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In 2010, governments spent over $4.05 trillion on health. This is 7% of the world economy. This dissertation measures the health outcomes achieved by this spending, how this spending changes upon the receipt of health aid, and the methods used to analyze this spending. The first chapter assesses the effect of government health expenditure on health outcomes. I use a large cross-country panel and a new instrument to test how domestic government health expenditure affects under-five mortality. I find that the average spending-to-outcome elasticity is -0.34, although it ranges between -0.04 and -0.61 depending on country-level characteristics. Countries with larger GDP per capita and more civil liberties, political rights, and democracy have the elasticities furthest from zero, although countries with the largest under-five mortalit...
This dissertation explores relationships between well-being and public finance by using subjective well-being measures such as self-reported life satisfaction. The first chapter summarizes the discussion over the use of subjective well-being in economics and reviews related empirical literature, especially in the field of public finance. The second chapter examines relationships between subjective well-being and government activities using country-level panel data. Specifically, the chapter examines how government spending, taxes, and deficit/surplus are related to aggregate level of life satisfaction, and how the relationship is different by social groups. The third chapter examines relationship between individual life satisfaction and expenditure by state government in the U.S. The last chapter, which uses the same data set as in the...
Benthic heterotrophs living in aphotic aquatic habitats rely upon subsidies of detrital energy, in the form of complex organic molecules, which are synthesized by macrophytes and phytoplankton in the photic zone. Identifying the relative importance of different basal energy resources to consumers is critical for understanding ecosystem function and trophic connectivity in aquatic habitats. Partitioning the contribution of differing detrital resources to deep nearshore subtidal consumers is impractical using solely observational techniques such as surveys of macrophyte biomass or gut content analyses. Biochemical markers such as fatty acids (FA) and multiple stable isotopes (MSI; collectively FAMSI) can help resolve which sources are actually important in consumers, but several key uncertainties in the assumptions of the approach limit ...
Dolly Varden (Salvelinus malma) are a facultatively anadromous salmonid common around much of the north Pacific Rim, but little is known of the factors that determine their migration and life-history patterns. In the Chignik Lakes system on the Alaska Peninsula, Dolly Varden are the only large bodied resident fish species and use nearly all available aquatic habitats at different life stages. In addition, they are often the numerical dominant fish in both freshwater and estuarine habitats. I employed a multifaceted approach to understand variation in Dolly Varden migration timing, growth, habitat use, and variation in anadromy. By integrating daily counts of Dolly Varden ascending rivers and streams throughout the migratory range over a wide temporal scale, I determined upstream migration generally occurs earlier in southern stream and...
The research in this Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the relationship between fishery-dependent catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) and abundance and how its use when assessing and managing fisheries may be affected by some of its shortcomings. CPUE data are often used to provide information on the historical and current stock size, but changes in CPUE may not be proportional to abundance. Hyperstability is when CPUE declines slower than abundance and can result in optimistic estimates of abundance and risk of overfishing. Hyperdepletion is when CPUE declines faster than abundance and using these data in an assessment can produce pessimistic estimates of abundance. Assuming a proportional relationship between CPUE and abundance when CPUE actually has a nonlinear relationship with abundance can misinform management and result in overfishing ...
The relative importance of environmental conditions and stock abundance in determining the productivity of fish stocks has been a subject of an on-going debate. The controversy can be formulated as four competing hypotheses: 1) productivity is driven by fishing pressure, which affects abundance, subsequent recruitment; 2) productivity is regime-driven, with periods of good and bad productivity unrelated to abundance; 3) productivity is random from year to year and unrelated to abundance and is temporally uncorrelated; and 4) both stock abundance and regimes of good and bad conditions interact to affect productivity. The goals of this study are (1) to evaluate the support for each of these hypotheses by examining the productivity of marine species using a large number of stocks, and (2) to evaluate the same hypotheses with respect to re...
Researchers at the Microscale Life Sciences Center undertook an ambitious project to examine the metabolic and genomic processes in single mammalian cells related to esophageal adenocarcinomas in Barrett's Esophagus patients. Examination of one cell at a time was necessitated by the need to resolve questions related to cellular heterogeneity and thus required that experiments be conducted in highly restricted (picoliter) volumes. Measurement of dissolved oxygen is a key parameter in understanding cellular metabolism. This need to examine oxygen consumption rates of single mammalian cells motivated the development of new sensors and new methods for the measurement of dissolved oxygen in picoliter volumes. Commercially available luminescent sensors as well as in-house customized luminescent sensors were characterized. Key parameters...
This dissertation discusses the fundamental study of several electroanalytical chemistry tools and methods. Unifying factors between the various chapters include the use of nano and microscale materials for electrode fabrication and the extensive use of voltammetric techniques for substrate characterization. Chapter 1 briefly introduces the technique of voltammetry and describes its importance in electrode characterization. This is followed by a short discussion of the methods and tools presented in upcoming chapters. In chapter 2 we highlight the development of fluorescence-enabled electrochemical microscopy (FEEM) and demonstrate an application towards heterogeneous catalyst screening. The FEEM technique uses a closed bipolar electrode (BPE) or arrays of many BPEs to couple the oxidation of an ordinary redox analyte to the fluorogeni...
Two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC × GC - TOFMS) is a highly capable instrumental platform that produces complex and information-rich multi-dimensional chemical data. The complex data is computationally overwhelming, especially when many samples are analyzed with multiple injections for each sample. The highly information rich data from GC x GC - TOFMS benefits from elegant and comprehensive target and nontarget algorithmic methods. The development of a novel tile-based Fisher ratio method that greatly decreases the false-positive rate is described thoroughly in this dissertation. Also, the initially application of currently available instrumental and data analysis methods to the optimization of the preparation of mouse heart tissue metabolomics and the investigation of the pathophysiol...
Direct methods for the transformation of alkanes into alcohols, alkenes, amines and other functionalized products would have a great impact on industrial processes. In this thesis the work described is aimed at developing electrophilic Rh and Ir systems to promote C-H bond activation and functionalization of alkanes and arenes. Several approaches have been taken to prepare the target complex [Tp*Ir(OH2)3]+ (Tp* = hydridotris(3,5-dimethylpyrazoyl)borate). While this species has not been synthesized, C-N coupling between ethylene and N-iodosuccinimide has been observed during the course of this study and is promoted by Tp*Ir(C2H4)2. Electrophilic Rh and Ir complexes bearing dimethylbutadiene (DMB) ligands have been found to be poor species for C-H activation due to...
