This dissertation examines three distinct empirical questions in macroeconomics and finance. Chapter 1 studies the reasons why households file for bankruptcy. The debt relief households obtain in bankruptcy provides insurance against wealth losses, but also distorts borrower incentives to repay debt, discouraging lending. Understanding how bankruptcy filings respond to changes...
Context: Crowd logistics is a novel shipping concept where delivery operations are carried out by employing existing vehicle capacity and drivers from the crowd, relying on their planned tours, thereby offering potential for economic, social, and environmental benefits. Despite the promise of this new logistics model, little is known about...
Spin-orbit coupling (SOC) is a powerful phenomenon that dictates the functional properties of transition metal complexes essential for information processing, catalysis, and magnetism. Though it is relegated to lower energy scales within the orbital description of first-row transition metal complexes, SOC impacts crucial aspects of electronic structure such as promoting...
Sexual orientation is conventionally understood as relative attraction to men versus women. It has recently been argued that male sexual orientation in particular can be extended to include other dimensions of sexual attraction besides gender, such as sexual maturity and location. With respect to the dimension of location, most men...
Millions of years of evolution have produced fascinating biological materials and structures that are optimized to perform a wide spectrum of functions essential for the survival of organisms. These biological materials have been intensively studied in order to decipher the intricate interplay between their superior material properties and structural design...
What is the role of entrepreneurship – a predominantly market-based approach – in addressing social problems such as inequality and social exclusion? How do entrepreneurial organizations with a distinctly social purpose (often referred to as hybrid organizations) manage additional imperatives, such as those related to democratic governance? Based on 70...
Despite advancing knowledge about the mechanics of earthquakes, earthquake prediction remains, and will likely remain, an unsolved problem. Hence in order to reduce the risk posed by earthquake shaking, seismologists have developed tools called earthquake hazard maps. Earthquake hazard maps communicate expected future shaking scenarios, and are used by engineers...
Many volunteer communities rely on technological systems to help their members connect, collaborate and learn the norms of how to participate in the organization. This dissertation presents research that examines technological interventions designed to support participation in three different volunteer-run communities, all of which have porous boundaries, and allow volunteers...
In this thesis, I present the development and benchmarking of several theoretical methods designed to enable the rigorous modeling of magnetic properties of molecules containing one or a few heavy atoms, particularly single-molecule magnets. The new methods use a full four-component treatment of relativity, allowing spin–orbit effects to be taken...
Using carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRPs) to reduce vehicle weight has received growing attentions because it can effectively curtail greenhouse gas emissions and slow down global warming. The thermoforming process is among the most promising techniques for mass production of CFRP parts because it is highly automated and has relatively...
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have gained more and more attention from researchers, manufacturers, and transportation experts. When AVs become available to the public, they are expected to dramatically alter the transportation system as we know it, posing critical questions such as: How will the road network react to this change? How...
Transport along and across the grain boundaries of solid-state electrolytes has implications for a broad range of materials and in an equally broad range of technologies. Over the past 2-3 decades, a substantial body of literature has been developed to explain grain boundary transport properties within the context of space...
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous disorder defined by core deficits in social communication as well as the presence of restricted interests and repetitive behaviors, including sensory processing atypicalities. Individuals with ASD also have atypicalities in integration of multiple sensory modalities (i.e., sensory integration), which are hypothesized to underlie...
Drawing from the data I collected through nine months (between 2014 to 2017) of participant observations, 120 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, and archival work, the project explores the tactics that Chechen and Dagestani journalists utilize to resist state pressure and circumvent state-imposed censorship. Specifically, I explicate how these regional journalists in...
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the dance makerspace, a learning environment designed to support STEM engagement through making and embodied experience for a group of African American youth dancers. It looks at how participants in a 4-week summer camp program at an urban creative arts center-turned-makerspace, constructed embodied...
Drawing on archival research and a new attention to literary form, Sion’s Muse argues that the religious poetry of the English Reformation decisively constituted new modes of devotional affect for laypeople. At the beginning of the English Reformation, the psalm translator Miles Coverdale wrote, “Would God that our minstrels had...
Economic inequality has reached historically high levels in both the United States and in the world. The research literature in sociology and political science has long shown that individuals tend to be very persistent in their views on the determinants of economic success, although these views may be formed on...
Neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) commonly involve the accumulation and aggregation of neurotoxic proteins that impair and ultimately destroy specific neurons. Considerable evidence from human and animal studies indicates that many NDs show disrupted circadian and sleep as symptoms. Yet little is known about the molecular mechanisms by which genes cause NDs...
Dystonia is a movement disorder characterized by involuntary and repetitive co-contractions of the agonist and antagonist muscles. Dystonia 6 (DYT6) is an autosomal dominant dystonia caused by loss of function mutations in the zinc finger transcription factor THAP1. I have generated Thap1 knock-out mice with a view to understanding its...
The Brink-Schwarz superparticle is a one-dimensional analogue of the Green-Schwarz superstring. In this thesis, we use the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism to study the superparticle. After proving a vanishing result for its Batalin-Vilkovisky cohomology, we explain the sense in which the superparticle exhibits general covariance in the world-line. Using techniques from rational...
Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a devastating injury, which can be caused by motor vehicle accidents, violence, and non-traumatic causes. These injuries can leave patients with lifelong paralysis, as well as incontinence and life threatening autonomic dysreflexia. There is currently no FDA approved treatment for SCI. Spinal injury disrupts the...
Developing materials with comparable structural complexity and programmed hierarchy as those found in nature is a grand challenge in materials science. One way to synthesize soft materials with these complex architectures is to use bottom-up self-assembly of nanoscale building blocks, mimicking how organisms grow tissues with specific functions from peptides,...
This dissertation, titled “Empire of Ruins: France in Roman Africa, 1830-1900,” explores the relationship between French colonialism in Algeria and Tunisia and the study of Roman Africa in the nineteenth century. Its central argument is that the French study and use of Roman ruins produced a version of Roman history...
Pragmatic language, or the use of language in social contexts, is critical to developing meaningful social relationships and is a significant contributor to mental health. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), fragile X syndrome (FXS) and Down syndrome (DS) are all genetically based neurodevelopmental disabilities characterized by deficits in pragmatic language, although...
Segregation of polydisperse granular materials remains to be a challenging problem in many industrial processes. However, most studies have focused either on bidisperse (two different particle size species) materials, which are not representative of most real mixtures, or on polydisperse materials in an idealized simple geometry. Additionally, most studies have...
In the first chapter I introduce the ideas that link selling information to surplus extraction. In my environment the seller may be uncertain about how much the buyer both has already learned before contracting with the seller (belief types) and is able to learn after contracting with the seller (information...
Heterogeneous catalysts based on metal oxides are of significant interest for many industrial chemical reactions. These catalysts, however, often suffer from ill-defined structures that preclude better understanding of the surface phenomena. Thus, structurally well-defined catalysts have received growing attention by making it feasible to understand the kinetics and reaction mechanisms....
Prenatal alcohol exposure is a global health concern. Despite guidelines advising against it, many women continue to drink throughout their pregnancies. Exposure to alcohol can have lifelong medical, social, emotional, and intellectual consequences on a developing fetus. Women in Uruguay have demonstrated consistently high self-reported alcohol consumption during pregnancy, but...
The three studies in this project investigate a selected number of youth protective factors and caregiver parenting skills with reducing the risk of justice involvement for youth involved in the child welfare system without a prior history of justice involvement. All three studies used child welfare administrative data, and the...
Built from non-covalent interactions, supramolecular biomaterials are highly dynamic and tunable, and recent work has shown that they are uniquely capable of mimicking functional biological structures. In this work, supramolecular biomaterials built from self-assembling peptide amphiphiles (PA) were investigated with the goal of precisely tuning their cohesive interactions to optimize...
Clientelism has been largely defined as an electoral strategy in which politicians distribute resources to voters to gather their support. This study proposes a new framework to understand clientelism by inverting the perspective of this practice, focusing on voters rather than politicians. This study proposes that clientelism should be understood...
Individuals following a stroke suffer from a host of movement impairments that affect the upper extremity. Hand use is often significantly compromised, especially in individuals with more severe impairments, which makes it difficult for individuals to participate in activities of daily living. One of the major goals of rehabilitation is...
This dissertation has two main aims. The first is to show that relying on the testimony of others is not as “epistemically special” as many epistemologists have made it out to be. More specifically, I argue that relying on someone’s testimony neither provides us with a non-evidential, epistemic reason to...
This dissertation addresses the property of amenability of discrete groups and their actions. In Chapter 2, following the introduction, all necessary definitions are given to introduce amenable groups, elementary amenable groups, random walks, topological full groups, Thompson's group $F$ and to show connections between them. The chapter also briefly covers...
Young children can sometimes acquire new vocabulary words—even property terms—through indirect learning (e.g. Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We explore two factors that contribute to this ability—perceptual alignment and linguistic contrast. We propose that spontaneous comparison processes lead children to notice key commonalities and differences that facilitate indirect property word learning....
This dissertation traces the historical development of diasporic Filipino American activism after the watershed 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and during the military dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines. Using multi-country archival research and approximately sixty oral history interviews, it analyzes labor, student, anti-dictatorship, and human rights activists...
Intestinal immunity is a critical contributor to host health. The immune system in the intestine maintains both defense against pathogens and homeostasis of intestinal tissue, which is exposed to environmental influences, including microbes and ingested foods. Proper regulation of the immune response is required to prevent damage to the host....
This dissertation explores our understanding of corporate credit ratings. In the first chapter I examine the issue of split ratings. S&P and Moody’s often differ in their initial ratings at bond issuance, producing what is referred to as a split rating. The consensus view in the literature and in practice...
Additive manufacturing is a promising process that has the capability to build components with complex geometries for structural and biomedical applications. Due to the rapid and localized directional solidification of molten metallic alloys, unique phase transformations occur at the melt pool that can provide for components with greater strength and...
This thesis describes a series of fundamental studies that address the role of electrostatic interactions in modulating i) the permeability of the ligand shell of a colloidal quantum dot (QD) to an anionic redox probe; ii) the resulting yield of photoinduced electron exchange within the QD ‒ redox probe complex;...
Knee injury causes a loss of stability in the joint and frequently leads to secondary degeneration of the cartilage in the months and years after injury, which can further impair joint function and cause pain and disability. Moreover, the secondary damage to the joint appears to be worse for females...
As national, state, and local educational leaders grapple with how to effectively address the needs of gender-expansive students, more research is needed to inform policy. Gender-expansive youth experience high rates of chronic social stressors such as victimization, discrimination, and rejection. These stressors have academic, mental and physical health consequences; however,...
Neural networks have revolutionized the field of computer vision since they provide solutions to a number of previously unsolved problems and achieve promising performance both in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. It has increasingly become recognized as providing high performance for applications as diverse as image classification, object detection,...
This dissertation examines connections between North and South Korean art during the late Cold War period. Despite the radical social and political differences between the two countries, in the 1980s and early 1990s conspicuous connections emerged between the work of state-sponsored North Korean artists and South Korean artists associated with...
This dissertation argues that black women’s literature on black-white multiraciality critiques public debates that celebrate the racially ambiguous multiracial child as the solution to racial conflict. Under this framework, this project investigates the popularization of multiracial identity in late 20th and 21st century United States, United Kingdom, and Jamaica, and...
In the early part of the 20th Century, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union implemented a program of rapid industrialization under the slogan, “the conquest of nature by man.” Ambitious engineering projects such as the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Northern river reversal sought to restructure...
Oxide/aqueous and metal/metal oxide interfaces are essential for environmental remediation, catalysis, and corrosion inhibition, in addition to their potential implementation as energy transducers, consumer electronics, and coating products. While these interfaces are critically important, they are difficult to access experimentally under aqueous flow conditions. This thesis describes results obtained with...
This dissertation is a social and cultural history of the body and the beauty industry in the Japanese Empire from 1868 to 1945. The emphasis is on the thoughts and actions of state and private actors such as doctors and the first generation of Japanese cosmetic product developers. When these...
Rhythmic fluctuations of electrical activity in the brain provide insights into the proposed mechanism by which we encode experiences and then maintain, forget, modify, and retrieve them. Yet there is still much to learn about how neural oscillations relate to memory function. The purpose of this research is to discover...
The fields of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology have emerged in recent years with the heavily overlapping goals of sustainable bioproduction of chemical goods and predictable and precise engineering of biological function.1 However, efforts to reach commercially relevant titers have stalled.2 Many challenges arise during optimization of each production platform,...