This dissertation addresses questions in the fields of household finance and corporate finance. In Chapter 1, I use a quasi-experiment in Norway to examine how households respond to capital taxation. The introduction of a new wealth assessment methodology in 2010 led to geographic discontinuities in household exposure to wealth taxes,...
Desmosomes are adhesive complexes found at sites of intercellular contact that are essential for mediating cell-cell adhesion. These junctions undergo regulated assembly and reorganization during processes such as embryogenesis and wound healing. Plakophilins (PKPs) are armadillo family members related to the classic cadherin-associated protein p120ctn. PKPs localize to the cytoplasmic...
In 2008, the term "remix culture" is widely understood to refer to mash-up videos and movie parodies, distributed on websites such as YouTube and authored primarily by white male teenagers. This dissertation argues that digital remix was invented primarily by African American men, who, in the mid-1980s, began using digital...
Problems involving irregularly shaped domains or embedded interfaces occur in a wide range of mathematical models. These include models in computational biology, fluid mechanics, and solidification. Numerical solutions for this type of problem can be difficult to obtain, and therefore a variety of methods have been devised to solve them....
The recent years have witnessed a large number of emerging applications in location based services, thanks to the wide spread use of GPS devices, cellular phones, RFID tags and mobile sensor nodes. A fundamental technology that enables such services is the efficient management of the vast volume of spatio-temporal information...
Chapter 1: (Bounds on the Counterfactual Revenue Distributions in Auctions with Reserve Prices) In first-price auctions with interdependent bidder values, the distributions of private signals and values cannot be uniquely recovered from bids in Bayesian Nash equilibria. Non-identification invalidates structural analyses that rely on exact identification of the model primitives....
I examine how consumers' purchase' decisions and intentions of purchases are affected by uncertainty about future deals (temporary price cuts or sales) for a product and how these results affect retailers' optimal pricing and marketing strategies. First I look at the effects of uncertainty about the timing of deals (i.e....
In this thesis we study protein folding with external force. In Part I we simulate the folding or unfolding procedure based on the two-state model. For constant-velocity experiments, the simulation results fit the experimental results. For constant-force experiments, we introduce cooperativity between domains to explain the different behavior between single...
ABSTRACT This dissertation moves work on school discipline into the digital era by filling a gap in the literature which has largely ignored how data from digital student ecosystems are mined and processed by school authority. My dissertation interrogates the role youth of youth online behavior in school discipline decision-making....
Although centrosomes nucleate and organize microtubules in mitotically-dividing cells, spindles in female reproductive cells (oocytes) form in their absence. In some organisms acentrosomal spindle assembly is mediated by acentriolar microtubule organizing centers (MTOCs) that are thought to functionally replace centrosomes. However, spindle assembly in human oocytes does not require MTOCs;...