Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Yale University

Discipline
Keyword
Publication Year
Publication
Publication Type
File Type

Articles 4801 - 4830 of 33851

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Essays In Macrofinance And Asset Pricing, Chase P. Ross Apr 2021

Essays In Macrofinance And Asset Pricing, Chase P. Ross

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays on the topics of asset pricing, macrofinance, and financial intermediation. In the first essay, I examine banks’ role in safe asset markets. Banks are vital suppliers of money-like safe assets: banks produce safe assets by issuing short-term liabilities and pledging collateral. But their ability to create safe assets varies over time as leverage constraints fluctuate. I present a model to describe private safe-asset production when intermediaries face leverage constraints. I measure bank leverage constraints using bank-intermediated basis trades. The collateral premium—a strategy long Treasuries used more often as repo collateral and short Treasuries used …

Go to article

Discovery Of Host-Microbiota Interactions, Connor Rosen Apr 2021

Discovery Of Host-Microbiota Interactions, Connor Rosen

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The microbiota, comprising the trillions of microorganisms that colonize barrier tissues, exert profound effects on host health and disease. Microbial effects on host physiology have been illuminated by a wealth of sequencing-based approaches that enumerate bacterial species, strains, genes, and products (collectively, “multi-omics” approaches) at different tissue sites and in different human populations. Microbes may influence local physiology at their site of residence, as well as having systemic effects including perturbation of organism-wide metabolism, with wide-ranging consequences. The molecular mechanisms by which microbes mediate both local and systemic effects, however, remain mostly unclear. This is in part due to technological …

Go to article

Energetics Of Biological Mechanics And Dynamics, Daniel Seara Apr 2021

Energetics Of Biological Mechanics And Dynamics, Daniel Seara

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Living matter is a class of soft matter systems that maintains itself away from thermodynamic equilibrium by the continual consumption of chemical energy. Indi- vidual proteins consume energy and break detailed balance to drive active force generation by molecular motors, force-dependent binding kinetics, and chemically driven (dis)assembly. These non-equilibrium dynamics propagate across heterogeneous structures to drive essential life processes such as replication, migration, and shape change at the scale of both single cells and multicellular tissues. While much work has been done to understand the molecular processes underlying each individual non-equilibrium behaviors, we lack a general understanding of how the …

Go to article

Essays In Industrial Organization And The Economics Of Education, Suk Joon Son Apr 2021

Essays In Industrial Organization And The Economics Of Education, Suk Joon Son

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation includes three chapters on industrial organization and the economics of education, centered around New York City's public high school choice procedure. In the first chapter, I document evidence of informational frictions in the usage of the public high school choice in New York City and the patterns of racial disparities. The second chapter develops a model of application behavior and considers its identification. The third chapter estimates a model of high school applications and uses it to analyze the impacts of New York City's high school choice procedure. Centralized school choice procedures are gaining wider adoption, based in …

Go to article

Rookie Market: Unpacking The Black Box Of Firm-Worker Matching, Soumitra Shukla Apr 2021

Rookie Market: Unpacking The Black Box Of Firm-Worker Matching, Soumitra Shukla

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The initial job placement of a college graduate plays a crucial role in his future job mobility and career growth. Poor initial placements can lead to lasting impediments by placing college graduates in jobs with limited room for training or promotion. Many college graduates obtain their first jobs through career offices which act as liaisons between students and employers. Job placement mechanisms proposed by career offices often dictate how a college graduate obtains his first job. Therefore, a detailed study of such job placement processes offers a unique window into the mechanisms which drive the sorting patterns in job search …

Go to article

Essays In Asset Pricing And Financial Intermediation, Sharon Yin Ross Apr 2021

Essays In Asset Pricing And Financial Intermediation, Sharon Yin Ross

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays on the topics of asset pricing, financial intermediation, and macrofinance. The first essay shows the role of government risk in asset prices. Firms that depend on the government—either through implicit guarantees or direct sales—face a special risk: government risk. I show that this risk is priced and is not spanned by other factors. I study four cases: U.S. banks, U.S. auto companies, U.S. government suppliers, and Japanese zombie firms. The U.S. cases involve direct exposure to government risk, and a U.S. government risk factor prices portfolios formed from government-dependent firms. Japanese zombies rely on …

Go to article

Investigation Of Long Noncoding Rnas In The P53 Response To Oncogenic Stress, Ephrath Fisseha Tesfaye Apr 2021

Investigation Of Long Noncoding Rnas In The P53 Response To Oncogenic Stress, Ephrath Fisseha Tesfaye

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The tumor suppressor protein p53 plays a central role in sensing and responding to cellular stress, and loss of normal p53 activity is a feature of most human cancers. P53, functioning as a transcription factor, regulates a wide network of genes that coalesce to drive many diverse tumor suppressive cellular processes. Despite three decades of extensive study, it is unclear which p53 targets are most critical for these tumor suppressive functions and under which biological contexts. More recent studies have revealed that the p53 network is not solely comprised of protein coding genes but also includes many long noncoding RNAs …

Go to article

Live Cell Dynamics Of Homology-Directed Dna Double-Strand Break Repair, Amanda Jane Vines Apr 2021

Live Cell Dynamics Of Homology-Directed Dna Double-Strand Break Repair, Amanda Jane Vines

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

It is crucial that DNA damage is repaired efficiently in order to maintain genome integrity. Double-strand breaks, or DSBs, are the most harmful type of DNA damage, and thus their repair is tightly regulated. Fission yeast is a prime model system for studies of such repair processes as they favor homology-directed repair (HDR) over other more error-prone mechanisms. My work seeks to better interrogate homology-directed repair of DSBs in a temporally and spatially controlled manner, expanding on previous studies using primarily genetic outcome-based assays of repair. This is necessary in order to probe the complex dynamics of interhomologue repair in …

Go to article

Mechanism Of Actin Filament Nucleation, Aaron Dovid Tzvi Rosenbloom Apr 2021

Mechanism Of Actin Filament Nucleation, Aaron Dovid Tzvi Rosenbloom

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

More than half a century has passed since the first proposal of a mathematical description of actin filament nucleation and elongation. The kinetics of elongation have been described both mathematically and experimentally, but the kinetics of nucleation remain in question. This work demonstrates that actin filament nucleation is not only thermodynamically unfavorable but also kinetically unfavorable. I used powerful computational methods to analyze the mechanism of actin filament nucleation. I aimed to identify the rate constants responsible for the formation of dimers and trimers that best fit experimental measurements of the concentrations of monomers, polymer, and filament ends over time. …

Go to article

How Eco-Evolutionary Interactions Mitigate Climate Risk: A Theoretical Perspective, Anna Vinton Apr 2021

How Eco-Evolutionary Interactions Mitigate Climate Risk: A Theoretical Perspective, Anna Vinton

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Accelerated rates of climate change are expected to either lead to adaptation and persistence, or extinction. Traditionally, ecological models predict extinction risk based on how environmental change alters a population’s intrinsic growth rate (r). However, these predictions often ignore the potential for evolutionary rescue, whereby populations avoid extinction via adaptive evolution. This dissertation sets out to address what allows rapid evolution to rescue natural populations in the face of environmental change. Our current lack of understanding of the role of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and their combined effect on population responses to climate change, demands further theoretical and experimental work …

Go to article

Essays On Dynamic Games, Io Kuan Vong Apr 2021

Essays On Dynamic Games, Io Kuan Vong

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation examines several economic questions related to dynamic incentives. In the first chapter, I study a dynamic game in which a careerist expert advises a sequence of principals on their actions to match a hidden, randomly evolving state. The expert privately knows her competence. The principals learn about the state and the expert's competence from past advice and past action outcomes, both publicly observable. I find that the equilibrium can feature a ``crisis of expertise,'' in which principals dismiss a competent expert's correct advice, and rely only on public information. Notably, the crisis happens precisely when the quality of …

Go to article

Representations Of Time In Late-Medieval Music, Philippa Ovenden Apr 2021

Representations Of Time In Late-Medieval Music, Philippa Ovenden

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The late-medieval style that is characterized by complexity of rhythm, notation, and pitch is commonly referred to as the ars subtilior, the “more subtle art,” a term coined by Ursula Günther in 1963. Along with its stylistic attributes, the scope of this repertory has been defined chronologically and geographically, associated with Southern France and Northern Italy during the period c. 1380–1420. In recent years, scholars such as David Catalunya, David Fallows, Karl Kügle, Jason Stoessel, Anne Stone, and Anna Zayaruznaya have argued that the so-called ars subtilior style should be expanded to incorporate a wider chronological and geographical purview. Responding …

Go to article

Essays In Industrial Organization, Yuzhou Wang Apr 2021

Essays In Industrial Organization, Yuzhou Wang

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation studies a few topics in industrial organization. In the first two chapters, I study the education market from the perspective of industrial organization. Chapter 3 studies second-price auctions with participation costs. Chapters 1 and 2 study the high school market of a large city in China that introduced a policy allowing public schools to offer both free and priced admission options within a centralized admission mechanism. Chapter 1 introduces the institutional background, such as details of the admission mechanism, the schools and their price levels, and the new policy. I then present descriptive analysis. I also estimate a …

Go to article

Intermolecular And Intramolecular Interactions Controlling The Localization And Activity Of The Yeast Kinases Kin1 And Kin2, Keith Aaron Weise Apr 2021

Intermolecular And Intramolecular Interactions Controlling The Localization And Activity Of The Yeast Kinases Kin1 And Kin2, Keith Aaron Weise

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Kin1 and Kin2 (Kin1/2), the S. cerevisiae orthologs of the mammalian microtubule affinity-regulating kinases (MARKs), regulate a variety of important cellular functions, including exocytosis and the unfolded protein response (UPR). In this study, I examined the regulation of Kin1/2 kinase activity and localization, which are poorly understood. I determined the impact on Kin1/2 of interaction with Bud14, a regulatory subunit of the phosphatase Glc7, the budding yeast ortholog of PP1. Kin1/2 localization to sites of polarized growth was completely dependent on interaction with Bud14, although Kin1/2 kinase activity was not dependent on Bud14. I also examined the impact of the …

Go to article

Effects Of Dietary Fats On Mechanisms Of Adipose Expansion And Function, Allison Marie Wing Apr 2021

Effects Of Dietary Fats On Mechanisms Of Adipose Expansion And Function, Allison Marie Wing

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Obesity, defined as the excessive accumulation of white adipose tissue (WAT), is a global pandemic and increases risk of many other pathologies. However, in vivo molecular mechanisms of adipocyte formation, or adipogenesis, during obesity and high-fat diet (HFD) consumption are still being understood. WAT can expand either through the proliferation of adipocyte precursors (APs) and their differentiation to form new adipocytes (adipogenesis) or through the increased size of adipocytes (hypertrophy). To study how dietary fats impact adipose expansion, mice were fed custom HFDs, each containing a different fat source, and adipogenesis and hypertrophy were quantified. This screen illustrated how dietary …

Go to article

Driving Emissions Down: Whole-Supply-Chain Mitigation Of Greenhouse Gases From Passenger Vehicles, Paul Wolfram Apr 2021

Driving Emissions Down: Whole-Supply-Chain Mitigation Of Greenhouse Gases From Passenger Vehicles, Paul Wolfram

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Greenhouse-gas emitting human activities have caused the warming of the earth surface temperature by 0.97°C relative to pre-industrial levels. In order to prevent the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, most countries are committed to pursue action to limit global warming to well below 2°C under the Paris Agreement. Global transportation is the single largest user of energy as well as the largest carbon-dioxide emitting end-use sector, chiefly driven by passenger vehicles. Emissions caused by vehicles do not only occur at the vehicle tailpipe though. Pollutants are released along the entire vehicle supply chain, ranging from electric power plant discharges …

Go to article

Femininity Under Threat: How Women Respond To Feedback About Their Physical Appearance, Natalie Wittlin Apr 2021

Femininity Under Threat: How Women Respond To Feedback About Their Physical Appearance, Natalie Wittlin

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

In recent decades, it has become increasingly normative—at times, even desirable—for women to possess traditionally masculine personality traits. The pressure on women to maintain a feminine physical appearance, however, has not waned. Past research has demonstrated that unlike men, women do not experience distress when their psychological gender stereotypicality has been threatened. This does not mean, however, that they are immune from the harms of gender stereotypicality threats altogether. In this dissertation, I explore the possibility that women experience distress when their physical femininity has been threatened. In Chapter 1, I lay the foundation for my empirical work. I provide …

Go to article

Essays In Financial Economics, Kevin Zhao Apr 2021

Essays In Financial Economics, Kevin Zhao

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

My dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I show across three different settings that an individual's history of experiencing persistent processes can impact their beliefs. First, I examine analyst forecasts of earnings and show that forecasters who have covered firms with more autocorrelated earnings in the past are more extrapolative relative to their peers: they are relatively optimistic after high past earnings and relatively pessimistic after low past earnings. This generates predictable errors: after a good announcement in the previous period, firms that are covered by more extrapolative analysts on average will tend to have negative earnings …

Go to article

Essays On The Us Higher Education, Zhengren Zhu Apr 2021

Essays On The Us Higher Education, Zhengren Zhu

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Two-year colleges, or community colleges, are an integral part of the US higher education system. More than 40% of undergraduate enrollment occurs at the two-year level. Moreover, two-year colleges are closely related to four-year programs, as students frequently transfer between two-year programs and four-year programs. In fact, close to 50% of bachelor's degree recipients have enrolled in two-year colleges before transferring to four-year programs. The following essays discuss three topics related to the US higher education system while emphasizing two-year colleges' role in this system. The first chapter studies policies that can address the low completion rate of two-year college …

Go to article

Platelet-Derived Growth Factor Receptor Beta Activates Abl2 Through Direct Binding And Phosphorylation, Kuanlin Wu Apr 2021

Platelet-Derived Growth Factor Receptor Beta Activates Abl2 Through Direct Binding And Phosphorylation, Kuanlin Wu

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The catalytic activity of Abl family kinases is tightly regulated in cells by a complex set of intra- and intermolecular interactions and post-translational modifications. Abl family kinases are activated by diverse cellular stimuli, including receptor tyrosine kinase signaling. For example, the platelet-derived growth factor receptor beta (PDGFRβ) is a potent activator of Abl family kinases. However, the molecular mechanism by which PDGFRβ engages and activates Abl family kinases is not known. We find that the Abl2 Src Homology 2 (SH2) domain directly binds to phospho–tyrosine Y771 in the PDGFRβ cytoplasmic domain. PDGFRβ directly phosphorylates Abl2 N-terminal half on multiple novel …

Go to article

Serotonin And Social Competency, Hannah Weinberg-Wolf Apr 2021

Serotonin And Social Competency, Hannah Weinberg-Wolf

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Despite the fact that serotonergic drugs are called upon to treat a myriad of psychopathologies, the effect of serotonin on core behaviors and cognitive abilities are poorly understood. This is especially true for cognitive functions which underlie socially competent behavior. This dissertation aims to increase understanding of the role of serotonin in other monitoring and social competency throughout development. Species of primates, including humans, that live in complex social environments must allocate extensive cognitive resources to monitor conspecifics. However, they must balance the benefits of gathering social information with the need to monitor their non-social environments. Social monitoring strategies vary …

Go to article

Learning To Map Natural Language To Executable Programs Over Databases, Tao Yu Apr 2021

Learning To Map Natural Language To Executable Programs Over Databases, Tao Yu

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Natural language is a fundamental form of information and communication and is becoming the next frontier in computer interfaces. As the amount of data available online has increased exponentially, so has the need for Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs, which is not used for natural language inference in this thesis) to connect the data and the user by easily using natural language, significantly promoting the possibility and efficiency of information access for many users besides data experts. All consumer-facing software will one day have a dialogue interface, and this is the next vital leap in the evolution of search engines. Such …

Go to article

Essays On The Economics Of Helath Care Payment Reforms, Yen Thi Hai Tran Apr 2021

Essays On The Economics Of Helath Care Payment Reforms, Yen Thi Hai Tran

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Both public and private health care sectors in the United States have been experimenting with many innovative payment methods with the aim of improving quality of care while containing the cost growth. For example, large employers and insurers in the private sector innovated their insurance design to encourage patients to make better decisions regarding to treatments and health care providers. In the public sector, Medicare recently implemented reforms on payments to physicians, hospitals and other health care facilities that incorporated quality-based bonuses. It also implemented policies such as “site-neutral payment” policies for different kinds of facilities that provide similar services …

Go to article

Spatial And Temporal Variability Of Trace Metal Concentrations And Speciation In Connecticut Surface Waters, Zhemin Xuan Apr 2021

Spatial And Temporal Variability Of Trace Metal Concentrations And Speciation In Connecticut Surface Waters, Zhemin Xuan

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

In this research, two studies were conducted to investigate the spatial distribution and seasonal variation of trace metal concentrations and speciation in Connecticut surface waters. In the first part, along with the monthly vertical profile of background biogeochemistry parameters (pH, Temperature, Dissolved oxygen, Major ions, Total dissolved solids, Nutrients, Acid neutralizing capacity, dissolved organic carbon), competitive ligand exchange – adsorptive cathodic stripping voltammetry was used to determine cobalt speciation in Linsley Pond, North Branford. Vitamin B12 (VB12) via enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was measured in an American stratified lake for the very first time. During summer stratification, the patterns of …

Go to article

Essays On A Consumer Subsidy With Firms' Bidding, Ge Zhang Apr 2021

Essays On A Consumer Subsidy With Firms' Bidding, Ge Zhang

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation evaluates a consumer subsidy program known as ``Home Appliances Going to the Countryside" (HAGC). The HAGC subsidy program provided rebates to Chinese consumers from the countryside if they purchased eligible products from 2008 to 2012. This dissertation first investigates the relation between the HAGC subsidy program and the ownership and recent purchases of home appliances and electronics, using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey. We find that households with agricultural Hukou made a larger number of purchases in the past 12 months than non-agricultural ones during the HAGC subsidy program, and we provide evidence that such …

Go to article

Disentangling The Vibrational Spectra Of Water With Cryogenic Water Clusters: From Isolated Static Oh Oscillator To Temperature Dependent Spectral Dynamics, Nan Yang Apr 2021

Disentangling The Vibrational Spectra Of Water With Cryogenic Water Clusters: From Isolated Static Oh Oscillator To Temperature Dependent Spectral Dynamics, Nan Yang

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Water is arguably the most important solvent and reactant on earth. It has many special properties compare to other liquids thanks to its hydrogen bonding. Understanding the interaction between water molecules as well as with other solutes in aqueous solutions is of great importance for studying reactions that happens in aqueous environments. Water in its many forms is heavily investigated by many experimental and theoretical methods including rotational, vibrational and electronic spectroscopy, ultrafast spectroscopy, interface specific spectroscopy, neutron scattering, X-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and so on. With improvements in instrumentation and computation power, …

Go to article

Simple Vs. Optimal Mechanism Design, Mingfei Zhao Apr 2021

Simple Vs. Optimal Mechanism Design, Mingfei Zhao

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Mechanism design has found various applications in today's economy, such as ad auctions and online markets. The goal of mechanism design is to design a mechanism or system such that a group of strategic agents are incentivized to choose actions that also help achieve the designer’s objective. However, in many of the mechanism design problems, the theoretically optimal mechanisms are complex and randomized, while mechanisms used in practice are usually simple and deterministic. The focus of this thesis is to resolve the discrepancy between theory and practice by studying the following questions: Are the mechanisms used in practice close to …

Go to article

Harnessing The Masses: International Conflict And Chinese Public Opinion, Jiahua Yue Apr 2021

Harnessing The Masses: International Conflict And Chinese Public Opinion, Jiahua Yue

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

My dissertation project (``Harnessing the Masses: International Conflict and Chinese Public Opinion") examines the interaction between Chinese foreign policy and public opinion. It comprises three empirical papers. I generalize theories of international relations and political economy developed under democratic settings and explore the role of domestic audiences in Chinese foreign policymaking. My main findings are two-fold. On the one hand, the state holds considerable political resources and plays an influential role in setting the political agenda. It has the power to mobilize popular nationalism in support of hawkish policies under favorable circumstances (e.g., territorial disputes). On the other hand, blind …

Go to article

Error-Corrected Quantum Metrology, Sisi Zhou Apr 2021

Error-Corrected Quantum Metrology, Sisi Zhou

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Quantum metrology, which studies parameter estimation in quantum systems, has many applications in science and technology ranging from frequency spectroscopy to gravitational wave detection. Quantum mechanics imposes a fundamental limit on the estimation precision, called the Heisenberg limit (HL), which bears a quadratic enhancement over the standard quantum limit (SQL) determined by classical statistics. The HL is achievable in ideal quantum devices, but is not always achievable in presence of noise. Quantum error correction (QEC), as a standard tool in quantum information science to combat the effect of noise, was considered as a candidate to enhance quantum metrology in noisy …

Go to article

Scalable Projection-Free Optimization, Mingrui Zhang Apr 2021

Scalable Projection-Free Optimization, Mingrui Zhang

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

As a projection-free algorithm, Frank-Wolfe (FW) method, also known as conditional gradient, has recently received considerable attention in the machine learning community. In this dissertation, we study several topics on the FW variants for scalable projection-free optimization. We first propose 1-SFW, the first projection-free method that requires only one sample per iteration to update the optimization variable and yet achieves the best known complexity bounds for convex, non-convex, and monotone DR-submodular settings. Then we move forward to the distributed setting, and develop Quantized Frank-Wolfe (QFW), ageneral communication-efficient distributed FW framework for both convex and non-convex objective functions. We study the …

Go to article

First Prev Next Last