VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Overrated? The Impact of Oil Revenue on Nigeria's Creditworthiness, Debt Profile & Sustainability, 1973-2004

One of the biggest challenges for an oil-producing country is how to use its oil wealth strategically to promote sustainable development. Almost fifty years after oil was discovered at Oloibiri in South Eastern Nigeria and after the country’s mostly-bitter romance with creditor organizations: How do we assess the debt crisis in which Nigeria found itself? What are the lessons to be learned? Certainly, these are some of the most important questions to be studied as the country embarks with a clean slate with private and bilateral lenders after the long soughtafter debt restructuring deal that came in April 2006. This thesis analyzes the lessons to be learned from Nigeria’s debt history, looking especially at the phenomenon of oil-led spending and borrowing that occurred during 1973-2004. Its objective is to determine whether Nigeria received a higher credit-rating than its domestic and macroeconomic fundamentals would have otherwise justified due to its oil revenues, and whether the debt-repayment crisis arose because oil windfalls from the early 1980s were not used to retire its debt.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
External Debt
Creditworthiness
Debt-servicing capacity
Thesis
Advisor: Hope Nick
Point Shaving in the NBA: An Economic Analysis of the National Basketball Association's Point Spread Betting Market

In this paper, I examine the point spread betting market of the National Basketball Association for indications of cheating through point shaving. Previous studies have illustrated the contradictory phenomenon of simple, profitable betting rules persisting in a market of informed traders. While normally dismissed due to the salaries earned by professional players, I propose point shaving as an explanation for this persistent market inefficiency. Through analysis of the distribution and symmetry of the forecast errors, I arrive at a rough approximation of point shaving’s prevalence. In studying in–game scores, I find conclusive evidence that the point spread influences game outcomes and has causative effects on the probability of the favored team covering the point spread. The key economic concept these results support is that with the non–linear payout structure of the point spread betting market creating a discontinuity over the value of final game margins, individuals are altering their behavior in response to these distorted incentives.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
sports betting
gambling market
NBA
sports book
efficient markets
wager
Thesis
Advisor: Noll Roger
Poverty and Religion: An Investigation into Child Labor in Ghana

Although the number of economically active children worldwide has diminished recently, the problem of child labor is still staggering. This paper examines supply-side determinants of child labor using data collected by the International Labour Organization (ILO) on Ghana, through their Statistical Information and Monitoring Programme on Child Labour (SIMPOC). Linear probability and probit models are used to analyze the importance of various child, household and community characteristics in determining whether a child works and attends school. Some support is found for Basu and Van’s (1998) belief that poverty determines child labor. However, religious affiliation, something not touched upon by previous literature, also tells a consistent story through the data. The results of this study could be used as a guide to policy and debate pertaining to child labor in Ghana.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
youth
work
schooling
income
poverty
Ghanaian
Thesis
Advisor: Pencavel John H.
Rethinking Urban Redevelopment in Saint Paul, Minnesota: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of The Bridges of Saint Paul

The Bridges of Saint Paul is a $1.5 billion development project proposed for the City of Saint Paul by the JLT Group, Inc. The Bridges project is a multi-use development consisting of office and retail space, condominiums, lodging, public space, and entertainment options. The project’s diverse offerings and large size have led to predictions of widespread and large impacts on the Twin Cities region. In considering the project, however, the City of Saint Paul made no attempt to weigh and consider interests in a systematic way. This study offers a method to weigh competing effects through a cost-benefit analysis. The analysis provides policy-makers in the city with a blueprint for consideration of future urban development projects for the proposed site and the Twin Cities region.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
Urban Renewal
Urban Revitalization
West Side St. Paul
Twin Cities
Thesis
Advisor: Noll Roger
School Inputs and Educational Attainment in Jiangsu, China

This paper leverages panel data collected from Jiangsu Province, China from 2001 to 2004 for examining the effects of school inputs such as class size and teacher education on educational attainment, represented by the percentage of middle school graduates who advance to high school or equivalent education. The results show that while middle school class size and educational investment do not have much impact, lower historic elementary school class size and higher teacher education have significant, positive effects on educational attainment. These conclusions differ from what is generally supported in western literature and contain additional policy implications for a developing region.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
Jiangsu Province
China
educational attainment
class size
teacher education
Thesis
Advisor: Rosston Gregory
The Determinants of Sniping on eBay: An Econometric Analysis

eBay is the largest and most widely known of many internet auction sites designed to connect buyers and sellers around the world. An eBay auction consists of a set bidding period during which individuals submit “maximum bids” for an item. The winner the auction is the individual with the highest bid, and the price is equal to the second highest bid, plus a small bidding increment. This system is a close approximation to a second-price auction, for which William Vickrey proved in 1961 that a weakly dominant strategy is to bid one’s own private value for an item. A bidding strategy called “sniping,” whereby an individual withholds a bid until the last moment of the bidding period, is widely observed on eBay, but seems to violate rational behavior in the Vickrey model. Bidding late should not have any advantage over bidding early in a second-price auction, so economists have sought ways to rationalize its existence. In this paper, I create a data set from 515 eBay auctions and test several potential determinants of sniping behavior using a standard linear regression model. I incorporate a number of variables from previous literature (a common value indicator for an item, the feedback rating of an individual, and the number of opponents in an auction), as well as a new variable (the number of substitutes for an item), and achieve significant results.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
game theory
auction theory
second-price auction
internet auction
eBay
sniping
Thesis
Advisor: Rothwell Geoffrey
U.S. Trade Policy and the Pacific Rim, from Fordney-McCumber to the Trade Expansion Act of 1962: A Political-Economic Analysis

From 1922 to 1962, United States trade policies changed dramatically, marked in the beginning by the heightening of protectionism and then the mobilization toward trade liberalization. The effect of these policies on the Pacific Rim, however, has been little studied. This thesis investigates the extent to which U.S. trade policies during this period impacted the Pacific Rim economies differently from the rest of the world. Empirical analysis demonstrates that U.S. trade with the Pacific Rim had consistently higher tariff barriers than U.S. trade with the rest of the world. This thesis then analyzes the reasons behind this phenomenon from both a political economy and a historical perspective. On both fronts, the Pacific Rim was at a disadvantage, and its higher barrier to trade with the U.S. was by no means historically accidental.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
United States
trade policies
Pacific Rim
tariffs
Thesis
Advisor: Wright Gavin
Volatility Forecasting with High Frequency Data

The daily volatility is typically unobserved but can be estimated using high frequent tick-by-tick data. In this paper, we study the problem of forecasting the unobserved volatility using past values of measured volatility. Specifically, we use daily estimates of volatility based on high frequency data, called realized variance, and construct the optimal linear forecast of future volatility. Utilizing single exponential smoothing, we develop formulae that yield the optimal coefficients for our forecast. We compare the precision of our forecast with those of two popular forecasting models, the HAR regression model and the Local Level model, in terms of mean squared errors. In empirical analysis of the seven DJIA stocks, our model performs better than two competing models in most of the cases.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
Realized Variance
High-Frequency Data
Instrumental Variables
Local Level Model
HAR model
linear forecasting
Thesis
Advisor: Hansen Peter
Why is Curly a Woman?!: Presentationality and Nostalgia in the Takarazuka Revue

In this essay, I use an analysis of the presentational theatrical elements of Takarazuka musicals to enter into a discussion about how and why the Revue evokes nostalgia for a very specific image of American culture in their stage production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s American musical classic "Oklahoma!".

Keywords: Theater and society
Text
Thesis
A Geoarchaeological Analysis of Adobe from the Presidio, San Francisco

This thesis is a comparative study of adobe from two different sites in the Presidio de San Francisco: the Officer's Club, in the main quadrangle, and El Polin Springs, an extramural site in the Tennessee Hollow Watershed. By combining macroscopic descriptions of the texture and plant content of adobe samples with petrographic analysis and a review of the local geology, this study focuses on intersite and intrasite variability in texture and source materials to understand more about the history of the individual buildings and the social relationships surrounding architectural production in the Presidio. Because the adobe from El Polin Springs was found with fired soil in burnt building rubble at the site, analysis of this rubble also seeks to contribute to knowledge about the fire episode. Findings indicate that there is compositional and textural variation between the adobe from these two sites, which may be due to the use of different source materials, variation within a single source location, or, in the case of the mineralogical variation, high-temperature alteration of minerals during the fire at El Polin Springs.

Keywords: School of Earth Energy &amp; Environmental Sciences
adobe construction
Thesis
Advisor: Voss Barbara
Barite Accumulation Rates and Analysis of Sulfur Isotopes over the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum

The Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a global climatic event that occurred 55 million years ago. D18O values from benthic foraminifera indicate that temperatures rose 4-5C coeval with a precipitous drop in d13C values that indicate a new source of carbon rapidly entered the global carbon cycle. Marine barite (BaSO4) was used to evaluate the 1) barite accumulation rate that serves a proxy for export production and 2) the sulfur isotopic composition of seawater that reflects the mass balance of oceanic sulfate (SO4 2-). Increased barite accumulation rates at the PETM suggest that increased export production and CO2 sequestration was in direct response to the change in carbon source, although not all of the increases are accounted for. High resolution d34S values are lower but within reasonable range of previously observed values and indicate a decrease in sulfate removal by pyrite deposition.

Keywords:  Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences
School of Earth Energy &amp; Environmental Sciences
paleoclimatology
Thesis
Advisor: Paytan Adina
Arrigo Kevin
Design of Photonic Crystal Cavities by Genetic Algorithms and Numerical Optimization Techniques

Photonic Crystals are semiconductor material structures that show promise for a variety of photonic-based applications. The properties of photonic crystals are very design-dependent. In this paper, we investigate the design of photonic crystal cavities by using Genetic Algorithms and Numerical Optimization Techniques. We see that the Genetic Algorithm proves to be powerful and effective design tool for such cavity structures.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Photonic crystals
Genetic algorithms
Semiconductors
Thesis
Advisor: Vuckovic Jelena
Full-System Power Analysis and Modeling

The increasing costs of power delivery and cooling, as well as the trend toward higher-density computer systems, have created a growing demand for better power management in server environments. Despite the increasing interest in this issue, little work has been done in quantitatively understanding power consumption trends and developing models to predict full-system power and component power breakdown that are not hardware specific.
To quantitatively understand power consumption trends in server systems, we study the component-level power breakdown and variation, as well as temporal workload-specific power consumption of two instrumented systems: a power-optimized blade system and a compute-optimized Itanium-2 system. Using this analysis, we examine the validity of prior ad-hoc approaches to understanding power breakdown and quantify several interesting trends important for power modeling and management.
We also introduce Mantis, a non-intrusive method for modeling full-system power consumption and providing real-time power prediction. Mantis is not hardware-specific and uses a one-time calibration phase to generate a model correlating AC power measurements with standard user-level system utilization metrics.
We experimentally validate Mantis on the two instrumented systems using a variety of workloads (CPU, memory, or I/O intensive) and hardware configurations (number of processors, power supply and frequency settings). Mantis provides power estimates with high accuracy for both overall and temporal power consumption, making it a valuable non-hardware-specific tool for power-aware scheduling and analysis.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Modeling
Information technology industry > Energy conservation
Electric power > Conservation
Thesis
Advisor: Kozyrakis Christos
Hydrothermal Minerals Record Variations in CO2 Flux of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge: Reykjanes Geothermal System, Iceland

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge spreading center is exposed on land at the Reykjanes geothermal system in southwest Iceland. Seawater that penetrates this coastal geothermal system at depth reacts with the host rock basalt to form secondary geothermal minerals in progressively higher-grade mineral alteration zones with depth at temperatures over 300C. Within several alteration zones, epidote, prehnite, calcite and quartz form a trivariant assemblage that, under conditions of specified temperature and pressure, allows predictions of geothermal fluid pCO2 to be made as a function of the composition of the solid solution minerals epidote and prehnite.

Keywords:  Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences
School of Earth Energy &amp; Environmental Sciences
Mid-Atlantic Ridge
Iceland
Thesis
Advisor: Bird Dennis K.
Liou Juhn
Learning Effective BDD Variable Orders for BDD-based Program Analysis

Software reliability and security are in jeopardy. As software has become ubiquitous and its capabilities have become more complex, code quality has been sacrificed in the race for the next ”killer app.” In response, program analysis researchers have mounted a revolution; they have developed new tools and methods, underpinned by traditional compilation techniques, in order to save software from its downward spiral. However, because these tools and analyses have also become more sophisticated, they too have suffered from scalability, reliability and complexity issues.
Just as program analysis researchers have set out to solve the problems of software developers, we have set out to solve the problems of program analysis researchers. The bddbddb (Binary Decision Diagram-Based Deductive DataBase) system has recently made possible many advanced, context-sensitive program analyses. Such analyses can be expressed in bddbddb as Datalog queries, which are quantifiably easier to write than a traditional implementation. The bddbddb system’s unique compilation mechanisms also yield analyses of exceptional performance. The key to this performance is the use of Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs), a compact representation that exploits repeated patterns in data, to represent the principle elements of an analysis. However, finding efficient BDD representations (i.e., BDD variable orders) for a particular analysis is nearly impossible to accomplish manually and, in some cases, is without a solution given an analysis and its formulation.
This thesis presents an algorithm that helps automate the discovery of efficient BDD representations. Our technique reformulates the search for BDD variable orders as an active learning process over the space of BDD variable orders and their execution times. This technique revolves around an iterative process of carefully sampling new orders and then reducing the search space by extracting features from high performance orders. The dominant features of the sampled variable orders can then be used to generate new orders, refine existing orders, or even revise analysis formulations. The variable orders generated by our algorithm outperform those obtained after months of manual exploration. And, more importantly, our results make bddbddb a viable and valuable tool for program analysis researchers in their quest for better quality code.

Keywords: Computer Science.
Decision making > Mathematical models
Decision trees
Co-winner Ben Wegbreit Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Thesis in Computer Science
Thesis
Advisor: Lam Monica
Planning Costs and Price Discrimination in Markets for Time-Specific Goods

When consumers have constant or non-existent planning costs firms can always achieve maximum profits with a single fixed price. However, when planning costs vary with consumers’ valuations a single fixed price is not always sufficient for profit maximization. In such cases it is optimal for the firm to provide an array of purchasing options. High valuation consumers will purchase with certainty at a high price while lower valuation consumers will opt for a lottery which gives some probability of being allowed to purchase at a discounted price and no opportunity to purchase otherwise. In general this type of mechanism may be difficult to implement, but in markets for time-specific goods any menu of lotteries can be realized by a descending price path with quantity restrictions at the discount prices.

Keywords:  Department of Economics
Stanford Department of Economics
prices
valuations
consumer
markets
Thesis
Advisor: Levin Jonathan
Post-Explosion Nuclear Attribution and Deterrence

Nuclear attribution or post-explosion forensics is the process of determining the origin of nuclear material after a nuclear incident. While nuclear terrorism has been well-explored in academic literature, there are no technical assessments of attribution capability. This thesis attempts to fill that gap by combining an assessment of the current technology with the contribution that attribution can make toward deterrence. I find that the technology behind attribution is well-developed but not foolproof, and I conclude that if the current capabilities were publicized more thoroughly and the post-explosion process of assessing the evidence were internationalized, states and individual actors might be deterred more than they already are. I explore other possible policy options, including a nuclear database and nuclear tagging, and these are found to be useful but to add less to deterrence.

Keywords: CISAC
Center for International Security and Cooperation
Stanford University
nuclear weapons
nuclear attribution
deterrance
Thesis
Advisor: May Michael
Putting the House in Order: The Rise and Fall of the Homeland Security Council

The Homeland Security Council (HSC) coordinates homeland security policy across the government. Recently, there has been enormous pressure to merge the HSC with the National Security Council. This thesis seeks to answer why the HSC is on the verge of this merger, despite the importance of homeland security to overall US security policy. The hypotheses, derived from the literature, consider whether a “flawed mandate,” under-resourcing, or presidential leadership style best answers that question. In analyzing these hypotheses, the study relies heavily on interviews. Somewhat surprisingly, the evidence suggests that the most compelling explanation is not any of these obvious factors, but rather something much more mundane: the organizational immaturity of the HSC. The thesis ends with recommendations to guide policymakers that are facing similar questions of presidential decision-making and the organization of the government at the highest levels.

Keywords: Center for International Security and Cooperation
CISAC
security policy
Homeland Security Council
National Security Council
organizational structure
Thesis
Advisor: Blacker Coit D.