VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays in protest and repression [electronic resource]

While civil wars and armed conflict have declined in Africa, protest incidence has increased. To explain when these protests emerge, we need to know (1) what individuals stand to gain from demonstrating, (2) how they overcome collective action problems, and (3) whether and how severely the state responds. The three chapters of this dissertation bring new theory and findings to bear on these three steps in the logic of protest and repression. First, what motivates demonstrators? In rural areas, the upward trend in protests captures an increase in mining and land-related conflicts. Common explanations for these protests focus on environmental harm, an influx of job-seeking migrants, or predation by rebel groups. Chapter 1 argues, instead, that the evidence supports a different explanation --- conflictual bargaining over the division of profits between mining companies and poorly informed host communities. Second, how do these protesters organize? Communities must overcome a coordination problem and face the risk of repression. Chapter 2 employs a quasi-experimental design to demonstrate that cell phone access has lowered the costs of protesting by easing communication among would-be demonstrators and by deterring the use of repression, as governments now fear that any brutality will be quickly and widely disseminated over cell phone and social media networks. Third, under what conditions does the state repress protests? Chapter 3 uncovers and explains two widespread patterns in how governments in Africa deploy repression: first, repression is more likely in response to urban demonstrations; but, second, when states intervene in rural areas, they are 75% more likely to kill demonstrators. These patterns suggest that small protests in remote towns pose a minor threat and, thus, prompt infrequent repression. Yet, when the state cracks down in rural areas, it worries less that brutality will spark a backlash, as there are fewer bystanders who might join the fray.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Fearon James D. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Weinstein Jeremy M. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Laitin David D. advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on capital markets and corporate disclosure [electronic resource]

This thesis studies how a firm's disclosure decisions are affected by the interaction between prevailing financial reporting regulation and managerial incentives. Chapter 1 summarizes studies related to this thesis. I focus on rules that require a firm to issue regular financial statements. As a result, the release of some information about a firm's performance and financial condition is inevitable. However, since financial statements do not fully reflect all value-relevant information, a firm's manager can still affect the interpretation of this information via voluntary disclosure. In Chapter 2, I study how reputational concerns of a firm's manager affect her voluntary disclosure decisions. I show that interpretation of both the firm's report and voluntarily disclosed information depend on the timing of the disclosure relative to disclosures made by other firms in the same industry. In Chapter 3, I consider the case when private information of the firm's manager cannot be credibly communicated to outside investors and a mandatory financial report is the only available information channel about firm value. As a result, the noisiness of a financial report will lead investors to overvalue some firms and undervalue others. I show that allowing for misreporting can increase social welfare if a firm must rely on external capital in order to finance its investment opportunities. Overall, my results emphasize the importance of taking into account strategic disclosure decisions of managers for regulators, investors, and analysts.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Beyer Anne primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Marinovic Iván primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Reichelstein Stefan
Essays on energy management and public health [electronic resource]

Energy management is concerned with the planning and operation of energy production and energy consumption units. This dissertation focuses on energy management problems for EV rental fleet charging and wastewater treatment plants, with the goal of minimizing energy costs in response to time-varying energy pricing schemes and/or minimizing CO2 emissions. In the EV rental fleet charging setting, we study the non-preemptive EV fleet charging control problem in order to minimize the total energy cost under hourly energy pricing schemes. This has not been addressed by previous literature. The optimal charging policy is derived in closed-form and can be implemented as a computationally efficient algorithm. Our simulation results show that our proposed charging algorithm reduces the electricity cost by 40% compared to the current charging patterns of an average California EV under hourly energy pricing schemes. Energy management issues for the wastewater treatment industry are a relatively new subject for the operations research community. We develop an analytical framework for optimal timing of the flow-control demand response approach to minimize energy cost and CO2 emissions respectively and characterize the optimal policies in detail. Our case study suggests that the optimization techniques in our paper can reduce 11% of wastewater treatment net energy cost and 9% of the related CO2 emissions via the flow-control demand response approach. This thesis also includes a third project related to public health. In particular, we develop a generalizable mathematical model to help public health departments working with housing departments to determine the cost and cost-effectiveness of affordable housing programs, in terms of secondary health benefits.

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Plambeck Erica L. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Rajagopal Ram primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Hausman Warren H. advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on interstate crises and audiences [electronic resource] : a text analysis approach to US foreign relations

Policymakers conduct foreign policy in the presence of domestic and international audiences―especially in the midst of interstate crises that may precipitate armed conflict (e.g., Fearon 1994, 1997; Schultz 1998, 2001; Smith 1998; Tomz 2007). This dissertation project aims to study the role of the audience in interstate crises by applying text analysis and machine learning techniques to vast bodies of newly digitized documents from the United States government. Quantitative time-series data generated in this project allowed for a substantially improved understanding of mechanisms explaining interstate behavior in the presence of domestic and international audiences. This dissertation project consists of three independent essays: 1) policymakers' credibility concerns and escalatory behavior in the Berlin Crisis; 2) the effectiveness of public and private diplomatic signals after Khrushchev's ultimatum in 1958; and 3) the determinants of de-escalation policy in the Vietnam War. These quantitative historical studies contribute to micro-foundational understandings of U.S. policymakers' perceptions and interstate behavior in crises and the actual influence domestic and international audiences have on foreign policy.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Schultz Kenneth A. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Fearon James D. advisor. Thesis advisor
Grimmer Justin advisor. Thesis advisor
Sagan Scott Douglas advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on state capacity [electronic resource]

This dissertation addresses two closely related questions. How does state capacity --- the ability of governments to implement basic policies, such as taxation --- develop? What are the consequences of state capacity development or its breakdown? These questions are explored in three related essays that use formal reasoning, analysis of original data with quasi-experimental designs, and qualitative evidence from archival research. The first essay presents a theory of the development of state capacity grounded in domestic elite conflict and tests it in post-revolutionary Mexico. The second examines the role of institutions of limited government and elite representation in explaining the expansion of the fiscal state in Spanish America in the late 18th century. Finally, the third essay develops and empirically evaluates a model of strategic tax evasion under the shadow of state collapse.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Magaloni Beatriz primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Haber Stephen H.
Scheve Kenneth F. advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on the economics of social networks [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of two projects, both concerned with how social networks form and how they affect economic decisions. In the first project, entitled Identifying Influential Agents in a Social Network, I define influence centrality, a new measure of influence which combines information on node and neighbor characteristics as well as information on the network structure, by building a model of friendship formation and peer effects and calculating the change in the equilibrium behavior of the network when one node changes its behavior. I apply the model to the context of smoking among middle and high school students and show that a targeted anti-smoking intervention in which a small number of influential smoking students are treated may be more efficient than a uniform program where every student in the school receives the same anti-smoking treatment. The second project, entitled Quantifying Spillovers in Network Formation Over Time, is a joint work with Sean Chu and Shankar Kalyanaraman at Facebook. The goal of the project is to separately identify and understand the relative importance of network effects and unobserved heterogeneity in a multi-period network formation model. Here, we define network effects to be the effect of the number of mutual friends on the probability of friendship and assume that unobserved heterogeneity is time-consistent. We estimate the model on a de-identified panel data set from a small group of users on Facebook and find that both network effects and unobserved heterogeneity are statistically and economically significant predictors of friendship formation on Facebook. We further re-estimate the model first, without network effects and next, without unobserved heterogeneity. Comparing the results from these specifications, we find that network effects play a more important role than unobserved heterogeneity in network formation models on Facebook.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Benkard C. Lanier primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Hartmann Wesley R. (Wesley Robert)
Yurukoglu Ali advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on the role of advertising in product markets [electronic resource]

This thesis studies the role of advertising in product markets and the mechanisms by which advertising affects consumers' purchase decisions. The first chapter explores the effects of e-cigarette advertising on demand for traditional cigarettes and contributes to the current policy debate as to whether e-cigarette TV advertising should be banned, as is TV advertising for tobacco cigarettes. To analyze this question, I leverage access to county-level sales and advertising data on cigarettes and related tobacco products, along with detailed data on the consumption behavior of a panel of households. Using both descriptive and structural methods, I show evidence that e-cigarette advertising reduces demand for tobacco cigarettes. In a policy-relevant counterfactual analysis, I predict that an e-cigarette advertising ban would increase demand for cigarettes by 3%, suggesting that a ban on e-cigarette advertising may have unintended consequences. Chapter 2, which is a joint project with Harikesh Nair and Pedro Gardete, explores new opportunities for ad targeting based on the past consumption of both products and ads. The standard paradigm in the empirical literature is to treat consumers as passive recipients of advertising, but this paradigm ignores the fact that consumers may actively choose their consumption of advertising. Becker and Murphy (1993) recognized this aspect of demand for advertising and argued that advertising should be treated as a good in consumers' utility functions, thereby effectively creating a role for consumer choice over advertising consumption. They argued that in many cases demand for advertising and demand for products may be linked by complementarities in joint consumption. We analyze an unusually rich dataset that links the TV ad consumption behavior of a panel of consumers with their product choice behavior over a long time horizon. In a series of descriptive analyses, we show that the data suggests an active role for consumer choice over ads and for complementarities in joint demand. To interpret the patterns in the data, we fit a structural model for both products and advertising consumption that allows for such complementarities. Interpreting the data through the lens of the model enables us to precisely characterize the treatment effect of advertising under endogenous non-compliance and assess the returns to targeting advertising based on endogenous past consumption. To illustrate the value of the model, we compare advertising, prices and consumer welfare to a series of counterfactual scenarios motivated by the "addressable'' future of TV ad-markets in which targeting advertising and prices on the basis of ad-viewing and product purchase behavior is possible. We find that both profits and net consumer welfare may increase, suggesting that it may be possible that both firms and consumers become better off in the new addressable TV environments.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Nair Harikesh S. (Harikesh Sasikumar)
Hartmann Wesley R. (Wesley Robert)
Sahni Navdeep advisor. Thesis advisor
Evaluating Potential Tumor Stem Cell Populations in Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG)

Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) is a brain tumor that originates in the pons of the brainstem. This devastating cancer most prominently affects children between the ages of 5 and 7 years of age, and comprises approximately 10-15% of all pediatric brain tumors. Recent studies have identified genomic alterations thought to drive development of DIPG, but the molecular effectors of tumorigenesis remain unclear.
Single cell qPCR experiments performed in the Monje Lab at Stanford have identified distinct subpopulations of cells from DIPG xenografts that exhibit distinct transcriptional profiles in contrast to other regions of the tumor. We hypothesized that this transcriptionally defined subpopulation of cells may act as cancer stem cells in DIPG. To further clarify the role of these subpopulations in DIPG tumor development, this project evaluated their potential to act as tumor-initiating stem cell populations.
To investigate whether this subpopulation could be acting as a tumor stem cell driving the initiation of DIPG, this population was screened for its ability to form neurospheres in vitro. Stem cell frequency estimates were calculated, and it was determined that cells seeded from the subpopulation of interest exhibited statistically equivalent stem cell frequencies when compared to cells from other regions of the same tumor.
Further, to evaluate whether the subpopulation of interest could act as a stem cell population contributing to the initiation of tumors, I monitored the expression profile maintenance of this population in culture over time. This analysis revealed that, over the course of several passages, the expression profile of this subpopulation is only weakly maintained.
Finally, to further characterize the potential for this subpopulation to act as a tumor-initiating population, it was imperative to evaluate its proliferative capacity as compared to other regions of the same tumor. In the presence of growth factors, the subpopulation of interest proliferated at a higher rate than cells from other regions of the same tumor.
With the identification of a subpopulation that shows substantial growth capacity both in vitro and in vivo, I tested if this population is sensitive to pharmacological inhibition in hopes of identifying a viable therapeutic target for DIPG. Crenolanib, a PDGFR-specific RTK inhibitor, was screened for its ability to kill bulk DIPG cells. However, it appears that by itself, or in conjunction with another promising drug, Panobinostat, Crenolanib is ineffective at killing bulk DIPG cells.
Altogether, this data suggets that the subpopulation of interest is not representative of a tumor-initiating stem cell population. However, it might actually be acting as a more differentiated transient amplifying population that doesn’t initiate the tumor, but instead contributes to its rapid growth.

Keywords:  Department of Biology
Biology
DIPG
Thesis
Advisor: Monje-Deisseroth Michelle
Heller Craig
Evaluating School Counselors: Impact of Variation in Student-to-Counselor Ratio in Missouri Public High Schools

In this paper, I analyze how variation in the student-to-counselor ratio impacts student academic outcomes (such as graduation rates and test scores) and behavioral outcomes (such as disciplinary infractions and post-high school decisions). I use a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach to estimate the impact of variation in the student-to-counselor ratio in Missouri public high schools. I look at school-level data primarily from the Missouri Comprehensive Data System as well as the National Center for Education Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and Common Core of Data. I find that an additional high school counselor increases ACT scores in math and science by approximately 0.13 and 0.11 standard deviations respectively. An additional counselor has no statistically significant effect on overall graduation rates, but increases the graduation rate for Black and Native American students by approximately 8.5 and 7 percentage points respectively. An additional counselor has no statistically significant effect on college enrollment rates, but increases post-graduate employment rates by approximately 1.5 percentage points. Finally, an additional counselor predicts a 0.67 percentage point increase in overall disciplinary infractions.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
Guidance Counselor
School Counselor
Comprehensive Guidance and Counseling
Student-toCounselor Ratio
Missouri
High School
School Discipline
Academic Achievement
Thesis
Advisor: Hanushek Rick
Evaluation of anti-CD47 Antibody (Hu5F9-G4) as a Therapeutic in Human Pancreatic Tumor Mouse Model

CD47 is a cell surface receptor over expressed on cancer cells that acts as a “don’t eat me” signal and inhibits the engulfment of cancer cells by phagocytes. This study explores the role of a novel monoclonal antibody, Hu5F9-G4, that blocks CD47’s interaction with its ligand SIRPα, in the phagocytosis of pancreatic cancer cells. Specifically, the study examined the therapeutic efficacy of the anti-CD47 (Hu5F9-G4) antibody alone and in combination with two EGFR targeting antibodies, cetuximab and panitumumab, in patient-derived pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) xenografts. We found that the anti-CD47 antibody slowed tumor growth, but did not increase survival noticeably. When used in combination with Panitumumab and cetuximab, the anti-CD47 antibody lead to less tumor growth in vivo than treatment with panitumumab, cetuximab, or PBS alone did. While the combination treatment significantly reduced tumors, it only marginally increased survival over single agent anti-EGFR antibodies. We conducted protein expression profiling of EGFR and CD47 expression by FACS and in vitro phagocytosis assays, to determine the in vitro response of the cancerous cells to the anti-CD47 antibody Hu5F9G4, the anti-EGFR antibodies cetuximab and panitumumab, and the combination of these antibodies. The examination of the expression levels of CD47 and EGFR in the BxPC3 cell line showed the expression of both cell surface markers. The phagocytosis assay showed that blockade by Hu5F9-G4 alone and in combination with other antibodies in vitro enables phagocytosis of the cancer cells. The combination treatment did not yield greater phagocytosis than the individual anti-EGFR treatments. This study is important because it is the first to demonstrate in the solid tumor setting to demonstrate that an anti-CD47 antibody in combination with an anti-EGFR antibody is able to dramatically shrink tumors in animal models.

Keywords:  Department of Biology
Biology
cancer
antibody therapy
Thesis
Advisor: Weissman Irving
Cyert Martha
The evolutionary universe [electronic resource] : cosmology, society, and natural history in Britain, 1780-1860

This dissertation examines the development of evolution as a cosmic concept—that is, as a concept that people applied to both the physical transformations of the astronomical heavens and to everything else in the universe—across the eight decades preceding Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' (1859). The story I tell is centered in Britain, but with important roots in, and connections to, French and German natural philosophy. The language people used to refer to the concept of the transformation of organic and inorganic nature changed over the time period in question, of course, but it did so within a consistently universal paradigm that extended a single transformist law or principle to everything in the universe, from the transformation of nebular matter into solar systems, to the development of the earth, to the emergence and transformation of organic life on its surface, the progress of individuals and human societies, and even life in a spiritual world to come. This cosmic evolutionary paradigm was developed in the context of imaginative habits of thought associated with a historical movement known as Romanticism. The story of cosmic evolutionary thought is important for three reasons. First, it reveals the way in which evolution was a feature of nineteenth-century thought more generally, uncovering new avenues for historical research across domains of study. Second, it presents evolution not as the product of a few individual moments of genius, but as a rising tide of thought that saturated literary, religious, social, political, and natural philosophical life. Finally, our understanding of evolution in particular, and the scientific enterprise more generally, are transformed by a clearer recognition of the imaginative, Romantic roots of evolutionary ideas. The story of the cosmic evolutionists demonstrates the critical role of imagination in science, and particularly evolutionary, historical accounts of nature, while also examining the controversy that has accompanied it from the very beginning.

Keywords: History.
Advisor: Riskin Jessica primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Campbell James T.
Findlen Paula advisor. Thesis advisor
Satia Priya advisor. Thesis advisor