4760 research outputs found
Sort by
Mobile technology and political behaviour in Africa
No full textIn recent decades, mobile technology has become widespread across Sub-Saharan Africa. Mobile phones provide material benefits, but also shape how people learn about the economy, are targeted by political parties, and are taxed by the state. Through three interrelated chapters, I examine these multifaceted political consequences of Africa’s “mobile revolution”. Each chapter focuses on a distinct type of technology, and a particular mechanism by which it shapes political outcomes, drawing on a range of cross-national data and fieldwork in Ghana and Malawi. Chapter one asks how basic mobile phones shape the availability of political information. I show that rural voters across Africa use mobile phones to regularly call relatives living in towns and cities. This rising domestic connectivity leads to the diffusion of new information from urban centres, leading to a fall in rural political trust and the urban-rural divides that structure politics in many African states. Chapter two turns to mobile internet and the quality of elections. Focusing on a controversial election in Malawi, I show that 3G coverage reduces ruling party vote share and election irregularities. I then build on fieldwork to explore mechanisms, finding that opposition groups use social media to campaign, online platforms expanded the reach of civic education groups, and election workers used WhatsApp to coordinate on polling day. Chapter three focuses on mobile payment platforms and recent moves by governments to tax them. These taxes are a substantive source of domestic revenue for low-capacity states, but have been difficult to implement due to public backlash. Using a conjoint choice experiment in Malawi, I examine how these taxes could be designed to attract greater support. The results stress the importance of earmarking revenues for local services and providing exemptions to protect the poorest citizens
Subjectivity and ideology in international intervention: the meaning-making of EU staff in the Sahel
No full textWhy do European intervention staff persistently invest in the promise of capacity building programmes despite witnessing their overwhelming failure to produce their desired effects around the world? Combining a Lacanian psychoanalytic theoretical framework with an ethnographic focus on everyday meaning-making practices, this thesis draws on 65 long-form interviews, participant observation in Mali and Brussels and extensive online archival material. This thesis critiques existing Foucauldian and institutionalist accounts to argue that the continuity of failed interventions is made possible on the ground level by staff who are actively invested in them but also confront the myriad contradictions of these policies in their daily work. This thesis uncovers the everyday affective and ideological investments staff make in intervening, through an examination of the EU’s decade-long engagement in Mali and Niger. First, I demonstrate that staff are attached to an identity as expert ‘Europeans supposed to know’ – based on a disavowed but enduring colonial hierarchy – while also grappling with the limits of European expertise in West Africa. Second, I analyse the collective lesson learning exercises that take place after each failed intervention and how the desired object of the successful intervention keeps staff invested but is always just out of reach. Third, I examine EU staff’s fantasised relationship with the African recipients of assistance, who play a dual role both as objects of blame for the poor results of the intervention and whose fantasised gaze and recognition European interveners desire and enjoy. EU staff disavow accusations of neocolonialism, blaming French involvement for spoiling their otherwise meaningful relations with recipients. These findings have important implications for understanding intervention continuity and repetition despite failure, but also contribute to theory on questions of identity, desire, epistemic authority and postcolonial anxiety in the everyday practice of European foreign policy, particularly in Africa
Beyond birth outcomes: the impacts of perinatal conditions on child development
Full text linkThis thesis investigates the impacts of perinatal conditions on children's health and development, focusing on two exposures in utero: ambient heat exposure and a temporary reduction in means-tested benefits. Existing research demonstrates that perinatal conditions can influence health at birth, as well as health, education, and employment in adulthood. However, less is known about how these processes manifest, if at all, in childhood. My thesis analyses the impacts of prenatal exposures on outcomes at birth and in childhood, through four empirical chapters. I use linked administrative data from the Northern Territory of Australia, which allows for longitudinal analysis. Chapter 2 investigates what drives seasonality in birth outcomes, identifying heat exposure as the primary driver. Chapter 3 examines which specific aspects of heat exposure matter most for health at birth. I find that prenatal exposure to both moderate and extreme heat affects newborns’ health. In Chapter 4, I find that prenatal exposure to extreme heat increases the risk of hospital admissions in early childhood and lowers test scores at ages 8, 10 and 12. In contrast to my findings in Chapter 3 on birth outcomes, I see little impact in childhood of moderate heat exposure. Chapter 5 analyses the impact of a reduction in means-tested benefits in pregnancy, finding that this led to increased hospital admissions in childhood. In contrast to the more general increase in admissions from heat exposure, the impact of the reduction in family income was driven by admissions for infections. Together, my analysis reveals that while the effects of various prenatal exposures may look similar at birth, their impacts in childhood are different. Furthermore, the effects I measure on health at birth do very little to explain or predict effects in childhood
Feminist futures and transformative potential: the paradoxes of CSO engagement in shaping the Women, Peace, and Security agenda
No full textCivil society actors are often sidelined in the theorisation of Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), resulting in a lack of understanding of their role within WPS. This thesis explores how civil society organisations (CSOs) shape and implement WPS and the epistemic impact of centring CSOs in the understanding of WPS. Through a standpoint analysis of the conceptual, relational and practice-based engagements of CSOs in the ecosystem of WPS (Kirby and Shepherd 2020, 2024) informed by a multiperspectival discursive analysis, I ask questions about how and where they produce meanings, how and where they are located, and what role they play in shaping and implementing WPS, shaped by the overarching question of what the impact is of making visible and centring CSOs' contribution to WPS. Based on research across the UK, Lebanon and UNSC, which encompasses 17 semi-structured interviews and 12 informal discussions with representatives from CSO and state-based actors, participant observation at 14 CSO events, and analysis of 12 CSO documents, this work aims to understand WPS beyond its dominant state-based discourses as a site of multiple contestations and nuanced layers. Through this analysis, I argue that CSOs engage with WPS through inherently irresolvable contradictions which are constantly in paradox and that CSOs' continued engagement with WPS both inside and outside the normative state-based institutions of WPS concurrently (re)produces hierarchies and inequalities and maintains its transformative potential. In doing so, I conclude that WPS is not one political project and argue understanding it as such provides the opportunity for meaningful transformation, alongside a necessity to understand that in many guises, WPS is and will be a failure. To enable meaningful transformation, I stress the essential nature of connectivity to continue to work for feminist peace in an increasingly polarised world
Directional high frequency trading in the Kyle-Back model
Full text linkIn traditional Kyle-Back models, the only source of information is a static or dynamic signal about the price of a risky asset received by the insider. We consider a more realistic version of the Kyle-Back model with a private and a public signal. The insider builds a linear combination of the public and private signals to make their valuation about the risky asset. The market maker uses the public signal and the total demand to set a linear pricing rule that is a martingale on their filtration. We show that any optimal strategy in equilibrium is such that the mispricing, the difference between the price process and the insider’s valuation, converges to zero almost surely in the insider’s probability measure. We introduce a particular linear admissible trading strategy to show the existence of equilibrium in the economy. Moreover, we use numerical analysis to show that the insider’s ex-ante expected profit relies on the public signal and how this setting is able to explain a high-frequency trading pattern at the end of the trading period
Essays in urban and environmental economics
No full textThis thesis comprises four independent chapters at the intersection of urban, environmental, and development economics. The first chapter presents novel evidence on how temperature fluctuations affect wealth inequality in both rural and urban settings. The second investigates how land scarcity drives urban expansion into high flood risk zones. The third evaluates the impact of flood defence investments on local population growth, leveraging a unique institutional setting in Vietnam. The final chapter analyzes the local economic effects of relocating economic activity across space using the BBC’s move from London to Manchester as a natural experiment
Pharmaceutical patent examination in developing countries: lessons from Brazil
Full text linkSince the enactment of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), almost every country in the world has introduced patent protection for pharmaceutical inventions. However, there is considerable variation in the implementation of policies that address developmental and public health challenges. There is a wide agreement that developing countries should implement preventive (ex ante) measures to strengthen patent examination and promote balance in the public and private incentives in the patent system instead of relying on corrective (ex post) measures to address the negative consequences of lax examination. This thesis draws lessons about flexibilities in patent policy from the Brazilian experience of implementing pharmaceutical patenting since conforming to TRIPS in the late 1990s. In 2018, Brazil started basing the examination in Brazil on reports published by other offices for applications covering the same invention, in a wide movement that seeks to simplify examination to expedite prosecution and reduce the backlog of pending applications. Chapter 2 shows that this has significantly increased the grant rate, and examiners tend to make fewer objections before issuing a grant. Combining these results with a comparison of grant rates with 14 other offices, the analysis concludes this approach has reduced the standard for granting patents in Brazil and produced more negative side effects than its intended goals. Brazil also abolished the dual examination system where the patent office and the health regulator both had to examine pharmaceutical applications from 2001 to 2021, with the changing arrangements. Analysing the many arrangements for this system over two decades, Chapter 3 shows how the entities converged to high patenting standards and raised the scrutiny of all patentability criteria, especially invention description, despite the intense conflict over each entity's jurisdiction. Therefore, the regulator’s non-binding opposition to strategic applications contributed significantly to examination in an almost symbiotic relationship. Lastly, Chapter 4 investigates the Brazilian government’s history of Hepatitis C drug procurement to assess the repercussions of these policies outside the patent office. Based on an understanding that the recommended treatments were equally effective and therefore great substitutes, the government shifted procurement to centralised tenders and induced competition by having originators of different drugs compete, regardless of each drug’s patent exclusivity status. Given the high patenting standard and originator’s commercial strategies, generic manufacturers could join those tenders, significantly boosting the government’s bargaining power. However, and tying together the three chapters, pressuring examiners to decide faster based on other patent offices’ reports and removing the dual examination system has led newer drugs to obtain patents more often, threatening the potential future benefits for the government of using this strategy of induced competition. This thesis shows that Brazil has successfully explored policy flexibilities to strengthen examination but should be wary of policies that simplify examination to expedite prosecution, given the importance of promoting the balanced stimuli in patenting that generate positive externalities for public health strategies
From collapse to crisis: the constitutional standoff in post-Soviet Russia, the role of the United States, and the failure of Russia’s democratic transition
No full textThe goal of my thesis is to investigate the reasons behind the Russian Constitutional Crisis of 1993 and to understand how these events fit into the broader context of the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the emergence of the modern Russian State. Furthermore, this thesis investigates what role, if any, the United States and other Western nations played in the events in Russia. This thesis begins by examining the origins of the Russian Parliament and the establishment of the Constitutional Commission in 1990, and then proceeds to study why efforts to democratise Russia instead resulted in the violence of September 21–October 4, 1993, at the cost of over 100 lives. The author concludes that the Crisis was the result of a combination of complex political factors, but ultimately the outcome of the Crisis served to severely diminish the substantial progress Russia had made between 1990 and 1993 towards a democratic ‘rule of law’ state
The firm-level effects of banking sector disruption
No full textThis thesis investigates the firm-level consequences of banking sector disruptions in the United States (US), focusing particularly on the effects of bank failures on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Despite the crucial role SMEs play in the economy and their dependence on bank credit, understanding how bank failures impact them has been hampered by a lack of granular, large-scale data linking smaller US firms to their lenders. To address this gap, this thesis first constructs a novel firm-bank relationship dataset by collecting and processing nearly 40 million loan documents from six major US states spanning two decades. Natural language processing and machine learning techniques, including text embeddings and efficient similarity search algorithms, are employed to link these unstructured filings to establishment-level data, creating a comprehensive and detailed dataset of US SMEs and their banking partners. Using this unique dataset and studying 231 different bank failures from 2000-2022, the thesis employs a difference-in-differences methodology to estimate the effects of bank failures on firm survival, employment growth, and revenue growth. The findings reveal that bank failures inflict substantial and remarkably persistent negative consequences on affected SMEs. Firms whose banks fail are significantly more likely to exit, with an 8 percentage point higher probability of failure even a decade after the event. Surviving firms experience lasting reductions in growth, with employment growth 5.3 percentage points lower and revenue growth 9.6 percentage points lower ten years post-failure, showing no signs of recovery within the observation window. Quasi-experimental evidence from bank failures triggered by regulatory cross-guarantee powers and large-scale fraud corroborates these causal findings. Furthermore, the analysis uncovers significant heterogeneity: the smallest and youngest firms suffer disproportionately larger negative effects, highlighting steep vulnerability gradients. Collectively, this thesis provides evidence on the severe and long-lasting real economic costs imposed by bank failures on SMEs. It contributes a new longitudinal dataset for studying US firm-bank relationships, offers insights into the mechanisms transmitting financial distress to the real economy via SMEs, and highlights large heterogeneity in the effects of bank failure on firm-level outcomes, informing policies related to bank regulation and resolution
Essays in applied microeconomics
Full text linkThis thesis investigates how significant external shocks-namely digital disruption, immigration, and international sanctions-affect labour markets, shape firm dynamics, and ultimately alter political landscapes. Employing different empirical strategies, including quasi-experimental methods, machine learning, and text-based computational analyses, it sheds light on the multifaceted ways in which these shocks reverberate throughout economies and societies. The first chapter, Digital Disruption and Entrepreneurial Opportunities, is based on my job market paper. It explores how online food delivery platforms such as UberEats and Deliveroo have transformed the UK restaurant industry. By compiling a unique dataset and leveraging a staggered rollout of platform entry, this study uses a dynamic difference-in-differences approach to identify causal effects. The findings demonstrate that digital platforms reduce traditional barriers to entry, facilitating a 35% growth in restaurant numbers-predominantly independent and minority-owned enterprises-and broadening the diversity of cuisines offered. This chapter underscores how digital technologies, rather than always favoring large incumbents, can also create inclusive pathways for smaller, diverse entrepreneurs to thrive. The second chapter, Understanding Multi-Layered Sanctions: A Firm-Level Analysis, investigates how Iranian firms adapt to complex sanctions regimes. By applying computational linguistics to corporate transcripts, the study constructs a firm-level measure of sanctions exposure, revealing that sanctions not only harm politically connected firms, but also more extensively burden non-connected firms given their larger market presence. The analysis finds that heightened sanction exposure depresses firm valuations, sales, and investment, driven predominantly by lost export opportunities and higher import costs. These results challenge the notion of “smart” sanctions, highlighting the broad and often unintended consequences for the wider economy. The third chapter, Immigration and Political Realignment, examines the influx of migrants following the EU’s 2004 enlargement and its implications for the UK’s political fabric. Through a shift-share instrumental variable design that exploits industry-level migration flows and regional employment structures, the chapter shows that heightened immigration exposure contributes to greater support for right-wing, anti-immigration parties and the 2016 Brexit Leave vote, at the expense of traditional Labour support. Although immigration bolsters local economies by increasing activity and employment, cultural and identity-based considerations overshadow economic benefits, propelling a shift in voter alignment and political discourse