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AbstractThis article studies the consequences of digital surveillance in dictatorships. I first develop an informational theory of repression and co‐optation. I argue that digital surveillance resolves dictators' information problem of not knowing individual citizens' true anti‐regime sentiments. By identifying radical opponents, digital surveillance enables dictators to substitute targeted repression for nonexclusive co‐optation to forestall coordinated uprisings. My theory implies that as digital surveillance technologies advance, we should observe a rise in targeted repression and a decline in universal redistribution. Using a difference‐in‐differences design that exploits temporal variation in digital surveillance systems among Chinese counties, I find that surveillance increases local governments' public security expenditure and arrests of political activists but decreases public goods provision. My theory and evidence suggest that improvements in governments' information make citizens worse off in dictatorships.

SummaryAnecdotal evidence suggests that people migrate to avoid air pollution. In this paper, we empirically examine the extent to which air pollution is a push factor for international migration. We allow air pollution to affect migrants differently according to their educational attainment as well as their gender. We also instrument for the level of pollution. Results generally show that air pollution is positively associated with emigration for higher educated individuals but less so for those with less educational attainment. Gender differences are less pronounced.

Gateway is a common term that has appeared mainly in geographical literature in various contexts. The focus on gateway shifts our attention away from "which cities dominate" to "how cities are affected by globalization." This dissertation aims to (1) justify the imbalanced development between air and maritime transport within gateway cities, and the existence of a multi-port and multi-airport gateway region in coastal China; (2) initially explore an operational framework of the states in the process of gateway planning, formation, and promotion in China; and (3) conceptualize the discourses behind the intervention of the states and the competitions among them in the process of building and developing gateways. With these research objectives in mind, two hypotheses are proposed: (1) the hierarchical gateway systems and the interdependency among multiple airports and multiple ports within a region could be explained by the concept of "administrative capital," and the development of gateway is affected by various states with different administrative capitals; and (2) the devolution reform in the port and airport sectors could be explained by path dependence, thereby revealing the reasons behind the changing role of the states in developing gateways in different periods. A combination of research methods, actualized in two complementary phases, is used in the study. The Ningbo gateway, as well as gateways (including airports and ports) in the South Yangtze River Delta, is chosen for the case study. First, the interdependency between airports and seaports in the region is analyzed by using annual and monthly data. Second, the role of the states in building and promoting gateways is analyzed by the concept of "administrative capital" and "path dependence," based on related policies and information obtained from three interviews conducted in Ningbo, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. The cargo throughputs of multiple airports and multiple ports in a region are found to have fairly strong interdependence on both monthly and annual bases. Therefore, to some extent, the demand for air cargo and seaborne shipments is strongly interdependent at a regional level. With such background, inadequacies in the capacity and connectivity of Ningbo Airport in servicing Ningbo are revealed. Support from the local government is important in the development of gateways. Such development is affected by different administrative ranks of the states and the accumulation of various advantages gained by the states because of their position in the national or regional administrative ladder. This dissertation proposes the concept of "administrative capital" to decode the discourses behind the interdependency between airports and ports in the region, as well as their unbalanced development. Thus, how administrative capital works in a government-dominated economy and leads to the formation of the geographical space of transport gateways is identified. ; published_or_final_version ; Geography ; Doctoral ; Doctor of Philosophy

Objective We propose a method for recognizing driver distraction in real time using a wrist-worn inertial measurement unit (IMU). Background Distracted driving results in thousands of fatal vehicle accidents every year. Recognizing distraction using body-worn sensors may help mitigate driver distraction and consequently improve road safety. Methods Twenty participants performed common behaviors associated with distracted driving while operating a driving simulator. Acceleration data collected from an IMU secured to each driver's right wrist were used to detect potential manual distractions based on 2-s long streaming data. Three deep neural network-based classifiers were compared for their ability to recognize the type of distractive behavior using F1-scores, a measure of accuracy considering both recall and precision. Results The results indicated that a convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) deep neural network outperformed a convolutional neural network (CNN) and recursive neural network with long short-term memory (LSTM) for recognizing distracted driving behaviors. The within-participant F1-scores for the ConvLSTM, CNN, and LSTM were 0.87, 0.82, and 0.82, respectively. The between-participant F1-scores for the ConvLSTM, CNN, and LSTM were 0.87, 0.76, and 0.85, respectively. Conclusion The results of this pilot study indicate that the proposed driving distraction mitigation system that uses a wrist-worn IMU and ConvLSTM deep neural network classifier may have potential for improving transportation safety.

AbstractAccess to the Internet is an essential determinant of innovation, which has received little attention in the literature. This paper emphasizes the role of Internet accessibility in lowering information costs and therefore boosting regional innovation activity. We construct a simple theoretical model to illustrate the positive impact of decreased discovery costs, proxied by the accessibility of the Internet, on innovation. To test this hypothesis, we exploit a county‐level data set in the U.S. and run three types of regression with and without instruments: OLS, negative binomial, and Poisson. Within each method, we employ four levels of download speeds. We find a positive relationship between the access to the Internet and the number of patents filed in that specific county. This effect is particularly strong in the case of access to download speeds of 10 Mbps. Our analysis suggests that access to the Internet lowers information disseminating costs and therefore encourages more patents filed in the county. The results also indicate that access to the Internet matters more than faster Internet speed for innovation. Policy implications for these results suggest that if there were a minimum Internet access initiative, there could potentially be a significant increase in innovation by the U.S.