VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The end of the concessionary regime [electronic resource] : oil and American power in Iraq, 1958-1972

This dissertation analyzes the historical process that culminated in the 1972 nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) -- a consortium that included four of the world's largest and most powerful corporations. I draw on IPC archives, recently declassified U.S. Government documents, and the Arab press to trace the impact of Iraq's 1958 "Free Officers' Revolution" on IPC interests in Iraq. I show that the Revolution set in motion a process of institutional development that resulted in the complete nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry at a relatively early date, and I emphasize the agency of a particular group of Western-trained Iraqi technical experts in producing this outcome. Moreover, I examine U.S and IPC efforts to counter Iraq's radical movements and offer an original interpretation of the relationship between the American government and the international oil industry. I show that the Iraqi challenge to the IPC undermined the stability of an implicit "corporatist bargain" between the U.S. State Department and the major American oil companies, and that the breakdown of this relationship was part of a larger crisis of American hegemony in the early 1970s. In so doing, I reveal powerful underlying factors that continue to drive the historical encounter between the U.S. and the Middle East.

Keywords: History.
Advisor: Beinin Joel
Bernstein Barton J. advisor. Thesis advisor
Chang Gordon H. advisor. Thesis advisor
Vitalis Robert
Endowments, inequality, and aggregation [electronic resource] : an inquiry on the foundations and methods of distributive justice

This dissertation is organised around the development and defence of a novel distributive principle and its philosophical foundations. This principle serves as a refinement of the view that distributive justice requires the mitigation of endowment differences, which otherwise stand to make some people worse off than others. The principle of distribution itself is extensionally intermediate between Utilitarian principles of distribution, and principles that have (typically) been offered as expressing the idea of giving priority to the worse-off.

Keywords: Philosophy
Advisor: Cohen Joshua
Hussain Nadeem J. Z. advisor. Thesis advisor
Satz Debra advisor. Thesis advisor
The engineering of Japan's modern river regime, 1600-1920 [electronic resource]

This dissertation is a history of the formation of Japan's modern river regime under the Home Ministry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Until that time, Japan's rivers had been integral to regional irrigation systems and the transportation networks by which much of goods, people, and information moved about the country. Widespread upstream logging and downstream reclamation also caused rivers to frequently flood, leading to widespread suffering for nearby communities and over time an erosion of the fiscal and moral foundations of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate. Following the 1868 Meiji Restoration, the new government's powerful Home Ministry initially pursued what its engineers later called a "low-water" policy that sought to balance flood control with the need for navigable rivers in the "promotion of production and encouragement of industry." However, as flooding continued and railways began to stretch across the countryside in the 1890s, ministry engineers jettisoned concerns about river navigation to create a new national "high water" policy that emphasized the reengineering of the country's largest rivers to handle the highest predicted water flow during summertime floods. In formulating this modern "high-water" river regime, the Home Ministry drew in part from the late nineteenth-century transnational flow in engineering knowledge and expertise, but in administering and carrying out its riparian work, the ministry participated in the creation and strengthening of a new national framework for infrastructural development. Because Japan's rivers are ultimately regional entities, the ministry's administering and reengineering of the nation's waterways had profoundly local effects on nearby fisheries, farms, and factories.

Keywords: History.
Advisor: Duus Peter
Wigen Kären
White Richard
Engineering team performance and emotion [electronic resource] : affective interaction dynamics as indicators of design team performance

Emotions play a crucial role in the practice of designing in teams. Engineers engaged in the activity of designing complex technical systems constantly negotiate dis- agreements with their peers and sometimes these disagreements turn hostile. Excite- ment and interest are suddenly replaced by frustration and contempt, and what started as a promising project falls short of expectations. Even though there is now a growing body of research about the relationship between social dynamics and engi- neering team performance, we still lack a coherent body of knowledge about the role of emotions in engineering team interactions. The reasons for this lack of research might be partially found in an absence of appropriate research methods and theory. This lack of research on emotions in engineering design interactions is opposed to an extensive body of work on emotions in marital interactions, an area in which re- searchers were able to powerfully relate emotional interaction dynamics with short and long-term outcomes. The present work adapts theory and methods that have been successful in pre- dicting satisfaction and divorce in marriages to study relationships between affective interaction characteristics and performance relevant outcomes in engineering design teams. In three studies, I show that Group Hedonic Balance, the balance between positive and negative affect present in a team, is a strong correlate of engineering team performance. Drawing from this work, I then propose a theory about the rela- tionship between intra-group conflict and performance based on affective distinc- tions of conflict types. This affect based intra group conflict theory departs from es- tablished theories, which are based on topical distinctions of conflict as either task, process or relationship-oriented.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering
Advisor: Leifer Larry J. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Gross James J. (Professor of psychology) advisor. Thesis advisor
Hinds Pamela advisor. Thesis advisor
Steinert Ralf advisor. Thesis advisor
The Enriched xenon observatory, 200kg [electronic resource]

The Enriched Xenon Observatory-200kg (EXO-200) is a liquid noble gas detector which measures both the anti-correlated light and charge signals produced during the potential neutrinoless double beta-decay of 136Xe. The rate of this decay gives insights into fundamental properties of the neutrino, such as its absolute mass scale and whether it is its own anti-particle. This thesis provides an overview of the EXO- 200 experiment, along with a detailed discussion of the slow controls system. It also discusses a method for determining the electron lifetime within the detector and describes the incorporation of an anti-correlation algorithm into the detector simulations. Finally, initial detector calibration data is shown which is used to determine both the detector's resolution and the electron lifetime within the detector.

Keywords: Physics
Advisor: Breidenbach Martin primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Gratta Giorgio advisor. Thesis advisor
Kahn Steven M. (Steven Michael)
Environment-wide associations to disease and disease-related phenotypes [electronic resource]

Common diseases arise out of combination of both genetic and environmental influences. Advances in genomic technology have enabled investigators to create hypotheses regarding the contribution of genetic factors at a breathtaking pace. However, the assessment of multiple and specific environmental factors--and their interactions with the genome-- has not. We lack high-throughput analytic methodologies to comprehensively and systematically associate multiple physical and specific environmental factors, or the "envirome", to disease and human health. We claim that the creation of hypotheses regarding the environmental contribution to disease is practicable through high-throughput analytic methods that have been well established in genomics. In the following dissertation, we develop and apply methods to systematically and comprehensively associate specific factors of the envirome with disease states, prioritizing factors for in-depth future study. The current disciplines of studying the environmental determinants of health include toxicology and epidemiology, which operate on molecular and population scales, respectively. This dissertation proposes approaches in both of these disciplines. For example, we have developed a framework to conduct the first "Environment-wide Association Study" (EWAS), systematically associating environmental factors to disease on a population scale. We have applied this framework to investigate type 2 diabetes and heart disease on cohorts that are representative United States population, finding novel and robust associations in diverse and independent cohorts. Given the lack of explained risk resulting from current day genome-wide studies, the time is ripe to usher in a more comprehensive study of the environment, or "enviromics", toward better understanding of multifactorial diseases and their prevention.

Keywords: Biomedical Informatics.
Advisor: Butte Atul J. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Bhattacharya Jay advisor. Thesis advisor
Cullen Mark R. advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays in applied economics [electronic resource]

These essays study the employment relationship, emphasizing the critical role of information and institutions in the hiring process and the importance of organizations, bosses, and peers after hiring and matching has occurred.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Lazear Edward P. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Shaw Kathryn primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Einav Liran advisor. Thesis advisor
Lim Claire advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on democratization and redistribution in the Philippines [electronic resource]

Does democratization lead to redistribution? The redistributive hypothesis has long contended that it does, but existing work has been conflicted and inconclusive. This dissertation seeks to deepen and expand our understanding of the redistributive hypothesis by using the Philippines as a case study. Unlike most previous studies, I explore the effects of democratization on many different aspects of redistribution. The three chapters of this dissertation cover the effects of democratization on tax structure, public services provision, and land redistribution. Throughout, I use both qualitative and quantitative analyses and construct several original datasets based on primary and secondary sources. My results show that democratization has increased some forms of redistribution but that the effect has not been universal. On the one hand, I find evidence that democratization led to more progressive taxation and increases in the government consumption, education spending, public school enrollment, and land redistribution. On the other hand, I find no evidence that democratization led to increases in total tax revenue or health outcomes. Moreover, while tax revenue came from more progressive sources under democracy, this result is attributable to greater tax compliance by the wealthy rather than more progressive statutory tax rates. Similarly, while land redistribution increased under democratization, it also still encountered significant limits. Overall, my results provide partial support for the redistributive hypothesis. Consistent with this hypothesis, my analysis of the Philippines demonstrates that democratization can still lead to redistribution in developing countries today. However, despite seeing this effect, we also observe substantial restrictions on both the type and degree of redistribution in the Philippines. This suggests shortcomings in the redistributive hypothesis as well as the importance of analyzing multiple measures of redistribution.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Haber Stephen H.
Tomz Michael advisor. Thesis advisor
Weingast Barry R. advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on development economics [electronic resource]

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters, all of which deal with topics in development economics. The first chapter explores the extent to which ability accounts for the observed differences in private school test scores versus public school test scores. The second chapter looks at the effects of an exogenous indigo price change in the nineteenth century on innovation. Finally, the third chapter looks at victims of violence during a civil war and tests whether victims of violence are targeted for their wealth, and particularly if this is the case for more liquid households. In school choice, and between private and public schools, sorting plays an important role. A sharp general equilibrium model of school choice is employed in Chapter 1 to estimate how much of the difference between private and public school test scores is due to ability differences. By calibrating a general equilibrium model and combining it with the universe of grade 8 test scores from Kenya across ten years, a distributional analysis is conducted to estimate the private school effect after controlling for ability sorting. Using the equilibrium distributions of ability from the model, the results suggest that, in the base case, the robust one standard deviation difference in test scores reduces to 0.50 standard deviations once heterogeneous ability is accounted for in each sector. Furthermore there is strong evidence that higher ability students perform better at private schools. Induced innovation, the idea that a relative change in factor prices will lead to innovation of the factor that has become relatively expensive, has strong theoretical foundations but scant empirical evidence. Chapter 2 uses the historical events of riots in Bengal, India and the American Civil War both in close succession in the late nineteenth century, to show how these events increased prices of natural indigo and induced innovation in synthetic colors. Identification comes from the substitutability of synthetic colors for natural colors. In terms of numbers, the induced effect is estimated to be an extra 97 patents, or roughly one fifth of the existing patents in dyeing at the time. Chapter 3 considers the determinants of violence in Sudan with a unique household dataset to characterize the degree to which victims are targeted for economic reasons. Wealthier households are found to have disproportionately worse outcomes across both physical (e.g. loss of assets) and human (e.g. personal injury) measures of the impact of the conflict. This pattern of targeting is robust, and furthermore there is evidence that violence was especially targeted at those who had lootable wealth.

Keywords: Economics
Advisor: Mahajan Aprajit
Abramitzky Ran advisor. Thesis advisor
Moser Petra advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on economic networks [electronic resource]

This dissertation theoretically analyzes how networks of relationships among decision-makers affect two kinds of economic processes: (i) investment in public goods; and (ii) repeated updating of beliefs or behaviors based on observing neighbors. The results connect these processes to the spectral properties of networks -- that is, eigenvalues and eigenvectors -- and use the connection to shed light on economic outcomes. The first essay, based on joint work with Matthew Elliott, focuses on games in which each player simultaneously exerts costly effort that provides different benefits to each other player. The goal is to find and describe effort profiles that are immune to coordinated coalitional deviations when such a game is played repeatedly. Formally, these effort profiles are the ones that can be sustained in a strong Nash equilibrium of the repeated game. We introduce a class of effort profiles that are called centrality-stable. These are characterized by a network centrality condition: agent A's contribution (defined as effort level times marginal cost) is equal to a weighted sum of the contributions of those who help A; the weight on B's contribution measures the marginal benefit B's effort provides to A. Under certain assumptions (mainly concavity of utility functions), centrality-stable profiles exist, are Pareto-efficient, and any such profile is sustainable in a coalitionally robust equilibrium of the repeated game. Centrality-stable profiles also have an alternative definition: they are those at which all agents are first-order indifferent to scaling all efforts by a factor near

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Jackson Matthew O. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Skrzypacz Andrzej
Wilson Robert
Essays on human capital and entrepreneurship [electronic resource]

This thesis analyzes economic models and empirical evidence on the topic of the evo- lution of labor market and the development of human capital in a rapidly developing country. The rst chapter develops a theoretical model of evolving skills and wages when there is an exogenous increase in return to skill. The model predicts that recent graduates' wages may decrease in the medium and long run even as the demand for skilled workers increases. The second chapter provides empirical evidence that supports the theory devel- oped in the rst chapter. The rst half of the chapter analyzes a recent China dataset, and nds that while wages for recent graduates decreased, wages for the experienced graduates increased. The second half of the chapter examines evidence from other developing countries at similar stages of development. The third chapter develops a model which provides a mechanism of rising return to skill after trade liberalization. By trading with a developed country, the developing country can make its high-skill workers more productive by working with foreign high-skill trainers, or by using cheaper skill-intensive foreign inputs. The fourth chapter develops a model of technology catch-up and its impact on the return to skill in a developing country. The opportunity for technology catch-up increases the demand for high-skill workers and drives up the return to skill. Moreover, if the new technologies acquired by the developing country are skill-intensive, the return to skill will increase further. i.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Lazear Edward P. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Roberts John
Shaw Kathryn advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on market design and experimental economics [electronic resource]

I explore fundamental behavioral aspects of several market design environments in a variety of projects using both theoretical models and laboratory experiments. I show that human tendencies can drastically shift potential outcomes away from those which would result if individuals were fully 'rational' and unbiased in decision problems similar to those found frequently in the field. I explore two common classes of centralized matching mechanisms--Deferred Acceptance and Priority--which have wildly different success rates in practice despite both being open to manipulation by agents who have incomplete information about the other participants in the match. For this reason, theory predicts both mechanisms in equilibrium will yield match outcomes which are unstable, meaning some agents will desire to renegotiate with one another after receiving their match assignments, and thus reduce participants' confidence in using the match. I provide laboratory evidence that out-of-equilibrium truth telling by agents is substantially more frequent in the Deferred Acceptance environment and thus Deferred Acceptance matches will generally be more stable in practice than matches using a Priority mechanism. This may explain why Deferred Acceptance mechanisms appear to be more viable in the field. I also explore two different models of decentralized two-sided matching environments where establishing scarce signaling methods can improve market outcomes. In a laboratory experiment, I show that allowing potential receiving job offers to send a single signal to their favorite potential employer before job offers are made increases overall match rates in the market, but is potentially damaging to the firms making offers when compared to the market without such a signal. Then, in a theoretical model where pre-offer communication takes the form of an interview process where workers have natural limits on the number of interviews in which they can participate, I show that in many cases firms can benefit themselves and the market as a whole by voluntarily restricting the number of interviews they offer to participate in. While not traditionally thought of as market design problems, voting mechanisms are fundamentally goods allocation problems as well and have many of the same issues as traditional markets do. I explore the effects of voter bias on outcomes in an otherwise standard voting model and find that even slight external pressure on individuals in a committee tasked with coming to a collective decision can destroy the ability of that committee to arrive at the correct result, even when individuals have good information about the best decision to make. Furthermore, the quality of the decision made by such a committee can actually degrade as the committee size increases, in contrast with the canonical Condorcet Jury Theorem which predicts that a committee's ability to choose the right outcome increases quickly as more members are added.

Keywords: Economics
Advisor: Niederle Muriel primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Jackson Matthew O. advisor. Thesis advisor
Kojima Fuhito advisor. Thesis advisor
Essays on political economy [electronic resource]

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter, Predictability and Power in Legislative Bargaining, is a joint paper with Nageeb Ali and B. Douglas Bernheim. This paper examines the effect of the predictability of recognition processes on the concentration of political power in legislative bargaining. For a broad class of legislative bargaining games, we identify a mild predictability condition on the recognition rule, requiring an ability to rule out some minimum number of legislators as the next proposer, under which Markovian equilibria deliver all economic surplus to the first proposer. When legislators can be nearly certain that the next proposer belongs to a class of the requisite size, the first proposer receives nearly all of the surplus. The second chapter, Designing Checks and Balances, is a joint paper with Tiberiu Dragu and James Kuklinski. We study the design of checks and balances institutions when two (or more) parties need to agree on changing an existing policy in environments with single-peaked preferences. We characterize a class of checks and balances rules that satisfy strategy-proofness and Pareto efficiency and show that there is a unique rule that satisfy these properties. It consists of implementing the ideal policy of the more moderate player, that is, the player that prefers the less aggressive change from the policy status-quo. We study the implications of our analysis for constitutional review. The third chapter is Regulation and Liabilities. I develop a game theoretic model of the interaction among a firm, a regulatory agency and a consumer group. I use this framework to analyze the effect of allowing product liability compensation on the incentives and utility of the firm. I show that the firm's incentive to produce a quality product increases in the level of the damage compensation awarded through tort claims; however, the firm's utility may increase or decrease in the level of tort claim compensation.

Keywords: Economics
Advisor: Bernheim B. Douglas primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Jackson Matthew O. advisor. Thesis advisor
Kojima Fuhito advisor. Thesis advisor