Essays in the economics and political economy of climate change

Empirical research on anthropogenic climate change is constrained by two fundamental facts: climate change is unprecedented and its impacts occur gradually. This implies that neither evidence from recent history nor the near future can directly inform policy. Under such circumstances, empirical research must find historical analogs capturing particular features of future climate change and policy, which, combined with theory, can provide credible out-of-sample predictions. The four papers in this dissertation use new data settings and methodologies to causally examine central questions related to climate change mitigation, adaptation, innovation, and impacts. Results from these papers can help inform future climate-related research and various issues regarding the political economy of climate policy

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Search for anomalous couplings in boosted WW/WZ -> l nu q(q)over-bar production in proton-proton collisions at root s=8TeV

Peer reviewe

General resilience to cope with extreme events

Resilience to specified kinds of disasters is an active area of research and practice. However, rare or unprecedented disturbances that are unusually intense or extensive require a more broad-spectrum type of resilience. General resilience is the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt or transform in response to unfamiliar,unexpected and extreme shocks. Conditions that enable general resilience include diversity, modularity, openness, reserves, feedbacks, nestedness, monitoring, leadership, and trust. Processes for building general resilience are an emerging and crucially important area of research

Pseudorapidity and transverse momentum dependence of flow harmonics in pPb and PbPb collisions

A search has been performed for heavy resonances decaying to ZZ or ZW in 2l2q final states, with two charged leptons (l = e, mu) produced by the decay of a Z boson, and two quarks produced by the decay of a W or Z boson. The analysis is sensitive to resonances with masses in the range from 400 to 4500 GeV. Two categories are defined based on the merged or resolved reconstruction of the hadronically decaying vector boson, optimized for high- and low-mass resonances, respectively. The search is based on data collected during 2016 by the CMS experiment at the LHC in proton-proton collisions with a center-of-mass energy of root s = 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb(-1). No excess is observed in the data above the standard model background expectation. Upper limits on the production cross section of heavy, narrow spin-1 and spin-2 resonances are derived as a function of the resonance mass, and exclusion limits on the production of W' bosons and bulk graviton particles are calculated in the framework of the heavy vector triplet model and warped extra dimensions, respectively.A search has been performed for heavy resonances decaying to ZZ or ZW in 2l2q final states, with two charged leptons (l = e, mu) produced by the decay of a Z boson, and two quarks produced by the decay of a W or Z boson. The analysis is sensitive to resonances with masses in the range from 400 to 4500 GeV. Two categories are defined based on the merged or resolved reconstruction of the hadronically decaying vector boson, optimized for high- and low-mass resonances, respectively. The search is based on data collected during 2016 by the CMS experiment at the LHC in proton-proton collisions with a center-of-mass energy of root s = 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb(-1). No excess is observed in the data above the standard model background expectation. Upper limits on the production cross section of heavy, narrow spin-1 and spin-2 resonances are derived as a function of the resonance mass, and exclusion limits on the production of W' bosons and bulk graviton particles are calculated in the framework of the heavy vector triplet model and warped extra dimensions, respectively.Measurements of azimuthal angular correlations are presented for high-multiplicity pPb collisions at root s(NN) = 5.02 TeV and peripheral PbPb collisions at root s(NN) = 2.76 TeV. The data used in this work were collected with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Fourier coefficients as functions of transverse momentum and pseudorapidity are studied using the scalar product method; four-, six-, and eight-particle cumulants; and the Lee-Yang zero technique. The influence of event plane decorrelation is evaluated using the scalar product method and found to account for most of the observed pseudorapidity dependence.Peer reviewe

Erratum to: Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (3rd edition) (Autophagy, 12, 1, 1-222, 10.1080/15548627.2015.1100356

non present