All animals purposefully navigate feature-rich environments: while exploring, in search of vital resources of food and water, finding mates, and patrolling and marking habitats. During these complex behaviors, continuous analogue input information from peripheral sensory organs guides discrete and digital sequential motor output; accordingly, each action is informed, modulated, or...
This thesis revisits classic optimal tax theory, recognizing that most people live in multi-person households. We derive optimal tax schedules for married agents, seriously taking the distinction between interpersonal and interhousehold inequality. After showing how individual-oriented utilitarianism typically leads to a misalignment between the households’ and the government’s objectives, which...
I set up a disagreement model where traders not only have different interpretations of a public signal that conveys information of a stock, but are also uncertain about the information quality of others' interpretations. The model along with traders being ambiguity-averse predicts a positive relation between investor disagreement (ID) and...
This dissertation is a culmination of work spanning several modes of travel, multiple datasets, and different contexts. Because the proliferation of new mobility services disrupted the transportation ecosystem, I aim to understand travel behavior and investigate how new and traditional modes intermingle. I focus my attention on Mobility-on-Demand which encompasses...
The cerebellar cortical system is an extensively studied circuit which is critical for motor learning. While multiple monoamines, such as norepinephrine and serotonin, modulate cerebellar cortical output, the mechanistic details of dopaminergic signaling in the cerebellum remain poorly understood. Additionally, neuronal cell types residing within the cerebellum remain relatively under-characterized....
This dissertation consists of three chapters that each study the interaction between government policy and real estate markets. All three chapters are connected by a broad interest in renters, landlords, and rental markets. Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between place-based policies and real estate and rental markets empirically by studying...
Macrophages are innate immune cells that are traditionally thought to be specialists in phagocytosis. More recent evidence suggest that macrophages reside in nearly every organ and readily adapt to local microenvironmental signals, leading to highly plastic phenotypes across and within tissues. Therefore, rather than treating it as a homogenous cell...
Children acquire linguistic competence via social interactions with adults and learn to converse in accordance with the norms of their communities. The present dissertation examined the communicative patterns of Thai-English bilingual mothers and children in their two languages, as well as compared the bilinguals’ conversations to each of their monolingual...
This dissertation provides an introduction to the diffraction and scattering theory for the Aharonov--Bohm Hamiltonian with one or multiple poles on $\mathbf{R}^2$. It shows the propagation of diffractive singularities of the wave equation with the magnetic Hamiltonians with singular vector potential, which is related to the so-called Aharonov--Bohm effect. Based...
As the interest in rational synthesis for solid-state materials accelerates, there is an urgent need to understand the design principles concealed within these reactions. In situ material synthesis provides such an avenue to not only uncover these assembling rules, but also for finding new materials even in seemingly familiar phase...