VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays on minimum wage and immigration policy

This dissertation has three chapters. The first chapter provides causal evidence on the effect of implementing or increasing a wage floor (an occupation-specific minimum wage) on the wage difference between outsourced, insourced, and informal workers, the employment of outsourced and insourced workers, and the size of the informal labor market. To do so, I use matched employer-employee data from Brazil, focusing on the labor market for cleaning workers. Brazil has regional occupation-specific wage floors that increased in response to yearly federal minimum wage increases starting in 2000. I use this institutional context to implement a simulated instrument that predicts the regional wage floors based only on the federal minimum wage increase and the wage floor in 1999. Estimation results show that a wage floor increase decreases the outsourced wage penalty, which makes outsourced workers relatively more expensive than insourced workers, thus reducing outsourcing employment. Finally, I find no significant effect on informal worker employment and a reduction in the informal wage penalty. The second chapter characterizes the contribution of immigrants to US innovation. Leveraging new data, we use the age of SSN assignment to identify immigrant status. Immigrants represent 16 percent of inventors but authored 23 percent of patents. Immigrant inventors contribute to knowledge diffusion across borders. They disproportionately rely on foreign technologies and inventor collaborations, and are cited more abroad. Using variation from premature inventor deaths, we find immigrant inventors create stronger innovation productivity spillovers on their collaborators than US-born inventors. A simple model implies immigrants are responsible for 36 percent of aggregate innovation, two-thirds due to innovation externalities on US-born collaborators. Finally, the third chapter estimates if the large influx of immigrants to Brazil between 1870 and 1920 contributed to the decline in women's participation in manufacturing employment during the same period. To do so, I assemble a novel country-wide data set that covers employment by gender and industry for the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in Brazil. I used a shift-share instrument similar to Card (2001) to estimate the causal effect. It predicts the influx of immigrants by assuming that immigrants of a specific nationality are more likely to settle in states with a large population from their home country. My results indicate that, counter-intuitively, the increase in immigration actually slowed down the decline in women's labor force participation in manufacturing

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Bloom Nick
Hoxby Caroline Minter
Abramitzky Ran
Choi Jungho
Sorkin Isaac
Essays on monetary policy and financial markets

This thesis studies the interaction of monetary policy and financial markets. The thesis examines the impact of monetary policy shocks on the cross-section of bond prices (e.g., government and corporate bonds). It also analyzes how monetary policy interacts with the portfolios of financial intermediaries and households. In the first chapter, Heterogeneous Intermediaries and Bond Characteristics in the Transmission of Monetary Policy, together Federic Holm-Hadulla, we study the transmission of monetary policy to the corporate bond market. We show that corporate bond purchases by the central bank give rise to credit spread shocks, whereas government bond purchases mainly cause term spread shocks. The yields of bonds held by different intermediaries respond heterogeneously to the two shocks because intermediaries systematically select different types of bonds. We explain these findings through the lens of a model of the fixed-income market with multiple risk factors. Insurance companies and pension funds select into assets with high interest-rate risk exposure to match their long-duration liabilities. The mutual fund sector instead absorbs securities that carry credit risk. Different policy tools affect the market prices of risk factors differentially, thereby redistributing risks across intermediary sectors and ultimately across the households investing in them. In the second chapter, Central Bank Communication and the Yield Curve, with Andrea Vedolin, Gyuri Venter, and Paul Whelan, we study the interaction between monetary policy and sovereign bonds in the Euro area. We argue that monetary policy in the form of central bank communication can shape long-term interest rates by changing risk premia. Using high-frequency movements of default-free rates and equity, we show that monetary policy communications by the ECB on regular announcement days led to a significant yield spread between peripheral and core countries during the European sovereign debt crisis by increasing credit risk premia. We also show that central bank communication has a powerful impact on the yield curve outside of regular monetary policy days. In the third chapter, Household Portfolios, Monetary Policy, and Asset Prices, together with Ciaran Rogers, we examine the role of the household portfolio rebalancing channel for the aggregate and redistributive effects of monetary policy. The transmission of monetary policy works not only through regular income and substitution motives but also through an endogenous portfolio rebalancing effect that generates changes in equilibrium asset prices and a subsequent wealth effect on consumption

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Piazzesi Monika
Schneider Martin (Professor of economics)
Bocola Luigi
Lustig Hanno
Essays on pretrial detention decision-making : evidence from Brazil

This dissertation investigates the Brazilian pretrial criminal decision-making through a series of quantitative case studies relying on a tailor-made dataset including over 2,000 defendant-level observations from a large city (Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul). In the overall, this research analyzes the Brazilian judicial practice to identify pretrial detention's key mechanisms and explanatory factors, assess its effects on case outcomes and explore the potential effectiveness of introducing statistical pretrial risk assessment in the country. The dissertation dialogues with the growing, though still U.S.-concentrated, empirical literature on pretrial justice by providing novel quantitative legal analyses from an influential Global South jurisdiction with the world's third largest incarceration population and a non-adversarial criminal procedure tradition. The first article provides an overview of pretrial detention in the first 100 days with descriptive statistics and inferential analyses that tease out the main case and defendant factors associated with pretrial decisions. The second article compares the real performance of judges in assessing defendant risk of failure to appear (FTA) with a simulated scenario where they rely on statistical risk prediction to decide between pretrial detention or release. Finally, the third article investigates the causal inference question of whether and the extent to which pretrial detention affects case outcomes

Keywords: Law.
Advisor: Donohue John J.
Cavallaro James
Weisberg Robert
Essays on the politics of scientific and technological change

This dissertation brings together three papers that explore the relationship between politics and scientific and technological change, paying close attention to how political actors respond to changes in science and technology. The first two papers see technology as exogenous to politics, and study the political consequences of different methods of adjustment to new production technology. The first paper tests and finds evidence against a common conventional wisdom -- that reemploying the losers from technological change will reduce their political grievances and mobilization. The second paper shows that institutions designed to deal with one type of job loss -- that due to trade competition -- might direct collective action by the losers from another type of job loss: automation. The last paper takes a step back and asks whether scientific knowledge -- in this case, knowledge about environmental harm -- is truly exogenous to the interests of powerful actors. I show that powerful states have an incentive to alter scientific information from international institutions in an effort to secure a more favorable climate agreement

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Political Science.
Advisor: Goldstein Judith
Acharya Avidit
Tomz Michael
Essays on U.S. retail industries

This PhD dissertation studies the welfare implication of the development of U.S. retail industries since 2000. The first chapter studies the impact of dollar stores on consumer welfare. The second chapter focuses on the overall trend of the brick and mortar general merchandise sector since 2010. The third chapter examines the relationship between food prices and households' dietary quality

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Economics.
Advisor: Einav Liran
Gentzkow Matthew
Klenow Peter J.
Estimation and testing methods for causal inference with interference

Causal inference is one of the core areas of research in modern data science that allows researchers to determine whether a specific intervention or treatment has an effect on an outcome. In its most basic form, causal inference is concerned with understanding the "cause and effect" relationship between variables. This requires going beyond correlation to understand whether changing one variable leads to a change in another. The gold standard for inferring causality is the randomized controlled trial, which randomly assigns subjects to a treatment or control group and compares outcomes. While randomized controlled trials provide us with data to do causal inference, the subsequent statistical analysis often relies on a key assumption known as the Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA). This assumption states that the treatment of one unit (or individual) does not affect the outcome of another unit. However, in many real-world situations, this assumption does not hold, leading to what is called interference or a violation of SUTVA. Interference can occur in various contexts such as social networks, where the treatment of one person can influence the outcomes of others, or in marketplace, where treatment of one entity can impact other entities of same type. Understanding and handling interference is a critical and complex aspect of causal inference, and it necessitates more advanced methods to correctly estimate causal effects. This dissertation offers new methodologies and theoretical results to address key issues in causal inference with interference. Specifically, we develop inferential results for causal effect estimators in panel experiments under interference, introduce novel estimation methods for causal effects with network experiments and tackle the problem of detecting interference in online controlled experiments with increasing allocation

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Statistics.
Advisor: Imbens Guido
Ugander Johan
Owen Art B.
Ethereal romanticism : dynamic materiality in German thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

This dissertation investigates how new scientific developments around the concept of "aether" changed the way German Romantic writers conceived of humans' interactions with nature and how literature and poetic forms are transformed through such changes. From Greek mythology and presocratic theories of nature through Newton's hypothetical space-filling medium to the nineteenth-century electromagnetic and field theories and the emergence of wireless technologies in the twentieth century, aether was one of the most indispensable yet elusive concepts in the history of science. Literary and cultural scholars have usually considered the occult aspects of the term as being most relevant to literary and intellectual history. This dissertation argues instead that Schelling, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Jean Paul Richter use ancient and contemporaneous theories of the fluid, chemical, magnetic, and vibratory interactions of aether to develop materialist conceptions of the human mind and poetry as well as proto-ecological modes of writing. In their scientific and literary thought experiments that center around aether, these writers appeal to nonhuman models, including mythological figures associated with waves of all sorts (light, water, and sound), animals such as the South American electric eel that can discharge electricity in water, and instruments such as the Aeolian harp, which is played by the wind. These experimental poetics with temporary and fluid forms, in turn, help Romantic writers develop dynamic and performative conceptions of matter and non-anthropocentric understandings of the relationship between humans and their environment. This project contributes to the growing scholarship on the relationship between literature and science in German Romanticism and engages in a productive dialogue with contemporary new materialist theories and ecocriticism.

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
German Studies.
Advisor: Smith Matthew Wilson
Daub Adrian
Eshel Amir
Nightingale Andrea Wilson
Ethnic identity and homeland politics in the Oromo diaspora

In this dissertation, I address the mismatch between how scholars employ ethnoracial categories in studies of race, ethnicity, and immigration and how individuals make sense of their identity on the ground, in their day-to-day lives. Using the case of Oromo immigrants from Ethiopia, I show how scholarship on immigration and identity can be improved by attending to subnational ethnic diversity, which allows for greater analytical clarity by teasing apart the distinctions between race, ethnicity, and nation and their relationship to one another. In undertaking this effort, I show how a shift in our level of analysis can make visible a deeper, more nuanced understanding of race/ethnicity and its import in social cohesion, conflict, and immigrant integration. This dissertation highlights the importance of attending to subnational ethnic diversity in two important ways. First, I show how the conventional use of Ethiopia(n) as a category of analysis does not align with my respondents' lived experience of Oromo as a category of practice. When studied as Oromo immigrants rather than Ethiopian immigrants, my respondents show how Blackness as an identity and lived experience transcends the U.S. context to include understandings of Blackness also situated in the homeland context via a shared experience of minority subjugation. Second, my treatment of Oromo immigrants as a unique subset of Ethiopian immigrants demonstrates how notions of indigeneity are as central to the formation and salience of Oromo identity as are notions of Blackness. That Blackness and indigeneity are more intimately linked than scholars have often understood them to be opens the door for a more serious engagement with Black indigeneity as a topic of inquiry.

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Sociology.
Advisor: Saperstein Aliya
Asad Asad
Jimenez Tomas
EVALUATING MODELS OF REFERRING EXPRESSION PRODUCTION WITH CROSS-LINGUISTIC DATA

Redundant modification in referring expression production varies both within language (e.g., English speakers produce more redundant color than size modifiers) and cross-linguistically (e.g., English speakers produce more redundant color modifiers than Spanish speakers). It is an open question whether these asymmetries are the result of asymmetries in the general referential utility of color and size modifiers or of incremental language processing pressures. Cross-linguistic investigations of redundant modification are important to this debate: similar cross-linguistic rates of redundant modification would suggest a strong role for general referential utility. In contrast, lower prevalence of redundant modification in languages with post-nominal modification suggests a strong role for incrementality. Here, we test whether differences in redundant modifier use are systematic for a particularly interesting language: Central Taurus Sign Language. As a language in its infancy, CTSL has no established conventions, and therefore provides us with a unique opportunity to explore how redundancy emerges in the initial stages of language formation. We also ask whether redundant modification patterns replicate in Turkish and we compare our results to English. Using data from these three languages, we evaluate computational models of referring expression production that each make different assumptions regarding the source of asymmetries in the production of redundant modifiers. The data suggest a limited role for incrementality, and support accounts of redundancy that center the role of referential utility. However, this conclusion is limited by data concerns.

Keywords: referring expression production
rational speech act
village sign language
Text
Thesis
Evaluating Race-Related Lived Experiences in BIPOC Youth Participating in a Telehealth Intensive Outpatient Program

Background. Youth mental health is a significant issue in the United States; especially for young adults and adolescents who identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC). BIPOC youth traditionally face greater barriers to care, such as lower insurance coverage and provider bias, and historically have suffered poorer health outcomes compared to their non-BIPOC counterparts. To understand how to most effectively help BIPOC youth with mental health issues, more data is needed. However, research on BIPOC mental health and mental healthcare programming is lacking. This study aims to better understand the needs and race-related lived experiences of BIPOC youth in a virtual intensive outpatient setting in order to improve programming curriculum and better meet the specific needs of BIPOC patients.
Methods. A survey with four measures–general belongingness, racial trauma, race-related discrimination, and internalized mental health stigma–was administered to 24 individuals in Charlie Health’s (a company offering virtual intensive outpatient programming for youth) young adult and adolescent BIPOC support groups. Data collected in this survey was compared against results in the general population, obtained from the literature.
Results. The findings suggest that BIPOC youth participating in IOP support groups report significantly lower levels of belongingness, and higher levels of racial trauma and race-related discrimination relative to their peers in other contexts, as seen in the literature. Results from the internalized stigma of mental illness measure were nonsignificant.
Conclusions. Research that improves understanding of BIPOC patient race-related experiences is important to enhance the quality of care provided to them. BIPOC youth in intensive mental healthcare treatment settings like Charlie Health could benefit from programming specific to their race-related lived experiences. Based on the results of this study, BIPOC programming curriculum could be more effective with the augmentation of certain topics, like belongingness in society and race-related discrimination, as well as a greater focus on unpacking racial trauma. Incorporating elements from Charlie Health’s BIPOC program–such as cultural competency training in clinicians–would also be beneficial. Further research on mental health stigma and outcomes in this population is necessary in order to make definitive curricular
recommendations.

Keywords: BIPOC
Mental health
Community mental health services
Stigma (Social psychology)
Racial Discrimination
Belongingness
Racial trauma
Young adults
Adolescents
Text
Thesis
Evolutionary dynamics of conformity

Conformist and anti-conformist cultural transmission biases have been documented in several species, in contexts from mating to finding food, and have been studied theoretically, with mathematical models. Many previous models have included a set of simplifying assumptions: (1) individuals observe a small number of cultural 'role models, ' n, and acquire a cultural variant from this sample with a single (anti-)conformity coefficient, D; (2) both n and D are constant over time; and (3) there are two cultural variants in the population (for example, the 'presence/absence' of a behavior). In Chapters 2-4, I vary each of these assumptions in turn, aiming to contribute to bridging the gap between theory and its applications to real-world scenarios. In Chapter 2, offspring can observe any number n of role models and apply different conformity rules to different configurations of sampled role models. A wide array of population dynamics emerge that were not possible in the canonical conformity model, including novel equilibria, stable cycles in variant frequencies, and chaos. In Chapter 3, n and the conformity coefficients can vary stochastically over time. This study reveals a variety of differences between deterministic and stochastic conformity models, but also proves that if conformity is expected on average in the stochastic model, the population converges to one of the three equilibria seen in the deterministic conformity model. Chapter 4 incorporates more than two cultural variants into the deterministic conformity model and uncovers novel types of polymorphic equilibria, variant frequency cycles, and chaos. Overall, Chapters 2-4 show that altering the assumptions of the standard conformity model may produce a more realistic representation of the wide range of properties that can emerge under (anti-)conformity. Chapters 5 and 6 explore how (anti-)conformity, in conjunction with other cultural transmission biases and/or genetic transmission, may affect the evolution of two phenomena—altruism and cumulative culture—that have puzzled evolutionary theorists. An altruistic behavior paradoxically reduces one's own fitness to increase that of another, and has commonly been modeled as a genetically transmitted trait. Chapter 5 shows how cultural transmission of altruism, including conformity, anti-conformity, and a "content" bias for altruistic behavior, changes the conditions under which this behavior evolves compared to those under purely genetic transmission. Chapter 6 seeks to explain why cumulative culture, i.e., the incremental improvement of a cultural trait, such as a tool, over time, is seen in few non-human animals despite its potential advantages. Results show that small population sizes and conformist transmission can hinder cultural accumulation

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Biology.
Advisor: Feldman Marcus W.
Rosenberg Noah
Tuljapurkar Shripad