VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Infrastructure, the economy and policy

The role of infrastructure in economic growth and development has been the subject of continued debate, yet no consensus has been achieved in the literature. This thesis examines the economic effect of infrastructure based on new evidence from China. We add to understanding of this complex phenomenon by focussing at micro levels, i.e., firm-level and household level with a focus on three critical infrastructure sectors: transport, renewable energy and information communication technologies. We employ a series of datasets on infrastructure, firm performance, and household economy from China in our examinations. Our first empirical study focuses on the economic effects of city’s ICT infrastructure on firm performance. We have found that the improvement of city’s ICT infrastructure positively improved firm’s profitability, marketing, and innovation. By taking advantage of an exogenous variation of city’s ICT using the telecommunication upgrade as a natural experiment, we establish the causal impact of city’s ICT infrastructure on firm profitability. We also identify the mechanisms in which ICTs impact firm performance, including the firm’s efficiency, firm’s labour, and firm cost. Our second empirical study focuses on the renewable energy sector and its influence on China’s rural household economy over the past two decades. We provide empirical evidence in this under-investigated area of research, and have found that renewable energy, including bioenergy, solar energy, and hydropower energy, indeed improved the rural household economy in China. In the third empirical study, we then focus on the impact of improved transport infrastructure connectivity on the litigation risks of listed firms in China. Based on a natural experiment on China’s highspeed rail system construction, we have found that the improvement of transport infrastructure connectivity reduced firm’s litigation risks. This study shows that the impact of improved transport connectivity on listed firms’ litigation risk stem from the reduction of information asymmetry, and also the increase of external regulations and monitoring. Overall, we have found evidence that transport infrastructure, renewable energy infrastructure and ICT infrastructure played a positive and critical role in the economic development from the perspectives of firm performance and household economy, and also provide in-depth analysis of the underlying mechanisms. The findings in this thesis offer evidence for policymakers that improvement of infrastructure contributes to the productivity, economic growth and social development, and reasonable deployment of infrastructure could pay off.

Advisor: Hall, JW
Farmer, D
Large eddy simulations of compressor turbulence

The DPhil thesis enclosed herein reports an investigation into turbulence in compressor passages, carried out using large eddy simulations (LES) of a repeating compressor stage. The thesis starts with a description of all the numerical tools used to conduct the research. First, the underlying assumptions of LES, as well as the governing equations and the discretization methods used in the in-house CFD solver, AU3X, are explained. This is followed by a brief account of the mesh generator developed in the current DPhil. Its ability to generate high-quality multi-block structured grids of turbomachinery blade passages, whilst also ensuring perfectly-balanced domain partitioning, is demonstrated. Finally, a novel sliding plane algorithm, developed with the aim of minimizing the communication cost in massively-parallel computations, is presented.
In the early stages of the DPhil, research was also carried out into the Reτ scaling of the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) modes of the two-point correlation tensor in turbulent channel flow. The POD modes represent an optimal basis for the two-point correlation tensor. The research conducted showed that POD modes corresponding to the large, i. e. half the channel height, streamwise and spanwise lengthscales exhibited good Reτ scaling once the large wall-normal modes were removed. Modes corresponding to smaller streamwise and spanwise lengthscales exhibited near universality even with the inclusion of the large wall-normal modes.
The focus of the investigation into turbulence in compressor passage turbulence was the Reynolds and deterministic stress fields. The repeating compressor stage computations were performed at three points on a compressor speed line; at the design condition and at two higher flow coefficients. In most of the domain, the Reynolds stresses were larger than the deterministic stresses, and also played a larger role in the timemean momentum balance. At the blade leading edge and passage inlet however, the deterministic stresses and deterministic stress divergence were comparable to, or larger than, the Reynolds stresses. The deterministic stresses were also significant in large phase-dependent unsteady flow features, i. e. the pressure side separation bubbles in the higher flow coefficient runs.
In the Reynolds stress budget, the deterministic stress field creates two additional budget terms: the deterministic production rate and the deterministic diffusion rate. The deterministic production and diffusion rate contributed significantly to the turbulent kinetic energy budget at the passage inlet and in the pressure side separation bubble. The deterministic production rate also appears in the deterministic stress budget, but with an opposite sign to that in the Reynolds stress budget. It is accompanied by another term that governs the rate at which Reynolds stresses transport periodic fluctuations. These were found to be the dominant terms in the deterministic kinetic energy budget throughout the blade surface boundary layers.

Keywords: Turbulence
Turbomachinery
Large Eddy Simulations
Advisor: di Mare, L
Social and economic lives of the ordinary poor in Ipswich, 1570-1620

Using a tailored combination of methodologies and an array of sources, this thesis offers a case study of the ordinary social and economic lives of ‘the poor’ in the town of Ipswich between 1570 and 1620. Inspired by the well-known work of Amartya Sen, it defines poverty in a broad sense, aligning with many contemporary perceptions of ‘the poor’, but breaking with current historiographical norms for the boundaries of poverty, which are typically more restrictive in scope. Moreover, it argues against the use of terms including ‘marginal’ or ‘labouring’ poor to denote those who lived in more mild hardship. Instead, it offers a new descriptive term for this diverse group: the ‘ordinary poor’.
Overall, it analyses and juxtaposes the life experiences of the ‘ordinary poor’ and their relief-dependent counterparts in relation to the composition of these groups, their families, and how they approached their financial lives and their children’s futures. Its findings show more similarities than differences. For example, both groups were susceptible to hardship migration and the effects of epidemic disease, but only the relief-dependent poor were particularly susceptible to broken family units. They also engaged in similar varieties of occupations (lawful and unlawful), worked hard to provide secure financial futures for their children, and held comparable levels of wealth, the latter being determined more by the size of their nuclear family than their socio-economic status. In addition, this study considers how the tax structures of the period and the influential poor law statutes of 1598 and 1601 impacted the lives of the poor, arguing these factors created forms of entrenched socio-economic disadvantage, which resulted in ‘poverty traps’ that impeded the efforts of many among the poor to improve their situations.

Keywords: Early Modern
Family History
British History
Poverty
Advisor: Ingram, M
An exploration of maternal support to children’s academic achievement in low‑cost private schools in Lahore

With an increased recognition of the poor quality and limited availability of schools provided by the government, low cost private schools are experiencing exponential growth across Pakistan. By drawing on qualitative, semi structured interviews with 15 low income mothers of children enroled in primary low cost private schools in Lahore, this study explores the way mothers are responding to this development, focussing on maternal conceptualisations of the value of education, and the behaviours they adopt at home and in relation to the school in order to support their children’s academic achievement. This study finds that mothers tend to prefer private schools in place of public schools. The responses indicate this is due to increased private school availability within poorer communities, English language being offered as the medium of instruction, the presence of more and qualified teachers and the availability of basic infrastructure such as running water and electricity. Qualitative inquiries regarding behaviours suggest, despite limited resources and at times, illiteracy, mothers are determined to engage with their children’s academic performance in a variety of ways at home and in relation to the school. At home, they tend to involve themselves by checking their children’s homework, assisting in exam preparation and encouraging siblings to provide academic guidance to one another. Importantly, they also enrol their children in after school private tutoring as a way to provide indirect academic support to their children. In relation to the school, mothers regularly attend parent teacher meetings, and if necessary, visit the school in order to discuss their child’s progress, both academic and discipline related. Importantly, their interaction with the school is mostly limited to parent teacher meetings that are initiated by the teachers. The findings of this study emphasise the need for future scholarly attention on exploring low income mothers prioritisation of private tutoring as a popular form of indirect academic support to their children. Additionally, the findings call for an investigation of the limited interaction between low cost schools and parents, particularly mothers, as they appear to be the more involved parents in low income communities in Lahore and exhibit a desire to engage more actively.

Keywords: CIE
CIE2017
MScEducation
Motivations for pursuing postgraduate study in the UK: Perspectives of Chinese graduates of a Sino-British cooperative university

Joining the global trend of internationalisation, higher education in the Chinese context has witnessed remarkable outbound flows of students and a thriving market of transnational education. With China and the UK forging formal arrangements for educational exchange, the UK has become one of the top destinations for Chinese international students and British higher education institutions have been proactively developing partnerships with Chinese institutions. Against this backdrop, this qualitative study examines the motivations of Chinese graduates of a Sino-British cooperative university for pursuing postgraduate study in the UK and the impacts of their previous undergraduate experience on their decision-making. The research reveals novel insights into international students’ study choices and the emerging relationship between student mobility to the UK and the growing availability of transnational education offered by British institutions. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with ten students who had spent their four undergraduate years in mainland China in a Sino-British university and then chose to enroll in master’s programmes in the UK. The data analysis adopted the Miles and Huberman framework (Miles, Hubermann, & Saldaña, 2013). From the analysis, the research uncovers four common themes in the students’ motivations for doing a master’s degree abroad: academic motives, career development motives, self-formation motives, and the influence of peer norms. The research also discovers five themes in the students’ choice of the UK as the overseas study destination: knowledge and awareness, academic considerations, career development, social environment, and financial cost. Additionally, it is found that the study experience at a SinoBritish cooperative university had a defining influence on the formulation of these two aspects of their motivations. Not only did it inspire the students to pursue higher education abroad for the sake of personal development, but it also contributed to their overwhelming preference for undertaking postgraduate study in the UK.

Keywords: CIE2019
CIE
MScEducation
Technological partnership in everyday life: exploring the user-identities of postgraduate students in technology-related courses

This study is guided by the underlying assumption that learning takes place through mediated processes. More particularly, learning is facilitated by the tools we use in everyday life. The rise of digital technology has led to new ways of examining and understanding learning as it occurs in both everyday life and across the life course. How one interacts with digital technology is likely to influence one’s learning across different domains of life from school to work to leisure.
This dissertation explores the concept of the ‘user-identity’ to examine the ways individuals interact and make use of digital technology in their everyday lives. User-identities can be conceptualized through the ‘digital mindsets’ individuals hold towards digital technology, as these in turn shape the ‘technological partnerships’ they exercise in everyday life. In understanding the identities of individuals as users of digital technology, I argue, we may better understand the ways they learn with these technologies through everyday activities and processes with digital technology.
Using this innovative theoretical concept, I explore the user-identities of 18 postgraduate students in technology-related courses through semi-structured interviews. User-identities expressed by participants demonstrate that these were significantly influenced by their educational and occupational pathways, where digital technology were likely to play a formal part of their learning. The study also suggests that user-identities are shaped over time across an individual’s wider learning life with digital technology and these develop across trajectories (education and occupational), identities (everyday users and specialists), and contexts (informal and formal) for learning and using digital technology.
With the increasing number of affordances in everyday life, users are given more flexibility and freedom over their technological activities. New ways of examining individual interactions with digital technology must be developed, as these now shape not only learning outcomes but also other life chances. I end with a recommendation of user-identities as an analytic concept for future learning and technology research. Such a concept may also be relevant in other fields such as new media research and digital sociology.

Keywords: L&amp;T2018
L&amp;T
MScEducation
Why cognitive skills matter for development and what explains their variation

Growth theories and the role of human capital formation in development remain widely-discussed topics in the field of education economics. While a plethora of studies that use school enrollment rates as a proxy for human capital fail to explain the variation in per-capita GDP growth, more recent work in the economics of education shows that cognitive skills are essential for development. How these skills are formed, however, is less clear and should be investigated. This dissertation examines whether cognitive skills, measured by science and mathematics, explain human development in Sudan. Drawing on the 2018 Sudanese National Learning Assessment, part of the Basic Education Recovery Project of World Bank (2019a), the questions are: Do cognitive skills matter for development? If so, what explains their variation? The findings, achieved through correlation analyses between state-level poverty rates and science & mathematics achievement, show a robust significant relationship. Additionally, multivariate OLS models indicate that components of Cunha and Heckman (2007) theory on skill formation such as subsequent achievement, parental and environmental factors and a student asset index created with a machine-learning algorithm explain the variation in science achievement.

Keywords: CIE
CIE2019
Does student-centred learning improve learning outcomes in Indian classrooms?

In an effort to improve education quality in developing countries, as outlined by the EFA2015 goals, student-centred learning (SCL) has been identified as a promising avenue for pedagogical reform. The promotion of SCL, usually through teacher-training programs, has received wide support from international development agencies. Situated within a case study of the TESS-India project, the present research explores whether SCL actually improves student learning outcomes. It contributes both theoretically to the debate on SCL efficacy, as well as to the policy debate on pedagogical reform.
The research, conducted in 15 government schools in Karnataka, finds that SCL has a positive correlation with learning outcomes in primary schools but not in secondary schools. Furthermore, it finds that SCL is already a marked feature of Indian classrooms, despite the fact that teachers lack a sophisticated understanding of how SCL contributes to learning. Lastly, this research identifies a number of barriers to the successful promotion of SCL in Indian classrooms, and suggests a number of institutional, infrastructural, and intellectual reforms that might need to go hand-in-hand with pedagogical reform.

Keywords: MScEducation
CIE
CIE2015
The role of endogenous network mechanisms for ethnic friendship segregation in classrooms.

This thesis studies the interrelation of ethnic homophily and three endogenous network processes as mechanisms related to ethnic segregation of friendship networks in classrooms. Stochastic actor oriented models are applied to a German and a Swedish sample of several classrooms to investigate in-group tendencies in transitivity, reciprocity and centrality. Findings from a hierarchical analysis of the dynamics in 33 classrooms (HSAOM) from the German sample reveal that dyadic homophily can only be found for non-native pupils. Accounting for homophily in transitivity reveals natives having a small tendency for embedded ties to the out-group, while non-natives show no differences of transitivity to in- or out-group. The data suggest that homophily for nonnatives might be driven by the dissolution of one-sided not-embedded friendship nominations after the first observation. HSAOM are used to analyse the Swedish sample of 194 classrooms in order analyse the role of reciprocity for the creation and maintenance of pupils' in- and out-group friendships. The results show similar tendencies for one sided and reciprocal homophily in friendship creation. While for friendship maintenance homophily is apparent in asymmetric relations, reciprocated friendships are more often dissolved within groups than between. Lastly, stochastic actor oriented models applied to separately analyse a subset of 64 classrooms from the Swedish CILS4EU data and the results are subsequently used for data-driven simulations in order to investigate how structural homophily mechanisms can have lead to the segregation of the first network observations. Results from the meta-analysis of the classroom models indicate no clear tendencies of homophily in either reciprocity, transitivity or centrality. However, accounting for these mechanism in data-driven agent based simulations provides give some insights about the emergence of segregation. The presented research projects underline that endogenous network mechanisms represent different social situations for pupils' choices about friendships to their ethnic in- and out-group. Accounting for these, helps to understand which relational structures between pupils from different backgrounds could be encouraged to avoid or reduce segregation.

Advisor: Jonsson, JO
Aleksandr Men as an interpreter of the Bible

Despite considerable interest from various quarters in the assassinated Soviet priest-theologian Aleksandr Men (1935-1990), there has been little attempt to assess his contribution to theological thought. This thesis argues that his principal contribution is as an interpreter of the Bible and biblical theologian in the ‘Russian school’ tradition, whose theology offers a way of overcoming divisions between secular and sacred spheres in an eschatological ‘divine-human culture’.
A methodology for reading Men’s ‘works’ is established using the details of his biography and published works. From this it is clear that interpreting the Bible was Men’s principal theological and pastoral concern, central to his many other interests. In developing a biblical theology based on ‘Russian school’ ideas he bridged the traditional Eastern ‘distance’ between dogmatic theology and exegetical commentary through hermeneutics and critical study. This makes the relationship between Men’s interpretive principles and the under-researched principles of the broader Russian Orthodox tradition productive, but not straightforward.
Men’s biblical theology is helpfully considered alongside that of Sergei Trubetskoi, who interacted with Vladimir Solov′ev’s philosophy (‘divine-humanity’, ‘all-unity’) and Adolf von Harnack’s views on dogma and biblical history. Unpublished letters from Trubetskoi to Harnack show how his Solov′evian responses to the latter crystallised Trubetskoi’s christological, biblical and philosophical thinking. Men’s contribution to Russian Orthodox Biblical Studies includes his development and use of Trubetskoi’s currently little-known biblical thought. Their philosophical inheritance from Solov′ev, views on the linear nature of biblical history, the concrete personal content of the ‘God-man’ Jesus Christ and their rejection of ‘sophiological’ thinking, lead both to interpret the ‘ecclesiality’ of the Russian Church similarly. The ‘divine-human culture’ that stands at the end of biblical salvation history becomes an eschatological reconciliation of the secular and sacred spheres. This stands as a challenge to all Christians, especially well expressed through artistic interpretations of Scripture.

Advisor: Zachhuber, J
Negotiating publicity, publicising domesticity: women-authored Heian kana memoirs, circulation, reception, and power

I examine the evolution of the socio-literary image of female middle-ranking producers of text in the late Heian period, and how it was informed by different understandings of domesticity and its interplay with the public sphere—both in these authors’ work and in later re-contextualisations; discussing relations between these writers and higher ranking patrons/husbands, the negotiation of loss of control over textual production and public persona, and it contemplates questions of patronage, forced circulation, and intertextuality. In order to do so, it focuses primarily on the power dynamics underlying the portrayal and significance of domestic and household-centred literary circulation in women-authored texts and others that exemplify their reception; addressing firstly, the different ways in which household and court-based kana nikki 仮名日記 (diary, memoir) authors conceptualise domesticity and their position within it as a tool to articulate their relation to broader society, and secondly, how they respond and negotiate around this conception.
This thesis presents a comparative approach to different modes of authorship, dynamics of patronage, questions of publicity, the circulation of women-authored texts, and their relation with the sphere of domesticity; and finds itself in the intersection between premodern literature and Queer studies.

Keywords: Domesticity
Literary Circulation
Reception
Court literature
Advisor: Guest, J