In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt analyzes how routine modes of debt and indebtedness restrict black women’s behavior across the everyday sphere and their subsequent engagement with both aesthetic and everyday performance to dismantle such routines. Modes of indebtedness are characteristic of racial capitalism and...
Sound is one of the most important mediums to understand the environment around us. Identifying a sound event in prerecorded audio (such as a police siren, a dog bark, or a creaking door in soundscapes) leads to a better understanding of the context where the sound events occurred. To do...
The commercial success of personal computing has led to the rapid creation and proliferation of diverse electronic systems including desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile devices, and embedded systems. For the past five decades, silicon has served as the base material for computing electronics. However, with increasing demand for unconventional electronics (e.g.,...
In this dissertation I analyze how population aging and political considerations can affect the conduct of fiscal policy and the management of sovereign debt. In Chapter 1 I focus on the impact of an aging population. In Chapter 2 I consider the effects of political uncertainty. How an aging population...
In Chapter 1 I characterize sharp bounds on treatment effects under data combination with instrumental variables. Data combination in this paper refers to having multiple samples drawn from the same population in which observations cannot be linked across samples. I allow for subsets of the outcome, treatment, instrument and covariates...
The basal ganglia are a remarkably complicated and interconnected tangle of subcortical nuclei whose exact function and composition are hotly debated to this day. What is plainly obvious, however, is that loss of dopaminergic modulation in the basal ganglia, as is the case in Parkinson’s disease (PD) following the progressive...
Language is a hallmark of human cognition—a rich and flexible method of representing the world around us. As such, language provides an invaluable resource to human infants: a way of gaining insight into the representations that guide adult cognition. In this dissertation, I explore how language influences infants’ cognition as...
China’s e-commerce development tells a story of how, under a strong authoritarian state, non-state-owned startup companies grew rapidly without state support and transformed many aspects of state-society relations. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, this dissertation makes a vital early attempt to uncover the impact of e-commerce development on China’s state-society...
Chapter 1 proposes a parsimonious two-country, two-good, and complete-market model featuring heterogeneous beliefs to address the Backus-Smith, volatility, and forward premium puzzles in international finance. The presence of the time-varying difference in beliefs has direct and indirect effects on equilibrium exchange rates. The direct effect appears as a wedge in...
In recent years Additive Manufacturing (also known as 3D printing) processes have risen in use within research and industry to create complex, custom parts, which would be otherwise too expensive or even impossible to fabricate via conventional manufacturing methods. While originated as a tool for rapid prototyping, the improvements in...