Air pollution is a pervasive environmental issue that has significant impacts on human health. Urban areas are particularly susceptible to high levels of air pollution due to concentrated emissions and populations. Urban air pollution has been linked to a range of adverse health effects, including respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases,...
This dissertation explores the experience of violence and precarity among Central American youth as they travel through Mexico to the United States. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted across Mexico from 2015 to 2019, I illustrate how the journey of these youth migrants is, in its basic expression, an...
Difficulties in prosody (e.g., intonation, volume, rate), turn-taking, and overly formal speech constitute common social communication deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which can significantly hinder social interactions (Paul et al., 2009). Subtle parallel differences in social communication have also been noted in parents of individuals with ASD, suggesting that...
This dissertation studies the real effects of firms’ financing decisions as well as the economics consequences of bias in fair value prices of corporate bonds. The first chapter examines the impact of compliance with changes in mandated financial reporting on corporate financing and investment decisions. I employ the recent implementation...
Since the official adoption of the Islamic legal system by the state governments in Northern Nigeria, Islamic figures in the religious public sphere have amplified their censure of homosexuality as a 'social illness' and 'depravity of depravities' incommensurable with the ethics that govern the discourse on gender and sexuality in...
Chapter 1 investigates asks the question how do financial frictions affect the type of human capital investments that students make in college? To study this question, I build a novel dataset covering more than 700,000 U.S. students, merging commencement records with address histories, credit bureau records, and professional resumes. I...
In recent years, the social sciences have been ensnared in a crisis in which many research findings cannot be replicated (Ioannidis, 2005; Open Science Collaboration, 2015; Camerer et al., 2016; Makel & Plucker, 2014). This crisis has been attributed to a variety of problems including lack of transparency about research...
Metal-organic frameworks are crystalline, nanoporous materials formed by metal nodes connected by organic ligands. MOFs represent an exciting approach to materials design where a material with desired properties can be made by choosing the compatible nodes, linkers and topologies independently. MOFs are highly porous and have high surface areas...
Previous studies have documented a systematic discrepancy between probabilistic seismic hazard maps and historical records of shaking (Stein et al., 2015; Brooks et al., 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019; Salditch et al., 2020; Salditch, 2021). In almost every case, shaking predicted by the hazard map is higher than that historically observed....
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heritable, neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social impairments and restricted and repetitive behaviors (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Tick, Bolton, Happe, Rutter, & Rijsdijk, 2016), with a subset of first-degree relatives demonstrating a constellation of subclinical traits that are qualitatively similar to the defining features of...