Changing faces, changing places: understanding immigration, housing market and native out-migration in established and new destinations in the United States.

This dissertation concerns residential incorporation and the socioeconomic impact of immigrants primarily from Latin America and Asia with their rapid geographical dispersal in the U.S. I adopt econometrics methodologies and GIS techniques to examine how immigration affects housing price changes and white out-mobility in established and new destinations, utilizing datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The first part examines the effects of immigration into the U.S. established and new immigrant destinations on housing prices using county-level data that span 2011 to 2017. Using the global and local Moran’s I statistics, I demonstrate how housing prices are spatially clustered across counties, and then model the housing price in a spatial econometrics context with an instrumental spatial Durbin model. This approach helps exploit and capture both the direct and indirect effects of foreign-born (im)migration on housing prices. Findings show that foreign-born concentration is associated with housing price appreciation in established destinations, but that effect is primarily constituted by spatial spillover. Housing prices in new destinations do not respond to immigration. Findings call for attention on the processes, not just the outcomes, of the immigrant residential attainment. Scholars have continued to debate the extent to which the urbanicity of the neighborhood shapes the relationship between immigrant concentration and white out-migration, and to which white out-migration is a result of racial prejudice or socioeconomic concern. In the second part, I combine data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with census data from 2011 to 2017 to examine the effects of immigrant concentration on migratory decisions of white householders. I find that the likelihood of out-mobility for white householders is positively associated with the proportion of immigrants in suburban neighborhoods. Consistent with theoretical arguments of a white flight hypothesis, the “class”/socioeconomic status (SES) of the neighborhood does not have a buffering effect on whites’ out-mobility with respect to immigrants. These findings illustrate the immigrant suburbanization is not the endpoint of residential integration, but exposes new challenges confronting immigrants about their racial status. The third part examines how changes in foreign-born populations are associated with home values and native flight in Louisville, the largest city in Kentucky. In particular, I use spatial autoregressive models (SAR) to explore the spillover effects of foreign-born populations beyond neighborhood boundaries and utilize geographically weighted regression (GWR) to tackle spatial heterogeneity that is complicating the immigrant/neighborhood relationship. Findings show an insignificant role of immigrant growth in shaping median home values of Louisville, while increasing proportions of immigrants are positively associated with out-migration of non-Hispanic whites. I also show how those relationships vary across space: the foreign-born population is a salient predictor in white flight in affluent northeastern suburban neighborhoods, compared to less privileged southern suburbs. These findings shed light on heterogeneous local responses within the metropolitan area when confronting immigrant suburbanization

How do Aspects of Chain Restaurants Affect the Overall Rating: Trip-Advisor Multi-dimensional Rating System Analysis

In this study, we analyze the aspect ratings and overall ratings of chain restaurants retrieved from the TripAdvisor multi-dimensional rating system. We gain aspect ratings including food aspect rating, value aspect rating, service aspect rating, and atmosphere aspect rating and their corresponding overall restaurant rating from individual reviews and each restaurant. We build three econometric models to examine how overall rating is affected and found that the food aspect has a significant positive impact on the overall rating. Another interesting finding of our analysis is that the service aspect negatively affects the overall rating. This is explainable under the chain restaurant domain because when these restaurants share the standard menu, close price range, and other similar features, service becomes the most diverse aspect for restaurants under the same brand name. When receiving good service, customers would expect other aspects of this restaurant perceived are of the same quality as the service. However, this is hard to achieve because of the similar evaluation of other aspects from the same chain. Therefore, the overall rating would decrease. In addition, we understand and interpret the value aspect of the chain restaurants. Service, food, and atmosphere ratings influence the value aspect ratings significantly and positively

Insecurity of detector-device-independent quantum key distribution

Detector-device-independent quantum key distribution (ddiQKD) held the promise of being robust to detector side-channels, a major security loophole in QKD implementations. In contrast to what has been claimed, however, we demonstrate that the security of ddiQKD is not based on post-selected entanglement, and we introduce various eavesdropping strategies that show that ddiQKD is in fact insecure against detector side-channel attacks as well as against other attacks that exploit device's imperfections of the receiver. Our attacks are valid even when the QKD apparatuses are built by the legitimate users of the system themselves, and thus free of malicious modifications, which is a key assumption in ddiQKD.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

A Rational Inattention Theory of Echo Chamber

Finite players allocate limited attention capacities across biased primary sources and other players in order to gather information about an uncertain state. The resulting Poisson attention network transmits information from primary sources to a player either directly or indirectly through the other players. We study when and why rational inattention leads players with similar preferences to form echo chambers, and why mandatorily exposing players to all biased sources could dissolve echo chambers but undermine welfare. We characterize the opinion distribution within an echo chamber, establishing the law of the few and the controversy of policy interventions that augment source visibility

Examining Effects of Badge Repeatability and Level on Users’ Knowledge Sharing in Online Q&A Communities

This study investigates the differential effects of badge repeatability and level on users’ knowledge sharing behaviors in an online Q&A (Question & Answer) community. Drawing on reinforcement theory and attribution theory of motivation, we conjecture that nonrepeatable badges reinforce individuals’ behaviors primarily by promoting internal attributions that strengthen their self-determination motivation, while repeatable badges reinforce people’s behaviors mainly via external attributions that undermine their self-determination motivation. By using fixed-effects models to analyze a panel data, we observe that nonrepeatable badges can better motivate users to share their knowledge than repeatable badges. In addition, the results show that attaining a higher level of nonrepeatable badges is associated with an increased effect for knowledge sharing, and that attaining a higher level of repeated badges leads to a decreased effect. These findings can contribute to extant literature by offering a probable explanation regarding why some gamified awards can motivate people better than others

Post-focus compression in Brahvi and Balochi

Previous research has shown that post-focus compression (PFC) - the reduction of pitch range and intensity after a focused word in an utterance, is a robust means of marking focus, but it is present only in some languages. The presence of PFC appears to follow language family lines. The present study is a further exploration of the distribution of PFC by investigating Brahvi, a Dravidian language, and Balochi, an Indo-Iranian language. Balochi is predicted to show PFC given its presence in other Iranian languages. Dravidian languages have not been studied for prosodic focus before and they are not related to any languages with PFC. We recorded twenty native speakers from each language producing declarative sentences in different focus conditions. Acoustic analyses showed that, in both languages, post-focus f 0 and other correlates were significantly reduced relative to baseline neutral-focus sentences, but post-focus lowering of f 0, and intensity was greater in magnitude in Balochi than in Brahvi. The Balochi results confirm our prediction, while the Brahvi results offer the first evidence of PFC in a Dravidian language. The finding of PFC in a Dravidian language is relevant to a postulated origin of PFC, which is related to the controversial Nostratic Macrofamily hypothesis