This dissertation addresses questions in the fields of household finance and corporate finance. In Chapter 1, I use a quasi-experiment in Norway to examine how households respond to capital taxation. The introduction of a new wealth assessment methodology in 2010 led to geographic discontinuities in household exposure to wealth taxes,...
Embryonic stem cells have the potential to differentiate into ectodermal, mesodermal and endodermal derivatives. This property makes them a valuable source of tissue specific progenitor and differentiated cells that can be used for cell replacement therapy. The first goal of this thesis is to test if cardiogenesis from embryonic stem...
The orderly process of hematopoietic differentiation is governed in large part by the coordinated transcription of specific genes. Deregulation of normal differentiation processes can lead to disease states including immunodeficiency, autoimmune disease, and leukemia. This research focuses on the family of transcription factors known as the early growth response (Egr)...
This research investigates under what conditions political institutions may induce longer and more expensive financial crisis resolutions by assessing the impact of power distribution on government responses to crisis situations. A new model is elaborated in which power distribution plays a key role in the evolution of financial crises, from...
My thesis focuses on the design and synthesis of lanthanide coordination complexes as Zn(II)-responsive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agents. These agents produce an increase in MR intensity upon binding of Zn(II) through water modulation to Gd(III) chelates. To this end, several Zn(II)-responsive contrast agents have been synthesized and studied...
Science education reform emphasizes learning science through inquiry as a way to engage students in the processes of science at the same time that they learn scientific concepts. However, inquiry involves practices that are challenging for students because they have underlying norms with which students may be unfamiliar. We therefore...
This dissertation develops and estimates a dynamic model of consumer choice behavior in markets for seasonal (short lifecycle) goods where products have a finite selling season, consumer valuations change over time and availability is limited. In these markets, retailers often use dynamic markdown policies in which an initial retail price...
Operations Management (OM) is concerned with the processes involved in delivering goods and services to customers (Hopp and Spearman 2000, Shim and Siegel 1999). While recent surge in service and professional white collar work has greatly changed the arena of OM practice, OM research has not yet well address the...
his dissertation traces the presence of early Soviet satire in several major prose works. My project examines Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Yuri Olesha's Envy, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit, and Mikhail Zoshchenko's prose trilogy (Youth Restored, The Sky-Blue Book and Before Sunrise) as literary works that incorporated and...
This thesis is a description of the measurement of the W boson mass using the D0 Run II detector with 770 pb^-1 of proton-antiproton collision data. These collisions were produced by the Tevatron at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV between 2002 and 2006. We use a sample of W -> e...