World\u27s Fairs in Chicago and Barcelona: Spectacle, Memory, and Nationalism

Nineteenth-century international exhibitions served as platforms for national competition and self-expression. Though over 4,000 miles apart, both Chicago, Illinois and Barcelona, Spain were animated by second city politics and featured a thriving industrial economy in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Yet while Chicagoans swelled with pride about the city they had helped resurrect from the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, they also displayed patriotism toward an American nation that had overcome the Civil War and was rapidly amassing power. A burgeoning Catalan nationalist movement, on the other hand, contributed to a widening disconnect between the capital of Catalonia and a sputtering Spanish nation. These pivotal differences - along with historical circumstance - have informed the historical interpretation of Chicago\u27s 1893 World\u27s Columbian Exposition and Barcelona\u27s 1888 Universal Exposition. The ways in which the collective memory of these two world\u27s fairs have diverged shed light on why, today, remembering Chicago\u27s World\u27s Fair has largely become an intellectual exercise while conjuring up memories of Barcelona\u27s Universal Exposition persists as a critical tool for Catalan nationalists wishing to advance their interests and broadcast their nationalism to the global community

Essays in the Economics of Labor and Higher Education

This dissertation examines the role of information in influencing both individuals' college outcomes and the productivity of a higher education system. It focuses in particular on large-scale educational reforms that raise different mechanisms than those in the existing literature on the returns to college attendance and college quality. Recent work has shown that the choices of whether to attend college and which college to attend can both affect individuals' future earnings. These papers typically focus on a narrow subset of students or schools to credibly identify the effects of college choice. This dissertation instead uses data on the near universe of college students in an entire country to explore informational mechanisms that are difficult to isolate in existing work. To do this, I exploit reforms to the higher education system in Colombia that affect the information on individual ability that is transmitted to colleges, to employers, or to students themselves. This allows me to adapt traditional labor economic topics like employer learning (Jovanovic, 1979) and assortative matching (Becker, 1973) to the context of higher education. In addition, the large-scale nature of these reforms raises general equilibrium issues that may not arise from marginal changes in college admissions (e.g., Heckman, Lochner and Taber, 1998). In Chapter 1, "Assortative Matching and Complementarity in College Markets," I examine one type of assortative matching in college markets: students with high socioeconomic status (SES) are more likely to attend high quality colleges. Assortativity matters if SES and college quality are complementary educational inputs. I develop an econometric framework that provides tests for the existence and sign of this complementarity. I implement these tests by exploiting a 2000 reform of the national college admission exam in Colombia, which caused a market-wide reduction in assortative matching in some regions of the country. I find that the reform lowered average graduation rates and post-college earnings in affected regions, consistent with a positive complementarity between SES and college quality. I also find evidence of mismatch: part of these negative effects came from the low SES students who were shifted into higher quality colleges. However, both the market-wide and mismatch effects die out several cohorts after the exam reform, which suggests that complementarity may evolve with large-scale changes in assortativity. In Chapter 2, "The Big Sort: College Reputation and Labor Market Outcomes," W. Bentley MacLeod, Juan E. Saavedra, Miguel Urquiola, and I ask how college reputation affects the process by which students choose colleges and find their first jobs. We incorporate a simple definition of college reputation---graduates' mean admission scores---into a competitive labor market model. This generates a clear prediction: if employers use reputation to set wages, then the introduction of a new measure of individual skill will decrease the return to reputation. We confirm this prediction by exploiting a natural experiment from the introduction of a college exit exam in the country of Colombia. Finally, we show that college reputation is positively correlated with graduates' earnings growth, suggesting that reputation matters beyond signaling individual skill. Finally, in Chapter 3, "Time Gaps in Academic Careers," I ask if interruptions in students' academic careers can lower their overall schooling attainment. I study an academic calendar shift in Colombia that created a one semester time gap between high school and potential college entry. This brief gap reduced college enrollment rates relative to unaffected regions. Low SES students were more likely to forgo college, and individuals who did enroll after the gap chose higher paying majors. Thus academic time gaps can affect both the mean and the distribution of schooling attainment, with implications for the design of education systems and for wage inequality

The Direct and Spillover Effects of Large-scale Affirmative Action at an Elite Brazilian University

We examine the effects of an affirmative action policy at an elite Brazilian university that reserved 45 percent of admission slots for Black and low-income students. We find that marginally-admitted students who enrolled through the affirmative action tracks experienced a 14 percent increase in early-career earnings. But the adoption of affirmative action also caused a large decrease in earnings for the university's most highly-ranked students. We present evidence that the negative spillover effects on highly-ranked students' earnings were driven by both a reduction in human capital accumulation and a decline in the value of networking

The efficacy of large-scale affirmative action at elite universities

We study the effects of affirmative action at an elite Brazilian university that adopted race- and income-based quotas for 45 percent of its admission slots. We link admission records to national employer-employee data to examine how the policy affected the careers of both its targeted beneficiaries and the university’s other students. For students admitted through affirmative action, the policy led to a modest increase in early-career earnings that faded as their careers progressed. Conversely, the adoption of affirmative action caused a large and persistent decrease in earnings for the university’s most highly ranked students. We present evidence that these negative earnings effects are driven by a reduction in human capital accumulation and a decline in the value of networking.Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociale

The juxtamembrane region of the cadherin cytoplasmic tail supports lateral clustering, adhesive strengthening, and interaction with p129(ctn)

Cadherin cell-cell adhesion molecules form membrane-spanning molecular complexes that couple homophilic binding by the cadherin ectodomain to the actin cytoskeleton. A fundamental issue in cadherin biology is how this complex converts the weak intrinsic binding activity of the ectodomain into strong adhesion. Recently we demonstrated that cellular cadherins cluster in a ligand-dependent fashion when cells attached to substrata coated with the adhesive ectodomain of Xenopus C-cadherin (CEC1-5). Moreover, forced clustering of the ectodomain alone significantly strengthened adhesiveness (Yap, A.S., W.M. Brieher, M. Pruschy, and B.M. Gumbiner. Curr. Biol. 7:308-315). In this study we sought to identify the determinants of the cadherin cytoplasmic tail responsible for clustering activity. A deletion mutant of C-cadherin (CT669) that retained the juxtamembrane 94-amino acid region of the cytoplasmic tail, but not the beta-catenin-binding domain, clustered upon attachment to substrata coated with CEC1-5. Like wild-type C-cadherin, this clustering was Ligand dependent. In contrast, mutant molecules lacking either the complete cytoplasmic tail or just the juxtamembrane region did not cluster. The juxtamembrane region was itself sufficient to induce clustering when fused to a heterologous membrane-anchored protein, albeit in a ligand-independent fashion. The CT669 cadherin mutant also displayed significant adhesive activity when tested in laminar flow detachment assays and aggregation assays. Purification of proteins binding to the juxtamembrane region revealed that the major associated protein is p120(ctn). These findings identify the juxtamembrane region of the cadherin cytoplasmic tail as a functionally active region supporting cadherin clustering and adhesive strength and raise the possibility that p120(ctn) is involved in clustering and cell adhesion

Fairness in College Admission Exams: From Test Score Gaps to Earnings Equality

This paper asks whether reducing socioeconomic gaps in college admission exam scores also reduces earnings inequality. A simple framework shows that the answer to this question depends on the exam’s predictive power for students’ earnings returns to college quality. I exploit a redesign of the Colombian national college admission exam to estimate these returns. Low-income students who took the new exam received higher scores and attended better colleges, but they had lower earnings after college. Thus exams with lower score gaps may not reduce earnings inequality if they are poor predictors of which students would succeed at better colleges

Alumni Job Networks at Elite Universities and the Efficacy of Affirmative Action

We examine the efficacy of affirmative action at universities whose value depends on peer and alumni networks. We study an elite Brazilian university that adopted race- and income-based affirmative action at a large scale. Using employer-employee data, we show that a key benefit of attending the university is access to high-paying jobs affiliated with its alumni. Affirmative action increased disadvantaged students' access to these firms and raised their early-career earnings. But these benefits faded over time. Further, the increase in student body diversity lowered the job prospects and earnings of the school's most highly ranked students

Brilliant Sm, Eu, Tb and Dy Chiral Lanthanide Complexes with Strong Circularly Polarized Luminescence Highly Luminescent Lanthanide Complexes with CPL Activity 2

Abstract The synthesis, characterization and luminescent behavior of trivalent Sm, Eu, Dy and Tb complexes of two enantiomeric, octadentate, chiral, 2-hydroxyisophthalamide ligands are reported. These complexes are highly luminescent in solution. Functionalization of the achiral parent ligand with a chiral 1-phenylethylamine substituent on the open face of the complex in close proximity to the metal center yields complexes with strong circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) activity. This appears to be the first example of a system utilizing the same ligand architecture to sensitize four different lanthanide cations and display CPL activity. The luminescence dissymmetry factor, g lum , recorded for the Eu(III) complex is one of the highest values reported, and this is the first time the CPL effect has been demonstrated for a Sm(III) complex with a chiral ligand. The combination of high luminescence intensity with CPL activity should enable new bioanalytical applications of macromolecules in chiral environments

Brilliant Sm, Eu, Tb and Dy chiral lanthanide complexes with strong circularly polarized luminescence

The synthesis, characterization and luminescent behavior of trivalent Sm, Eu, Dy and Tb complexes of two enantiomeric, octadentate, chiral, 2-hydroxyisophthalamide ligands are reported. These complexes are highly luminescent in solution. Functionalization of the achiral parent ligand with a chiral 1-phenylethylamine substituent on the open face of the complex in close proximity to the metal center yields complexes with strong circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) activity. This appears to be the first example of a system utilizing the same ligand architecture to sensitize four different lanthanide cations and display CPL activity. The luminescence dissymmetry factor, g{sub lum}, recorded for the Eu(III) complex is one of the highest values reported, and this is the first time the CPL effect has been demonstrated for a Sm(III) complex with a chiral ligand. The combination of high luminescence intensity with CPL activity should enable new bioanalytical applications of macromolecules in chiral environments