Stories and fantasy represent an important aspect of consumer life and comprise a huge marketing enterprise within consumer entertainment. Each year, upwards of $82 billion is spent on books, games, and other fantasy industries in the United States alone. Likewise, fantasy has important implications for consumers’ sense of identity. In...
In my dissertation I explore several applications of collective household models with limited commitment to study the behavior of singles and couples in the modern US marriage markets in presence of endogenous risk of divorce. In the first chapter, I show that the model is capable of rationalizing the patterns...
We prove the Rigidity Conjecture of Goette and Igusa, which states that, after rationalizing, there are no stable exotic smoothings of manifold bundles with closed even dimensional fibers. The key ingredients of the proof are fiberwise Poincaré–Hopf theorems generalizing earlier such results about the Becker–Gottlieb transfer. These theorems show how...
This dissertation is divided into three chapters. Chapter one studies changes in market concentration and productivity growth in the United States from the 1990s to the 2010s. Chapter two measures the impact of a banking crisis, the British Panic of 1825, on non-financial firms. Chapter three examines how women's employment...
Earth’s mantle has a two-layer structure comprising an upper and a lower mantle, separated by a global seismic discontinuity at 660 km depth. The mantle transition zone (MTZ), which extends from the seismic discontinuity at 410 km depth to the base of the upper mantle plays a crucial role in...
Miniaturized lasers are important for fundamental studies of light-matter interactions and applications in on-chip photonic integration. Plasmonic nanoparticle lattices supporting surface lattice resonances can provide optical feedback for directional lasing emission at room temperature. This thesis focuses on how the design of plasmon cavities can enable engineering of laser emission...
Quantum dots (QDs) are promising photocatalysts due to their large extinction coefficient, large surface area-to-volume ratio, and stability upon irradiation. QDs have been studied in photocatalytic hydrogen production, CO2 reduction, and reduction of small organic molecules such as nitrobenzene. This dissertation describes the application of QDs in two photocatalytic cross-coupling...
Mixed-dimensional heterojunctions between two-dimensional (2D) materials and organic semiconductors is a rapidly growing field. This is motivated by the promise of leveraging the extraordinary properties of 2D materials with the synthetic tunability and reconfigurability of organic electronics, allowing the realization of new physics or devices that are not possible in...
Dysfunction in mitochondrial dynamics is believed to contribute to a host of neurological disorders and has recently been implicated in cancer metastasis. The outer mitochondrial membrane adapter proteins Miro1 and Miro2 play a role in the regulation of mitochondria. Each paralog comprises two GTPase domains flanking two centrally located calcium/magnesium-binding...
In the first two decades of the 21st century, metal organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted much attention in both fundamental-research and-industrial application areas. Derived from a vast library of both inorganic metal nodes and organic linker bridges, MOFs are crystalline materials whose structures and chemical environments can both be tuned...