In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of Venetian women began musical training in childhood to become professional musicians, known as figlie di coro (daughters of the choir), in the four charitable Ospedali Maggiori. These women overcame childhood poverty and abandonment to awe prestigious guests with their skills and even...
This thesis consists of three chapters: two are empirical studies of policy design in small-business lending markets, while the final is a large-scale retrospective of retail mergers. Chapter 1 examines moral hazard in loan guarantee programs. To address credit constraints in small-business lending markets, policymakers frequently rely on loan guarantees,...
Cancer is a top leading cause of deaths worldwide, among which pancreatic cancer and liver cancer are top leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Despite recent developments in cancer treatment, pancreatic and liver cancers still have a high mortality and low life expectancy, especially when diagnosed at advanced stages. Earlier cancer...
This dissertation studies three aspects of healthcare market regulation.
Chapter 1 studies the optimal design of quality scores for health insurance plans. Regulators often generate quality scores to help consumers with limited information about product quality, as in schooling, healthcare, and financial markets. When designing scores, regulators must not only...
With the ever-increasing demand for more complex functionalities and miniaturization of photonic devices, the design of such devices requires a whole new different approach, deviating from classical photonic design approaches. Conventionally, the design of a typical photonic device starts with a prior knowledge, intuition, and practical experience of specific behavior...
This paper studies the joint importance of dissemination and the structure of firms’ information networks in the pricing of value relevant financial information. I first document that disruptions to the dissemination of information on Twitter.com cause the market to react less to earnings news. Using ten staggered Twitter outages, which...
In the adult hippocampus of many mammalian species, populations of newborn dentate granule cells (DGCs) are continuously generated and undergo subsequent activity-dependent neuronal maturation and incorporation into the preexisting hippocampal circuitry. Increasing evidence has demonstrated that these young adult-born DGCs (abDGCs) participate in numerous cognitive and affective processes such as...
My research at northwestern with Dr. Christina Zelano focused on the human amygdala subnucleithat receive monosynaptic input from the olfactory bulb. Surprisingly little is known
about these brain regions, including their potential roles in olfactory and nonolfactory
processing. During my PhD, I completed three projects aimed at furthering our understanding...
This dissertation develops a causal theory of the relevant alternatives in a situation and applies this theory to the semantics and epistemology of conditionals, the theory of knowledge, and the epistemology of stereotyping. The first chapter presents the theory of causal models and causal alternatives. The second chapter applies this...
Missing data are often described as an annoyance in research and generally presented as a source of error or bias during analysis. To this end, methods that center on planned missingness are an underappreciated and powerful tool that can actually be used to improve data collection and the validity of...