VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays on Behavioral Tax Policy and Political Violence

This dissertation includes original research in the fields of behavioral public economics and political economy./nThe first chapter provides evidence from a field experiment testing whether exposure to relative earnings information impacts worker effective labor supply. I exogenously manipulate access to information about relative position in the distribution of worker earnings as well as the shape of the distribution among workers engaged in piece rate, web-based clerical work. There are four main findings. First, those exposed to information about their placement in the earnings distribution provide significantly more labor effort on average than those with no information about peer earnings. Second, labor supply elasticity with respect to net of tax wages, a key sufficient statistic for optimal income tax policy, is unchanged between the two groups. Third, the higher productivity observed among workers exposed to relative earnings information is driven by those workers who experienced an exogenously assigned high relative earnings rank and low average comparison group earnings. Fourth, this later finding is gendered in the sense that women supply more labor regardless of whether they learn they occupy high or low relative standing while men supply significantly more labor only upon learning they occupy high relative standing. A model of worker preferences that incorporates status concerns is shown to reconcile these seemingly disparate findings in contrast to several alternatives considered. These findings suggest that governments can potentially use relative earnings information to grow the tax base - but not to affect optimal labor income tax rates - and that firms can generate significant productivity boosts simply by providing workers with information about the earnings of their peers./nThe second chapter addresses an entirely different question, namely, the efficacy of violent forms of protest. It takes as its point of departure the acknowledgment that estimating the effect of violent forms of political protest on protest success is complicated by endogeneity and omitted variable bias. To address this problem, I utilize instrumental variables methods to estimate a causal effect of violent protest on the likelihood that protesters win policy concessions. Using daily French protest data and a set of weather and school holiday instruments, I find a significant and negative relationship between property destruction associated with protests and the chance of near-term success in changing policy. The IV estimates are larger than OLS estimates and are robust to a variety of alternative specifications. Such findings are predicted by several posited endogeneity channels, and, they suggest that political violence does not, in fact, pay off.

Advisor: Saez, Emmanuel
Independence Relations in Theories with the Tree Property

This thesis investigates theories with the tree property and, in particular, notions of independence in such theories. We discuss the example of the two-sorted theory of an infinite dimensional vector space over an algebraically closed field and with a bilinear form (which we refer to as T_∞), examined by Granger in his thesis. Granger notes that there is a well-behaved notion of independence, which he calls Γ-non-forking, in this theory, and that it can be viewed as the limit of the non-forking independence in the theories of its finite dimensional subspaces, which are ω-stable. He defines a notion of an ``approximating sequence'' of substructures, and shows that Γ-non-forking in a model of T_∞ corresponds to ``eventual" non-forking in an approximating sequence. We generalize his notion of approximation by substructures, and in the case of a theory whose large models can be approximated in this way, define a notion of independence which is the ``limit'' of the non-forking independence in the theories of the approximating substructures. We show that if the approximating substructures have simple theories, the limit independence relation satisfies invariance, monotonicity, base monotonicity, transitivity, normality, extension, finite character, and symmetry. Under certain additional assumptions, limit independence also satisfies anti-reflexivity and the Independence Theorem over algebraically closed sets./nWe also consider the two-sorted theory of infinitely many cross-cutting equivalence relations, T^*_{feq}. We give a proof, explaining in detail the argument of Shelah and Usvyatsov for Theorem 2.1 in [Shelah-Usvyatsov'08], that T^*_{feq} does not have SOP_2 (equivalently, TP_1). The argument makes use of a theorem of Kim and Kim, from [Kim-Kim'11], along with several other lemmas involving tree indiscernibility.

Advisor: Scanlon, Thomas W
Probabilistic approaches for tracking physiological states in the cortex through sleep and seizures

We present work in this dissertation on methods to map measured electrode signals from human subjects into the physiologically relevant parameter space of a mathematical model of the cortex, approaching two specific dynamical brain phenomena: sleep and seizures./nIn the context of sleep, we develop a probabilistic method for mapping human sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) signals onto a state space based on a biologically plausible mathematical model of the cortex. From a noninvasive EEG signal, this method produces physiologically meaningful pathways of the cortical state over a night of sleep. We propose ways in which these pathways offer insights into sleep-related conditions, functions, and complex pathologies. To address explicitly the noisiness of the EEG signal and the stochastic nature of the mathematical model, we use a probabilistic Bayesian framework to map each EEG epoch to a distribution of likelihoods over all model sleep states. A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is incorporated to improve the path results using the prior knowledge that cortical physiology has temporal continuity./nNext we adapt our probabilistic methodology to infer the parameter region in the mathematical model of the cortex most likely to be producing seizures observed in an electrocorticogram (ECoG) signal. This method produces a probabilistic pathway of the temporal evolution of physiological state in the cortex over the course of individual seizures. We describe ways in which these methods and results offer insights into seizure etiology and suggest potential new treatment options./nOnce again, a probabilistic Bayesian framework is used to map features of EEG or ECoG segments onto a distribution of likelihoods over physiological parameter states. And again, a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is introduced to incorporate the belief that cortical physiology has both temporal continuity and also a degree of reproducibility between individual seizures. However, for seizures, we additionally inspect the ratio of likelihoods between HMMs run under two possible parameter regions, both of which produce seizures in the model, to determine which physiological parameter regions are more likely to be causing the observed seizures. We show that between individual seizures, there is consistency in these likelihood ratios between hypothesized regions, in the temporal pathways calculated, and in the separation of seizure from non-seizure time segment likelihood maps. We also improve upon several of the underlying techniques for sampling the parameter state space, feature selection, and probability density estimation.

Advisor: Szeri, Andrew J
Bone Strength Multi-axial Behavior - Volume Fraction, Anisotropy and Microarchitecture

Trabecular bone is a major load-bearing tissue in the musculoskeletal system and is subjected to various multi-axial loads in vivo. For example, in the vertebral body, the trabecular bone is primarily subjected to uniaxial loads, in the proximal femur, trabecular bone is subjected to biaxial loads i.e. loads oriented at two mutually perpendicular directions, in distal radius, the trabecular bone can subjected to shear loads due to off-axis loading during a traumatic event. Understanding the multi-axial strength and underlying tissue-level failure mechanisms of human trabecular bone is of great clinical and scientific importance since age-related osteoporotic fractures primarily occur at trabecular bone sites, such as the hip, spine and wrist. With the onset of osteoporosis, there is an increase in porosity and deterioration of the microarchitecture of trabecular bone, which results in increased fragility and fracture susceptibility of trabecular bone./nUsing high-resolution, micro-CT based nonlinear finite element models, we investigated the strength of trabecular bone under compression, shear, biaxial and multiaxial loading conditions. Under uniaxial loading, it was shown that the variation in both compressive and shear strength was primarily attributed to the volume fraction of the trabecular bone, but the observed scatter in the ratio of the shear and compressive strength was attributed to heterogeneity and anisotropy of the trabecular microarchitecture. At the tissue-level, it was shown that shear loading leads to predominantly tensile tissue failure unlike compression loading that makes trabecular bone much weaker under shear loading. Under biaxial loading, it was shown that the yield strength varied with both volume fraction and anisotropy, and most of the variation in biaxial strength could be primarily attributed to similar variation of the uniaxial strengths with minor variations due to trabecular microarchitecture. Based on these results, the complete multi-axial yield strength behavior of trabecular bone was investigated for over 200 multi-axial load cases. A new yield strength criterion was then formulated in the six-dimensional strain space to mathematically characterize the multiaxial failure criterion of human trabecular bone./nThe research presented in this dissertation has provided considerable insight into the variation of both apparent-level strength and the tissue-level failure mechanisms of trabecular bone under various loading conditions. The role of bone volume fraction, anisotropy and microarchitecture on the uniaxial and multi-axial strength has been outlined. A multi-axial failure criterion has been formulated which can be used to noninvasively predict the strength of whole bones of osteoporotic patients using clinical CT scans.

Advisor: Keaveny, Tony M
Hardness of Maximum Constraint Satisfaction

We show optimal (up to a constant factor) NP-hardness for maximum constraint satisfaction problem with k variables per constraint (Max-k-CSP), whenever k is larger than the domain size. This follows from our main result concerning CSPs given by a predicate: a CSP is approximation resistant if its predicate contains a subgroup that is balanced pairwise independent. Our main result is analogous to Austrin and Mossel's, bypassing their Unique-Games Conjecture assumption whenever the predicate is an abelian subgroup./nOur main ingredient is a new gap-amplification technique inspired by XOR-lemmas. Using this technique, we also improve the NP-hardness of approximating Independent-Set on bounded-degree graphs, Almost-Coloring, Two-Prover-One-Round-Game, and various other problems.

Advisor: Mossel, Elchanan
Trevisan, Luca
Colonial Articulations: English Instruction and the 'Benevolence' of U.S. Overseas Expansion in the Philippines, 1898-1916

Abstract/nColonial Articulations: English Instruction and the `Benevolence' of U.S. Overseas Expansion in the Philippines, 1898-1916/nBy/nFunie Hsu/nDoctor of Philosophy in Education/nDesignated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Daniel Perlstein, Chair/nEven though historians are increasingly pointing to the importance of colonialism in U.S. history, an investigation of the role of colonialism in the shaping of American public schooling has been largely unexamined in education. This dissertation focuses on the colonial legacy as it pertains to English instruction, highlighting the case of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. This project provides a close examination of Philippine Public Law 74, the colonial education policy that mandated English as the language of instruction, and investigates the social and political conditions that motivated the policy. Employing a historical methods approach, this study examines how the U.S. education policy of English instruction organized both the school system and the broader project of American colonialism. Moreover, this dissertation examines the process by which the history of U.S. overseas conquest in the Philippines has been forgotten./nThis dissertation demonstrates that a gendered and racialized discourse of education was central to efforts in reconciling the contradiction that U.S. colonialism posed to American democracy. It illuminates the manner in which gendered constructions of the American English teachers as feminine and nurturing-- as juxtaposed with the image of the aggressive male soldier--enabled the institution of American colonial education in to create a domesticating illusion of peace. Through the mechanism of English instruction, American officials were able to articulate their presence as "benevolent tutelage" rather than imperial expansion, thereby erasing the violence of colonialism and instructing the forgetting of U.S. overseas conquest. In other words, English instruction provided an ideological justification and institutional method to literally rewrite the history of U.S. empire. This study highlights the political role of English instruction in U.S. colonial expansion; and it examines the manner in which notions of gender, domesticity, and race were embedded in the ideology and implementation of U.S. colonial English instruction.

Advisor: Perlstein, Daniel
Model(ing) Law: The ICTY, the International Criminal Justice Template, and Reconciliation in the Former Yugoslavia

My project uses the case study of the ICTY and reconciliation in the Balkans to address the larger topic of the capacity of international criminal tribunals (ICTs) as transitional justice mechanisms. I argue that the ICTY operates under the (flawed) received wisdom of the IMT at Nuremberg, what I term the international criminal justice template. This template accords three transitional justice functions for ICTs beyond (and in conjunction with) their central judicial aim of adjudicating cases: as (1) articulators of progressive criminal law (2) historians and (3) reconcilers or storytellers. My examination of the ICTY through each category illustrates that obstacles to the ICTY's role as a transitional justice mechanism are structural, and relate to the absence of a discursive loop between sovereign and governed. This discursive loop, present at domestic law, accounts for the capacity of domestic courts to perform the tasks identified by law and society scholars as central to courts, namely the capacity to act as constitutive social agents as well as the capacity to exert social control. At the international level, this capacity is interrupted. The dissertation calls for new scholarship and the development of international law and society studies, in order to better theorize and understand the structural and theoretical constraints governing the establishment of legitimacy for international criminal courts.

Advisor: Feeley, Malcolm M
Shapiro, Martin
Ion solvation at air-water interfaces

In this thesis we conduct a thorough study of the forces that act on ions when they are near air-water interfaces. These forces are important because they produce behavior which is very ion specific. That is, certain ions have a strong propensity for air-water interfaces and other ions avoid them completely. We will see that the dominant forces that allow ion adsorption to surfaces are fairly general and exist in a very broad class of liquids, so that even ions in a very simple model of a polar fluid exhibit a preference for the surface. In models of water, however, there are also forces which are very ion specific. In particular, the degree to which an ion is surface enhanced or surface repelled is very dependent on the sign of the charge. We will conduct a thorough study of this charge asymmetry in a simulated model of water and find that it is sensitive to various model details like ion size, the magnitude of the charge and polarizability. We will also study the way that solvent polarizability renormalizes the interactions between a pair of ions in solution, and a pair of ions at the interface and we will find that a simple effective model is fairly good at capturing the effects of polarizability. Finally, we will discuss attempts to improve dielectric continuum theory so that it is more useful for studying problems that involve solutes at interfaces.

Advisor: Geissler, Phillip L
Inhibitory Control in the Drosophila melanogaster Feeding Circuit

Feeding behavior is essential for achieving metabolic homeostasis and is critical for survival. Animals adjust their food intake based on their physiological needs and food availability. How sensing deprivation signals and detection of taste gets converted to feeding behaviors remains poorly understood. Here I use the genetically tractable model organism Drosophila melanogaster to examine the neural mechanisms underlying feeding decisions. The genetic conservation of molecular signaling pathways, the simpler nervous system and the powerful genetic tools make it an excellent system to explore the organization and logic behind brain circuits controlling food intake./nThis thesis investigates the neuronal mechanisms underlying inhibition in the Drosophila feeding circuit. Here I describe the identification of 4 GABA-ergic interneurons in the Drosophila brain that establish a central feeding threshold which is required for any taste and satiety dependent feeding decisions. I show that these neurons control consumption in an activity dependent manner. Inactivation of these cells results in indiscriminate and excessive ingestion, independent of taste quality or nutritional state. Conversely, acute activation of these neurons significantly reduces consumption of water and nutrients. I show that their output is acutely required to express any feeding preference and that these neurons are not regulated by taste processing pathways or satiety signals. This work reveals a new layer of inhibitory control in insect feeding circuits that is required to suppress a latent state of unrestricted and nonselective consumption. Furthermore I identify the recurrent nerve as a peripheral source of post-ingestive inhibition of nutrient intake in Drosophila and show that the two feeding inhibitory mechanisms are distinct and independent of each other. The work presented here opens the door to analyzing how central and peripheral inhibition regulates feeding behaviors in Drosophila melanogaster.

Advisor: Scott, Kristin
Coercive Pleasures: The Force and Form of the Novel 1719-1740

Coercive Pleasures argues that the early novel in Britain mobilizes scenarios of rape, colonization, cannibalism, and infection, in order to model a phenomenology of reading in which the pleasures of submission to the work of fiction--figured as analogous to these other/ncoercions--reveals the reader's autonomy as itself a fiction. This is a project about the novel but also about the way in which literary forms mediate political models of subjectivity. Literary histories of the novel tend to relate its "rise" to the emergence of a liberal subject whose truth/nresides in her interior, autonomous and private self. I propose instead that privacy and autonomy are the price rather than the payoff of fiction. With its depiction of invasive and coercive content such as rape, colonialism, cannibalism, and infection, and its self-conscious deployment of forms that coerce absorbed reading, the novel reveals the reader's consent to read to be part of a structure that infracts both readers' and characters' autonomy, producing a particularly modern/npleasure. As Pamela Andrews complains, pleasure "is not a Volunteer thing." In its self-awareness of its own captivating effects, the novel distinguishes itself both from seventeenth-century romance but also from modern discourses that disavow fictional absorption altogether,/nsuch as empiricism. My reading builds on Victoria Kahn's and Oliver Arnold's revisionist accounts of contract theory, in which both have shown that consent and coercion were viewed at the turn of the century not as opposed but rather as complementary concepts that give form to the modern subject. Coercive Pleasures argues that the novel intervenes to expose the pleasures of subject formation built on coercive consent. Some early novels identify and coopt the coercive/npleasure that contract theory and consent-based models of political subjectivity deploy, while others intervene to disrupt this pleasure, critiquing implicitly, or even explicitly, the fictions of/nconsent.

Advisor: Sorensen, Janet
Duncan, Ian
Exploration of Surveillance and Control Strategies for Re-emerging Schistosomiasis Environments in Sichuan Province, China - The Development and Application of an Individually-based Model

Schistosomiasis is still prevalent in seven provinces in China despite several decades of continuous effort. Suppression of transmission in low-infection areas proves to be extremely difficult, and re-emergence of the disease in areas it was previously controlled or eliminated further complicates the situation. New surveillance and control strategies based on a better understanding of current transmission patterns are therefore crucial to the achievement of disease elimination. This dissertation explores these questions with the focus on the hilly and mountainous regions in Sichuan Province./nThe main contents of this dissertation are centered on the development and simulation of a stochastic individually-based model. Focused on two cohorts representing the post-equilibrium and re-emerging environments, respectively, survey protocols and data description on human demographics, infection status, snail density, and cercarial mouse bioassay are presented and compared. A health education intervention was also introduced as an example of how individual data could be used for hypothesis testing related to model component determination. Upon development of the model, Monte-Carlo simulations were conducted to account for randomness from multiple sources including parasite acquisition, worm development, egg shedding and infection testing./nSurveillance results in the re-emerging villages indicated low sensitivity of current techniques for low infection-intensity environment. The distribution of individual susceptibility to S. japonicum infection appeared to be log-normally distributed with a high skewness. Given the cercarial density and water contact magnitude distributions of the surveyed populations, a considerable fraction of people had susceptibility levels that would not lead to infection. For infection surveillance purposes, sampling individuals with high susceptibility has markedly greater efficiency than other indices focused on either water or cercarial exposure. Based on these findings, priorities should be given to the development of more sensitive environmental monitoring and infection testing methods and exploration of an appropriate and quantifiable index for susceptibility. Environmental and economic modifications in addition to the traditional control methods need to be conceptualized and implemented to further conquer the disease and achieve comprehensive elimination.

Advisor: Spear, Robert C