UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Promoting Rich and Low-Burden Self-Tracking With Multimodal Data Input
    (2022) Luo, Yuhan; Choe, Eun Kyoung; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Manual tracking of personal data offers many benefits such as increased engagement and situated awareness. However, existing self-tracking tools often employ touch-based input to support manual tracking, imposing a heavy input burden and limiting the richness of the collected data. Inspired by speech's fast and flexible nature, this dissertation examines how speech input works with traditional touch input to manually capture personal data in different contexts: food practice, productivity, and exercise. As a first step, I conducted co-design workshops with registered dietitians to explore opportunities for customizing food trackers composed of multimodal input. The workshops generated diverse tracker designs to meet dietitians' information needs, with a wide range of tracking items, timing, data format, and input modalities. In the second study, I specifically examined how speech input supports capturing everyday food practice. I created FoodScrap, a speech-based food journaling app, and conducted a data collection study, in which FoodScrap not only collected rich details of meals and food decisions, but was also recognized for encouraging self-reflection. To further integrate touch and speech on mobile phones, I developed NoteWordy, a multimodal system integrating touch and speech input to capture multiple types of data. Through deploying NoteWordy in the context of productivity tracking, I found several input patterns varying by the data type as well as participants' input habits, error tolerance, and social surroundings. Additionally, speech input helped faster entry completion and enhanced the richness of the free-form text. Furthermore, I expanded the research scope by exploring speech input on smart speakers by developing TandemTrack, a multimodal exercise assistant coupling a mobile app and an Alexa skill. In a four-week deployment study, TandemTrack demonstrated the convenience of the hands-free speech input to capture exercise data and acknowledged the importance of visual feedback on the mobile app to help with data exploration. Across these studies, I describe the strengths and limitations of speech as an input modality to capture personal data in various contexts, and discuss opportunities for improving the data capture experience with natural language input. Lastly, I conclude the dissertation with design recommendations toward a low-burden, rich, and reflective self-tracking experience.
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    THE ROLE OF SOILS IN PRODUCTION: AGGREGATION, SEPARABILITY, AND YIELD DECOMPOSITION IN KENYAN AGRICULTURE
    (2015) Pieralli, Simone; Chambers, Robert G; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Agricultural production relies on soils. Increasing global population and the impact of climate change threaten the sustainability of soil for agricultural production. For these reasons, it is necessary to broaden present current methodological approaches to incorporating soil into economic analysis. The first essay proposes a methodology to aggregate quantitative soil characteristics through the use of separability theory in a Data Envelopment Analysis framework. This yields an aggregate soil-quality measure that appropriately aggregates soil characteristics. The application is to Kenyan maize farmers. The second essay develops a nonparametric statistical test of structural separability based on a bias correction of a central limit theorem for Data Envelopment Analysis estimators developed in Kneip, Simar and Wilson (2015a). The proposed nonparametric test for structural separability adapts the statistical procedures to test technology restrictions present in Kneip, Simar and Wilson (2015b). Monte Carlo experiments determine the size and power properties of the proposed test. An empirical analysis of Kenyan household farmers illustrates the use of the methodology. Global needs for higher agricultural production require understanding whether the frequently noted inverse land size-yield relationship is a true empirical regularity or an artifact of data collection methods. To examine this relationship, the third essay of this dissertation generalizes productivity decomposition methods to incorporate the quantification of a soil-productivity contribution. The generalized method decomposes a yield index into separate components attributable to (1) efficiency, (2) soil quality, (3) land size, (4) variable inputs, (5) capital inputs, and (6) output mix. Nonparametric productivity accounting methods are used to decompose the inverse land size-yield relationship in a multi-output representation of the technology without specific assumptions on returns to scale. A strongly significant inverse land size-yield relationship is present among Kenyan farmers.
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    Investigating the Global Productivity Effects of Highly Skilled Labor Migration: How Immigrant Athletes Impact Olympic Medal Counts
    (2011) Horowitz, Jonathan Joseph; McDaniel, Stephen R; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Labor migration is a defining attribute of today's global economy, as more people live outside their country of birth than ever before and workers have more opportunities beyond their local borders (GCIM, 2005). This has motivated scholars to better understand the mobility of human capital and its various effects. While data are available to track aggregate migration patterns between countries, it is much more difficult to determine its association with such metrics as gains or losses in productivity for specific sectors of industry (Asis & Piper, 2008). Athletes are among the few groups of workers (along with information technology specialists, senior academics, health professionals and teachers) who can seek employment on a global market level while most people have fewer opportunities based on national markets (GCIM, 2005). Moreover, given the availability of records and clear metrics of productivity, the sports entertainment industry provides a unique opportunity to investigate the movement of a highly skilled labor force (Kahn, 2000). Therefore, the current study will investigate 21st century labor migration patterns and their relationship to productivity in the context of arguably the largest, oldest and most global example of sports business, the Summer Olympics. The scholarly and practical implications and future directions for research will be discussed.
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    Regulation, Institutions, and Productivity Growth
    (2006-08-24) Oviedo Silva, Ana Maria; Haltiwanger, John C; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation investigates how the investment climate affects firm dynamics, productivity, and macroeconomic performance across countries. The first chapter provides an empirical analysis of the macroeconomic impact of business regulation. It characterizes the stylized facts on regulation across the world, using a set of comprehensive indicators of regulation in a large number of countries. These indicators are used to study the effects of regulation on growth and volatility employing cross-country regression analysis. The analysis allows for the effects of regulation to vary with the country's level of institutional development, and it also controls for the likely endogeneity of regulation with respect to macroeconomic performance. Results show that a heavier regulatory burden reduces growth and increases volatility, although these effects are smaller the higher the quality of the overall institutional framework. The second chapter focuses on the mechanism through which regulation impacts on macroeconomic outcomes, and assesses the role of firm entry and exit as channel of transmission of the effects of regulation on productivity growth. We use sector and manufacturing-wide productivity and firm turnover data derived from firm-level information for OECD and Latin American countries to explore the effects of various types of regulations following a two-step approach. The first step examines the impact of regulation on firm turnover. The second assesses the effects of firm turnover on productivity growth. Results provide partial evidence that regulation, particularly product market regulation, hampers productivity growth by deterring firm entry and exit. The third chapter investigates the effects of regulation uncertainty on the innovative behavior of firms, and on the efficiency of the Schumpeterian "creative destruction" process. It argues that regulation uncertainty, caused by a poor institutional environment, distorts the selection process of firms and leads to high observed reallocation, but low productivity. Following Hopenhayn (1992), an industry is modeled where firms engage in innovative investment and face an uncertain innovation cost. The analysis centers on the entry and exit decision of firms, their innovative behavior, and the subsequent industry evolution. In equilibrium, a more uncertain cost creates distortions in the reallocation process that lead to lower average productivity, size, and innovative investments, having similar effects as an increase in the magnitude of the cost. This indicates that, in addition to the level of regulation, unpredictability of regulation is an important source of inefficiency in the reallocation process.
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    Self-regulation, productivity, and nonlinear pricing. Three essays on quality production in agricultural markets
    (2006-05-16) Zago, Angelo; Chambers, Robert G.; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this dissertation I analyze the quality choices of a group of producers. In the first essay I use mechanism design to study the interaction of asymmetric information and the democratic process in the quality choices of a group of heterogeneous producers facing an opportunity to gain from establishing a reputation for their quality products. I find an asymmetry in the possible equilibria between the high and the low quality majorities. The quality level provided by the group with a low quality majority is lower than the first best, and the minority producers get rents. With high quality majority, if demand and group conditions are favourable, the quality level provided by the group is higher than the first best and the minority's type left with rents. Otherwise, the quality level provided by the group is first best and no rents are left to the low-quality producers in the minority. The second essay proposes a methodology to measure the characteristics of intermediate products when quality is multidimensional. It uses a general representation of the multioutput technology via directional distance functions and constructs quality indicators based on differences. The quality indicators may be used to evaluate firms' output taking into account the whole set of quality attributes. I explore the relationships among the different quality attributes and the yields by a systematic investigation of the disposability properties of the technology. In addition, I show how aggregate quality may vary with the production level. The third essay designs an optimal payment system for a group of producers implementing it empirically. In the essay I show how to implement the first best through higher prices for better quality commodities, deriving the optimal pricing schedule. I take into account producers' heterogeneity by modelling inefficiency and illustrating how technical efficiency interacts with producers' ability to produce output for a given level of inputs and hence affects revenues. The technology and the technical efficiency of producers are then estimated with a stochastic production function model. The estimation results are then used to simulate the pricing scheme.