In everyday conversations, listeners need to rapidly perceive and parse speech input as they receive it. While listeners with normal hearing may do this with relative ease, this is a multi-step process that requires listeners to recognize individual speech sounds as meaningful then integrate them to understand and respond almost...
Very few studies have examined school racial climate in racially diverse school contexts. School racial climate refers to “perceptions of interracial interactions and the socialization around race and culture in a school” (Byrd, 2017, p. 700). The association between interracial peer interactions, psychological well-being, and academic outcomes is well documented,...
Very few studies have examined school racial climate in racially diverse school contexts. School racial climate refers to “perceptions of interracial interactions and the socialization around race and culture in a school” (Byrd, 2017, p. 700). The association between interracial peer interactions, psychological well-being, and academic outcomes is well documented,...
Nucleic acid drugs promise to revolutionize the development of therapeutics. They offer a platform for digital medicine, where systematic changes to the nucleic acid sequence can be utilized to target the entire human genome. However, nucleic acids suffer from a number of drawbacks, such as negligible cellular uptake and rapid...
Does the Russian Federation in the Putin-Medvedev era follow a grand strategy, and if so, what does it look like, and how can we discern the making of Russian grand strategy? However, Russian grand strategy is neither formally codified nor readily accessible, and it remains opaque at best. In this...
This dissertation consists of three chapters on theoretical and empirical industrial organization. The first chapter highlights a previously unnoticed property of commonlyused discrete choice models, which is that they feature parallel demand curves. The second chapter studies how a behavioral consumer preference with “price reference effect” can overturn the standard...
This dissertation proposes an oracle efficient estimator in the context of a sparse linear model. Chapter 1 introduces the penalty and the estimator that optimizes a penalized least squares objective. Unlike existing methods, the penalty is differentiable – once, and hence the estimator does not engage in model selection. This...
Numerous insights into the sensorimotor systems that guide the control of voice have been garnered by observing how the system responds to manipulations of its auditory feedback. However, current approaches may be limited in the exploration of more complex parameters of volitional and adaptive voice control due to their limited...
Bitcoin is a decentralized payment system proposed in 2008 by Nakamoto, who remains anonymous to date. It offers an effective alternative to fiat money or centralized payment systems with advantages on privacy, anonymity, and low international remittance fees. The transactions in Bitcoin payment system are sent through a peer-to-peer network,...
This thesis consists of three papers studying applied microeconomics and economic history. The chapters are broadly organized around two different topics: the political effects of media and the consequences of disruption to human capital. In the first chapter, joint with Susan Ou, we study the role of media in the...