Small area estimation (SAE) has been one of the most active areas in survey methodology research, due to the increasing demand for small area statistics from government agencies and the private sector. But in some areas of interest, sample sizes could be very small, or even zero, in which case,...
Commercially available electrically powered prosthetic elbows are stiff and unyielding. Making these artificial limb replacements more closely mimic human elbows by increasing their compliance may be beneficial. In addition to having increased compliance compared with current electrically powered prosthetic elbows, humans modulate the overall impedance of their joints. The author...
An understanding of how two people anticipate, adapt, and react to each other's forces and motions could aid in designing machines to work cooperatively with humans and further explain how a single human interacts with the world. Tasks, such as lifting and moving a bulky object, teaching manual skills, dancing,...
The present dissertation includes my research on modeling financial market returns and volatility on high frequency data. It consists of three chapters.
The first chapter introduces a novel high-frequency volatility estimator based on large price moves, which constitutes a generalization of the standard range. An asymptotic theory is developed in...
Information processing in the striatum is crucial for voluntary movement control and associative learning and in the normal condition is subject to balanced dopaminergic and cholinergic modulation. However, in Parkinson's disease (PD) striatal dopamine (DA) level falls because of degeneration of DA neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta and...
This dissertation investigates the ways in which poetry encourages visual images in the reader. This investigation breaks new ground, for in the wake of behaviorist psychology and the linguistic turn in literary theory, literary critics have ignored and often spurned the visual imagination. The project uses Imagist poetry as a...
This dissertation explains why some rebel groups act in a highly coercive fashion toward local populations, only to shift to increasingly contractual behavior, and why other groups that share similar circumstances evolve in the opposite direction. Drawing upon fieldwork in Sudan, Iraq, Turkey, and Colombia, this study examines three rebel...
Social networks play an important role in the labor market. Various surveys document that 30-60% of jobs are found through friends or relatives. To better understand how networks operate in the labor market, I examine how networks that were formed involuntarily as a result of the American Civil War and...
In this dissertation we analyze, using standard formal imperfect competition models from the literature, two central public policy issues in the deregulated wholesale electricity markets. The first issue is the regulatory rules around generator ownership of transmission companies or transmission rights in general. The second issue we look into is...
In mammalian development, cell specification and organogenesis are achieved by the regulated expression and repression of specific subsets of genes. The anterior pituitary gland, comprised of five cell types that arise from a common precursor, is an excellent model system for understanding these developmental processes. Examination of factors regulating transcription...