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Environmental dynamics and interactions with innovation
Full text linkThroughout history, environmental dynamics and risks have both necessitated and inspired innovation. In this thesis I explore the interaction between the environment and innovation in four standalone chapters. The first two chapters examine environmental dynamics in the context of climate change adaptation, while the latter two chapters explore how environmental factors can influence inventor productivity. Specifically, in Chapter 1, I examine how flooding affects the development of flood adaptation innovation. Using county-level data from the United States, I focus particularly on the local effect of flooding. Chapter 2 presents a departure from the empirical research methods and explores how climate uncertainty affects the decision-making of inventors for climate adaptation innovation using a real option valuation approach. In Chapters 3 and 4, I focus on exploring environmental factors as possible negative stimulants for innovation. Tracking inventors’ patenting output over time, Chapter 3 empirically examines the influence of temperature variations on inventor productivity, while Chapter 4 explores the impact of air pollution. The findings of this thesis suggest that various environmental factors, particularly amid the growing threat of climate change, continue to shape the development of innovations today
Essays in consumer heterogeneity and expectations
Full text linkThis thesis comprises three essays that examine the origins, cross-section, and consequences of household forecast errors. Drawing on harmonised micro-data from the Michigan Survey of Consumers, the New York Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations, and the ECB Consumer Expectations Survey, the first essay uncovers a single latent “pessimism” factor that declines monotonically with income. Next, the chapter investigates forecast pessimism at a more granular level, and demonstrates that the effect of income is quantitatively large. Exploiting individual level income shifts, it shows that the relationship between income and forecast pessimism survives. Lower-income households systematically over-predict inflation, unemployment, and other macroeconomic outcomes. The second essay investigates one explanation for forecast pessimism: ambiguity aversion. We ask: if ambiguity aversion drives forecast pessimism, what is the source of this ambiguity? The paper outlines two testable hypotheses and tests them. First, using survey-based Ellsberg experiments linked to expectation data, we find that more ambiguity averse agents have larger, positive, forecast errors, but that the elicited preferences covary with income themselves. Second, we find that the response of consumer expectations on receipt of a signal is asymmetric, and that this asymmetry declines with income. Taken together, these two results are consistent with low-income households acting as if they are more ambiguity averse, and the source of this ambiguity being the strength of signals households receive. The final essay embeds these distorted beliefs in a portfolio-choice framework with nominal risk. Non-homothetic robustness is employed, consistent with the conclusions of Chapter 2. When we calibrate the model, we match the empirical profile of inflation forecast errors, as detailed in Chapter 1. We next estimate the welfare cost of distorted inflation beliefs in the model and find that a modest aggregate forecast error has the potential to generate large welfare losses
Hybrid norms and the politics of integration: evolving linkages between global health security and universal health coverage
Full text linkThis thesis examines the evolving relationship between global health security (GHS) and universal health coverage (UHC), two dominant – yet historically fragmented – normative agendas shaping global health. While GHS prioritizes preparedness and response to acute health threats, UHC emphasizes equitable access and affordability of health services. Despite growing recognition of their interdependence, meaningful integration between GHS and UHC remains limited in policy and practice – potentially weakening coordination and undermining public health outcomes, especially during crises. The COVID-19 pandemic created an inflection point, accelerating discussions on their alignment and potential synergies. However, existing scholarship lacks a robust theoretical framework to explain how two established and influential norms can co-evolve without one subsuming the other. This thesis addresses this gap by introducing two related concepts, rooted in constructivist international relations and political science literature: ‘hybrid norms’ (a framework for tracing the construction, convergence, and coherence of previously-distinct norms and their associated regimes) and the ‘politics of integration’ (a lens for unpacking the strategic processes of framing, negotiation, and institutionalization that shape normative integration). The study unfolds through three empirical chapters, each interrogating GHS-UHC integration at successive stages of development, reflecting the hybrid norm framework. The first empirical chapter traces their historical (re)construction through major crises and international agreements, employing a discursive analysis of key policy texts to argue that both norms have been shaped through repeated interaction and contestation, rather than linear adoption. The second empirical chapter utilizes a multimethod qualitative analysis to examine recent diplomatic negotiations (WHO Pandemic Agreement and the 2023 UN Political Declaration on UHC), analyzing normative convergence between GHS and UHC through the co-promotion of complementary discourse and core functions – while also revealing how political contestations, institutional path dependencies, and operational trade-offs constrain deeper integration. The third empirical chapter uses thematic analysis of key informant interviews to explore how stakeholders across governments, global health organizations, donors, and civil society conceptualize and operationalize GHS-UHC coherence in practice. It finds that a hybrid norm linking GHS and UHC is emerging, which may help overcome geopolitical power asymmetries, foster strategic collaboration across diverging actor priorities, and enable more integrative forms of diplomacy to better address multiple overlapping crises. This project offers novel contributions to global health policy and governance, constructivist norm theories, and international relations and political science scholarship. Empirically, it traces the emergence of a hybrid norm linking GHS and UHC through diplomacy and institutional design – revealing how normative integration unfolds incrementally across geopolitical and operational contexts in response to longstanding fragmentation. Conceptually, it introduces a new framework that reorients integration from a technical fix to a dynamic, contested, and co-evolving normative process to improve cross-sector collaboration and coordination. Methodologically, it advances a real-time discursive analysis approach for studying norm development across overlapping regimes through global negotiations. Taken together, these contributions provide a new lens for understanding the politics of integration, and offer fresh insights and practical implications for building a more equitable, resilient, and sustainable global health architecture
The Ventotene Moment – justice, liberty, and European federalism in the political thought of Third Force socialism (1929-1954)
Full text linkHow did Italian antifascist exiles seek to reconcile socialist and federalist ideals to envision a revolutionary reorganization of Europe between the interwar and early postwar periods? What significance does the Second World War hold in the evolution of this ideological and political enterprise? This thesis investigates how Italian socialist “heretics” articulated a vision for an antitotalitarian “Third Force” Europe predicated on radical democracy and a socialist economy. Central to this analysis is the Ventotene Manifesto (1941), authored by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, which called for the abolition of national sovereignty and the establishment of the United States of Europe. By tracing the Manifesto’s ideological roots in the interwar period, particularly through the influence of Giustizia e Libertà and figures like Carlo Rosselli, the research explores how the Italian exiles sought to transcend both fascism and Stalinist communism while navigating the tension between revolutionary elitism and democratic aspirations. The Second World War emerges as a decisive catalyst, giving rise to what this study identifies as the “Ventotene Moment:” a unique convergence of ideological ferment and political opportunity that enabled the refinement of their federalist-socialist vision. By recovering this neglected political tradition, the study sheds light on an overlooked chapter of European federalist thought and reflects on its complex legacy in relation to European integration
The single-pointed mind: theorising attention from South Asia
Full text linkThis thesis takes as its primary site of engagement a pervasive concept: attention. As an implicit analytic, attention has long been used by anthropologists to explain various arenas of socio-cultural life pointing to its centrality in our formation as human subjects. Yet, anthropologists have also tended not to pay attention to attention itself – it has infrequently featured explicitly as a point of theoretical and ethnographic exploration. As part of an attempt to explicitly engage with this psycho-bodily capacity, I argue for a move away from the treatment of attention only as a self-evident aspect of experience, as is the case in much extant scholarship. Instead, I contend that a mature anthropology of attention should also focus on the ideological constitution of this psycho-bodily capacity – that is as a major site of emic theorisation and moral concern. This recognises more fully the importance of attention as a crucial ground of valorisation, contestation and anxiety through which diverse cultures and groups attempt to make up the self in particular ways. As proof of the value of this approach, the following account offers an attentionalist reading of north Indian culture and history. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Banaras as well as archival research, a number of well-worn areas of South Asian anthropology – colonial history, ritual, aesthetics and theories of self – are re-interpreted through an attentional lens. In each case, I explore how a particular ideology of attention – built around single-pointedness – is vital to how different social actors in Banaras attempt to shape their lives and their interiority. This reflects in part longstanding religious and ethical positions as well as the fact that since the colonial period, single-pointed attention, has provided a centralising value for an idealised conception of national subjectivity, offering a basis for an imaginary of Indian superiority grounded in introspective capacity
Essays in the political economy of institutional change
No full textThis thesis examines three topics in the political economy of institutional change. I focus on the direction of state development after war and the design of interventions shifting social norms. Chapter 1 studies a transition to democracy, asking whether states and societies can shift social norms. Chapter 2 analyzes the rise of autocracy, examining the type of state that emerges in response to war. Chapter 3 explores how narratives of the past change present politics. I study these questions by combining large and novel datasets with robust research designs for identifying causal relationships. A central aim is to understand the conditions and identify interventions under which persistent social equilibria can be overcome. The first chapter, Shifting Norms and Political Demand: Denazification in postwar Germany, studies whether states and societies can shift social norms. In a major denazification program, millions of Germans were questioned about their political past by courts. The chapter documents how denazification shaped the emerging political landscape in postwar Germany. I leverage sharp variation in denazification across Allied occupation zones, across districts, and within districts. I find that broader denazification reduced the demand for nationalist policies and changed social norms. Differences are driven by mass rather than elite cases and political consequences are observed absent major differences in punishment. The results indicate that the breadth of transitional justice may be more important than its severity. As such, the study has important implications for the design of transitional justice following autocratic rule. The second chapter, Crisis, State Capacity, and the Rise of Autocracy: A Design-based Analysis of the Thirty Years’ War (joint with Matthias Weigand), analyzes whether wars enable autocracy. We examine how the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the largest conflict in pre-modern Europe, gave rise to capable autocracies. We use planned troop movements from secret military communications to estimate the impact of town-level war exposure on the growth of fiscal and military capacity and the dismantling of parliaments. During the war, executive power increased to prevent plunder and coordinate military logistics. After the war, rulers used this capacity to consolidate autocratic rule via propaganda and repression. Pre-existing legal institutions acted as a barrier to war-induced autocracy. With parliaments eliminated, militarized absolutist regimes persisted for centuries and provided fewer public goods. Our findings highlight a dynamic trade-off in the concentration of executive power during crises. The third chapter, Mass Media of Remembering: The Role of TV in Coming to Terms with the Past, studies how mass media shapes collective memory and voting behavior, focusing on the broadcast of a Holocaust documentary in West Germany in 1979. I leverage an unexpected disruption in television access caused by right-wing extremist attacks on transmission towers. Due to these attacks, hundreds of thousands of viewers near affected towers were unable to watch the documentary. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I compare electoral outcomes between neighboring municipalities with and without television access. The results show that access to the documentary reduced the trend of radical-right vote share by 0.1 to 0.23 percentage points. A placebo test based on a failed bombing accounts for strategic targeting and confirms the result
Speculation and circulation: real estate development and the market for land in urban Pakistan
No full textThis dissertation studies the dynamics of Lahore’s rapidly expanding residential real estate market as a means to contextualize and understand growing housing pressures in the city. Specifically, it examines developer motivations and mechanisms of profitmaking to uncover why and how expansion has taken place in recent years, and in whose interests. By studying and centring the actions of supply side actors such as real estate developers, whose activities and modes of profitmaking remain understudied and undertheorized within existing scholarship, it investigates why the city’s real estate market remains inaccessible for a majority of the city’s residents. Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork, this dissertation shows that actors in the business of land development in Lahore have devised a mechanism that overcomes constraints in accessing institutional finance and allows them to profit off land conversions without using their own resources. This mechanism – what I characterize as accumulation by speculative circulation – relies on market-making techniques and the circulation of a market-based instrument of land acquisition and sales known as ‘the file’ to finance land conversions. The file, as I show, is an object but also a future. It is a fictional commodity that turns ‘land’ into ‘liquid’ form, helping create a real estate market that is structured, first and foremost, to accommodate the interests of investors and state actors, rather than those looking to meet their housing needs. This thesis argues that the valorisation and repurposing of land for investment purposes serves as both site and mechanism of housing exclusion, contributing to spatial inequality in the city and heightening the odds against more equitable interventions. It also shows how state entities themselves are implicated in this accumulation model, and remain invested in furthering sprawl, gentrification and dispossession. By illustrating how speculative practices operate in real estate markets, especially in contexts where theory expects otherwise, the thesis contributes empirically and theoretically to questions of land commodification and peri-urban transformations, particularly in rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global South. It also extends and complicates theories of speculative urbanisms, financialization and dispossession
Towards more interpretable factor analysis: a focus on sparsity and uncertainty
Full text linkExploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) is a statistical technique for uncovering latent structures in multivariate data by modelling observed variables as linear combinations of unobserved factors. For interpretability, estimated loading matrices are often rotated to achieve sparsity, but existing rotation methods may lack sufficient accuracy or computational efficiency. This thesis introduces a new family of rotation criteria for recovering loading matrices with varying sparsity in EFA, based on component‑wise Lp loss functions. These criteria measure the sum of the pth powers of the absolute values of all factor loadings to encourage sparsity in the factor structure. To address the nonsmooth nature of this objective, we develop an iteratively reweighted gradient projection algorithm that achieves high accuracy with significantly reduced computational cost compared to penalised estimation techniques. We further establish novel identification conditions for the Lp rotation estimator, allowing for a small proportion of non‑simple items in the true loading matrix. Empirical results confirm that the Lp rotation criterion consistently outperforms classical rotation methods when the underlying factor structure is sparse. To support valid inference, we also propose a methodology for computing p‑values for factor loadings under the Lp framework. Building on these p‑values, we incorporate False Discovery Rate (FDR) control procedures—such as the Benjamini‑Yekutieli (BY) and e‑value‑based Benjamini‑Hochberg (eBH) methods—to guide variable selection while controlling the expected proportion of false discoveries. These procedures are demonstrated to remain valid across various experiments. The proposed Lp rotation framework has been implemented in the R package GPArotation, with functions lpT and lpQ available for orthogonal and oblique solutions, respectively. Overall, this thesis offers a unified approach to estimation, identification, and inference in EFA, contributing both theoretical insights and practical tools for sparse and interpretable factor analysis
Woven networks: technological upgrading, standards and Chinese ICT corporations in North Africa
Full text linkThis dissertation asks whether the globalisation of Chinese digital capital creates opportunities for technological upgrading and structural transformation in host developing countries or, conversely, hinders the accumulation of technological capabilities and broader economic transformation. Using a mixed-methods approach – including an original dataset, 107 fieldwork interviews with local, Chinese, and foreign stakeholders, and extensive documentary research – this thesis examines the role of Huawei and ZTE in Algeria and Egypt, two key recipients of Chinese digital projects. The analysis draws on a political economy framework that integrates two strands of the literature: (1) heterodox development theory to assess spillovers and the role of foreign firms in upgrading, and (2) technopolitics to analyse the politics, norms and standards conveyed through digital infrastructure. The research finds that the role of Chinese firms in fostering technological upgrading in host developing countries is at best mixed. While the globalisation of China’s ICT industry has helped expand internet access and is increasingly fostering managerial knowledge spillovers through greater labour localisation in senior roles, it does not substantially contribute to consolidating technological capabilities nor boosting productivity in the domestic ICT industries. What might initially seem like developmental connections promoting domestic capabilities are, in fact, linkages diffusing – through fibre optic cables, data centres, antennas, routers, and training programmes – new norms, protocols, and standards that reconfigure local ICT ecosystems and integrate them into distinct technopolitical regimes. Thus, Chinese digital corporations are disseminating, both intentionally and unintentionally, de facto standards from the ground up, via the construction of cost-competitive digital infrastructure. Fieldwork findings from Algeria and Egypt reveal that the operations of the two Chinese firms, like those of Western competitors, have hindered local actors in expanding their share of domestic markets and consolidating their capabilities. Both governments appeared to prioritise efficiency and immediate access to cutting-edge digital infrastructure over long-term learning and upgrading. In the current context of heightened geopolitical tensions and increasingly bifurcated digital systems, developing countries face growing pressure from dominant actors that are extending their regulatory influence as a strategy to consolidate extraterritorial economic and political power. I argue that the extent to which developing countries can harness this intensifying competition for national development will ultimately depend on local configurations of power, capabilities, and the use of digital industrial policies to bolster strategic autonomy
“Searching, we found ourselves”: the search for the disappeared and the government of victimhood in contemporary Mexico
No full textSince 2006, over 120,000 people have disappeared in the context of Mexico’s “war on drugs”, a militarised counternarcotics strategy that has unleashed a spiral of deadly violence and gross human rights violations. The situation has pitched tens of thousands of families into a desperate search for their missing loved ones. Many relatives have mobilised into “search collectives” (colectivos de búsqueda), small organisations that carry out citizen searches for the missing and petition authorities to find them and guarantee truth and justice. This thesis investigates the bureaucratic, political and social life of the “victim” category through the vantage point of relatives of the disappeared, legally considered secondary victims of enforced disappearance. It documents the ways in which it is mobilised by the state to manage the claims and suffering of the relatives of the disappeared, and how, in turn, relatives inhabit and interact with it. Victimhood has the potential to help relatives make sense of their experiences and their new individual and social identities. The thesis argues, however, that the label is not neutral or objective but rather a highly contested —and historically contingent— category that is specifically and locally produced through everyday interactions. It also argues that searchers inhabit the victim identity in complicated and conflicted ways. They draw on it wittingly to advance certain claims and access resources, but are also critical of it, with some rejecting it outright. The thesis argues that the label both opens up and closes down ways of acting and being. For example, it shows that “victim” is an activist identity that can ignite collective action, foster solidarity, and contest dominant state narratives about violence. On the other hand, it demonstrates that the victim label is a bureaucratic category that disciplines the ways in which sufferers mobilise and make political claims. Moreover, it illustrates how the language of victimhood articulates expectations, hierarchies, and emotional scripts around how people affected by violence relate to victim support institutions and existing forms of redress