the accuracy of chromosome painting performed by IMPUTE5.
A major application is the imputation of the UK Biobank dataset using the 100,000 Genomes Project reference panel. We show how the reference panel has been created and how imputation will be performed. Imputation of the UK Biobank represents an extremely valuable resource for researches, potentially providing new highlights for genome-wide association studies.

Keywords: impute5
genotyping
snparrays
imputation
Advisor: Marchini, J
Palamara, PF