This dissertation addresses three distinct topics in development economics. The first chapter assesses the role of entry and exit in the measurement of misallocation in India. In the last decade, misallocation of productive inputs across firms has been proposed as a primary driver of differences in aggregate productivity over time...
Western scientific norms (e.g., Bacon, 1623/2005) dictate that mechanistic explanations like “rain falls because clouds form water vapor” are preferable to teleological ones like “rain falls so that plants should grow. Do people have preferences that naturally align with this? The predominant interpretation of past research is that they do...
Commonsense inference is a critical capability of modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The machines need commonsense knowledge to perform tasks exactly like human being does. Learning commonsense inference from text has been a long standing challenge in the field of natural language processing due to reporting bias -- people do...
How do perceivers stereotype people who are at the margins of multiple, interlocking social identities? The present dissertation proposes and tests a model of intersectional stereotyping called intersectional categorization theory (ICT). This model advocates the following core ideas: (a) that perceivers use one lens at a time for making sense...
Uttering Sonic Dominicanidad: Women and Queer Performers of Música Urbana Verónica Dávila Ellis What meanings are ascribed to the voices and sonic compositions of Caribbean and Latinx women and queer performers? What do their sounds tell us about Caribbean identity, gender, sexuality, and race? This dissertation centers the work of...
With the global rise of surveillance technology, contentious episodes may be captured on video from multiple perspectives. These perspectives include the third-person visual perspective such as red-light cameras and dashboard cameras, the first-person visual perspective such as body-worn cameras, and perspectives from written descriptions such as police reports and witness...
Reading informs our understandings of the world. Information we encounter in both academic and everyday reading situations can be integrated into our general knowledge, influencing our perceptions and decisions. When the information we read is valid, these influences are desirable. However, we are also routinely exposed to inaccurate information which,...
This dissertation studies the sense most neglected in literary studies, philosophy, and the history of the senses: olfaction. It argues that modernity has been marked by a tendency towards deodorization that attempts to establish a monosensorial and odorless civilization shaped by ocularcentrism. Against this tendency, the authors studied here (Friedrich...
There is a rich history on the study of the interplay between symmetry and synchronization in networks. At the most fundamental level, many synchronization patterns are induced by underlying network symmetries. However, when stability is taken into account, the relation between symmetry and synchronization is far from monotonic. In this...
Current genetic studies are largely biased towards European populations, leaving the discovery of genomics biomarkers and causative genetic variants unexplored in minority populations, such as African Americans. Meanwhile, African Americans are disproportionately affected by a variety of complex diseases and respond differently to many drug treatments. The disparity is due...