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Essays on the economy of 19th century England
Full text linkThe thesis consists of three chapters that examine the economy of England in the 19th century. Chapter 1 studies the impact of the construction of the railroad network on local patenting. Using novel data, I find that, by increasing market access, the railroad caused an increase in local patenting. Chapter 2 studies how the Panic of 1825 affected the local economy. The financial system was subject to strict rules requiring small, local banks to have a working relationship with a London agent bank, and we exploit the sudden financial collapse of these London agent banks to establish how the collapse of a local bank connected to a failed London agent caused an increase in local non-financial firm bankruptcies. Chapter 3 studies how the railroad affected economic growth. I find little evidence that the construction of the network increased local land values or had any impact on local bankruptcies. I provide evidence that this could be due to a creative destruction effect in which the destruction element was particularly strong
Poverty, climate change, and policy design: essays in environmental and development economics
No full textPoverty and climate change are not only two of the most pressing global challenges, but they are also interconnected in ways that can complicate attempts to alleviate either in isolation. Their relationship is evident across multiple dimensions. Climate change exacerbates poverty through rising temperatures and increasingly frequent and severe weather events, the effects of which are disproportionately felt by the world’s poorest communities. Conversely, efforts to alleviate poverty through economic development can contribute to higher emissions and environmental degradation. In the global fight to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, the burden of efforts to reduce emissions will be unevenly distributed, with transitions often disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations. Despite the pressing nature of climate change, the importance of alleviating poverty, and the ways these issues intersect, there remains a relatively small body of work that integrates these topics. This thesis seeks to contribute here, using micro-econometric methods and real-world policies to consider three key ways in which poverty and environmental policy are interconnected. After an introduction in Chapter 1, Chapters 2 and 3 examine how poverty influences the primary impacts of environmental policies, focusing on behavioral barriers and related solutions to facilitate the transition to energy-efficient technologies. Chapter 4 then considers the secondary effects of environmental policies—in particular, their possible impacts on poverty and inequality. Finally, Chapter 5 explores the role of policy in mitigating the adverse effects of climate change amongst the poorest and most vulnerable. Taken together, the findings in the thesis demonstrate some of the diverse ways that poverty and environmental policy can interact. Environmental policy will need to account for these interactions to achieve climate change mitigation, minimize adverse secondary impacts, and support communities vulnerable to climate change. A multifaceted approach, tailored to specific contexts, will be necessary for balancing mitigation, adaptation, and equity in the face of these interconnected challenges
The shadow economy of mobile phones: an ethnography of grassroots entrepreneurship in an urban marketplace in China
No full textBased on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in a mobile phone market in Shenzhen, China, this thesis explores how grassroots migrant merchants operate an extensive business network for the retailing, repairing, and reselling of mobile phones. Their market activities represent a central hub in the global supply and distribution of mobile phones. Merchants rely on their own creativity, autonomous practices, and the careful negotiation of shifting regulatory regimes. To capture the agency of such grassroots entrepreneurship, which entangles formal and informal processes, the thesis develops the concept of the ‘shadow economy’. The analysis begins with the financialisation and privatisation of urban market space, showing how formalisation displaced existing social support networks and exacerbated the precarity of grassroots entrepreneurial labour. It then examines the contested notions of authenticity and trust, particularly in the local practices of supplying and providing shanzhai (copycat) and second-hand mobile phones, and demonstrates how merchants both challenge and are constrained by the dominance of Western brand owners and the state’s regulation of consumer rights. With business opportunities shrinking in a time of economic slowdown, merchants have turned to speculative activities, profiting from arbitrage on the platform-based and extensive logistics networks of mobile phones. These practices result in intensified labour for smaller returns, prompting merchants to navigate their entrepreneurial subjectivity in response to these changes
Engineering of global monetary orders: gold’s role within the Bretton Woods system
Full text linkHow do we explain the role designated for gold within the Bretton Woods system? At the time of the negotiations, economic scholarly opinion was already turning away from gold. It is a puzzle, therefore, that gold was designated a key role in the Bretton Woods system. The Bretton Woods regime could have unfolded in many ways: the system could have been less gold-centric while still complying with US interests. A different approach could have prevented the calamities of the gold standard. Among the proposals, the key currency could even have been bancor, yet fashioned in a way that maintains US ascendancy. Why did we have a gold-centric standard in 1944? This project focuses on the creation of the Bretton Woods system with a focus on gold. It looks at the economic ideas and strategies of two key negotiators, Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes, to emphasize a unipolar monetary world order (White’s plan) versus a multipolar one (Keynes’s plan). It also studies on-the-ground negotiations at the Atlantic City Conference directly preceding the Bretton Woods, and the Bretton Woods Conference itself. I trace the role of gold, bearing in mind agency versus structure – that is, the role played by pivotal individuals and their ideas versus structural disparities and powers between the countries they represent (G. John Ikenberry versus Richard Gardner). I also consider the singular versus multilateral origins of the Bretton Woods (Benn Steil versus Eric Helleiner). This study aims to reconsider the intellectual underpinnings of the Bretton Woods system; it also draws generalizable insights into how monetary systems get designed, and if and how critical agents at these key moments exert agency. Two key questions emerge here. First, why White? Second, why focus on gold? White’s role before and during the negotiations warrants scrutiny. As the Director of Monetary Research, Assistant to the Secretary, and the person in charge of the Bretton Woods drafting and international economic policymaking, White was the most significant individual working at the US Treasury at the time. He was also a member of Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau’s “9:30 staff”, which consisted of senior officials at the Treasury who briefed Morgenthau daily. While the world was in flux and the opportunity for a change arose, White’s ideas became consequential. Morgenthau stated, “He will be in charge of all foreign affairs for me… I want it in one brain and I want it in Harry Dexter White’s brain” (Skidelsky, 2000). White agreed with Keynes on a number of issues, but the differences in their ideas proved consequential during the construction of the Bretton Woods regime. The Bretton Woods system’s focus on gold is puzzling given the existence of alternatives. For one, the challenges of gold in international economic systems were already understood at the time (Lamoreaux & Shapiro, 2019). Further, some economists suggested breaking the link between gold and the reserve currencies (Lamoreaux & Shapiro, 2019). Successful experiments had already shown that an external standard wasn’t needed to stabilize currencies (Lamoreaux & Shapiro, 2019). For instance, the Tripartite Agreement of 1936 stabilized currencies in relation to one another, while in the sterling area, currencies were stabilized in relation to the pound, meaning that they were “pro-gold-free” arrangements (Eichengreen, 2019). This thesis hence aims to answer why gold was designated such a role in the Bretton Woods system
Essays in empirical asset pricing
No full textThis thesis presents three essays on the determinants of risk premia across currency and equity markets. The first essay studies the macroeconomic foundations of currency risk premia using a dataset spanning a century. It decomposes the predictability of 11 fundamentals into cross-sectional (CS) and Dollar components, finding CS predictability is more robust. Using a Bayesian framework to navigate the resulting ”factor zoo,” the analysis reveals a dense currency Stochastic Discount Factor (SDF) where many fundamentals contribute noisy information. An aggregated Bayesian Model Averaged (BMA) SDF demonstrates superior out-of-sample pricing power over parsimonious models. The second essay investigates the time-series predictive power of the Currency Volatility Risk Premium (VRP). It shows that the VRP term-structure significantly forecasts currency appreciation and excess returns, particularly at longer horizons. This premium is linked to macroeconomic distress, suggesting it serves as compensation for bearing risk during adverse economic conditions. The third essay introduces a novel risk factor in the cross-section of U.S. equities: the ”equity recovery rate,” defined as the fraction of market equity recoverable in bankruptcy. A robust, inverse relationship is documented between this rate and subsequent risk-adjusted returns. This premium is shown to be distinct from compensation for leverage, traditional distress risk, and other well-known factors
Rags to rags, riches to riches: essays on occupational mobility in England, 1851-1911
Full text linkThis thesis uses census-linked datasets, created from digitised full-count decennial censuses of England and Wales between 1851 and 1911, to estimate occupational mobility in Victorian and Edwardian England. The thesis is divided into three papers. Existing research in social mobility predominantly focus on the intergenerational aspect while largely ignoring another important channel for mobility — mobility over the life course. Using a linked sample of over 400,000 men, the first paper estimates the levels of life-course (intragenerational) mobility in England between 1851–1881 and 1881–1911. By regressing current occupational ranks on initial occupational ranks, this paper finds an intragenerational rank-rank correlation of between 0.61 to 0.68 over a 10-year period, and between 0.50 to 0.57 over a 30-year period. Low occupational mobility was mostly driven by the primary and secondary sectors, but new occupations in services and professions also appear to be relatively secure. Life-course mobility was limited for the Victorians and experienced by only a small minority working in tertiary sectors. England during this period appears to be far from an open society. The second paper uses a different and likewise newly constructed linked sample of between 67,000 and 160,000 father-son pairs in 1851–1911 to provide revised estimates of intergenerational occupational mobility in England. After correcting for classical measurement error using instrumental variables, I find that conventional estimates of intergenerational elasticities could severely underestimate the extent of father-son association in socioeconomic status. Instrumenting one measure of the father’s outcome with a second measure of the father’s outcome raises the intergenerational elasticities of occupational status from 0.4 to 0.6-0.7. Victorian England was therefore a society of limited social mobility. The implications of my results for long-run evolution and international comparisons of social mobility in England are discussed. The third paper explores spatial variations in intergenerational mobility in England at the end of the nineteenth century, using a census-linked dataset of between 160,000 to 600,000 father-son pairs observed between 1881 and 1911. The results show that there is already a north-south divide in terms of intergenerational mobility in late-Victorian England, using rank-based measures of relative mobility and absolute mobility. In addition, mobility patterns exhibit clear differences depending on migration history and origins. Migrants from the North are much more mobile than those that remained in the North and experience significant gains in occupational ranks from migration, while the same pattern is not observed for Southern migrants and non-migrants. The advantages of north-south migration hold even after accounting for selective migration using household fixed effects. Finally, there is also evidence that there was a ‘Great Gatsby curve’ in late-Victorian England, as places of higher occupational inequality were also places of lower social mobility
Descriptive assumptions and normative justifications in social choice theory: ambiguity, strategic voting and measurement
Full text linkSocial choice theory provides fundamental tools for many sciences. Moreover, its models are applied and implemented in a remarkable range of diverse contexts to guide collective decision procedures. Understanding these models of collective decision-making and their normative verdicts poses an important challenge to philosophers of science, epistemologists, political philosophers, and philosophers of technology. This thesis is a collection of four papers that question the assumptions in social choice theory models at the intersection of individual decision-making and the design of collective decision mechanisms. The chapters, in particular, target the normative verdicts of these models by drawing on perspectives from the philosophy of science, political philosophy, and psychology. The central claims defended in the thesis are twofold. Firstly, the core claim is that abstracting away from individual decision-making does not always lead to greater generality but often makes the verdicts of social choice models inapplicable to the intended target systems. This observation draws on the fact that most target systems of social choice models involve individuals. Individuals are significant both in how they interact within a collective decision mechanism and as the object of normative consideration. Particular assumptions about individual decision-making, although often absent in a given social choice theory model itself, are needed for the model’s normative verdict to transfer to many target systems. Secondly, many models developed by social choice theory not only require scrutiny of their descriptive assumptions but also need an explication of the normative commitments underpinning them. Normative assumptions in social choice theory typically take the form of axioms or desiderata that are prima facie difficult to reject. However, the values underlying the acceptance of a given axiom can vary greatly, which, in turn, can significantly affect whether the model’s normative verdict successfully transfers to the intended target system
Essays in financial economics
Full text linkThis thesis explores foundational questions at the intersection of economics and finance, combining theoretical modelling with applied econometrics to address long-standing issues in asset pricing, international macro-finance, and monetary economics. The first chapter develops a general equilibrium model with multi-asset international financial intermediaries to study jointly uncovered interest parity (UIP), uncovered equity parity (UEP), and the hedging role of exchange rates. By allowing intermediaries to take positions in both global bond and equity markets, the model offers a unified framework where exchange rate dynamics reflect balance sheet exposures across asset classes. It clarifies the joint determination of currency risk premia and equity returns, highlighting how currencies may or may not hedge global portfolios. The model delivers novel testable implications for the behaviour of exchange rates relative to international equity and bond flows. The second chapter focuses on financial econometrics, revisiting empirical puzzles surrounding the Euler equation and intertemporal substitution. It shows that official consumption data—typically smoothed and filtered—can severely distort estimations of the Euler equation, often yielding implausibly low or negative values for the slope. The chapter develops a flexible method to recover unfiltered consumption data, yielding more stable and economically reasonable estimations across specifications, data types, and asset-holder groups. These findings have direct implications for macro-finance models. The third chapter addresses empirical challenges in estimating the Phillips curve, a key component in macro and finance models with nominal dynamics. It proposes a multi-sector framework that incorporates heterogeneity in price stickiness, enabling more realistic nominal frictions. By leveraging sectoral variation that is orthogonal to monetary policy shocks and imposing cross-equation restrictions, the paper delivers robust and meaningful slope estimates. The results reconcile macro and micro evidence on price rigidity and offer insights into the transmission of monetary policy to nominal variables
Indigestible, disgusting, and vile: the development, regulation, and reception of ersatz food products in Germany during the First World War
Full text linkErsatz (substitute) food products have long played a part in histories of the German food crisis during the First World War. From war bread, to turnips, to watery sausages, these foods have been used by historians to symbolize the desperation of the food crisis, particularly in the later years of the war, often valuing these foods more as anecdotal material than a phenomenon worth studying in their own right. Who was responsible for developing these wartime substitutes, and what nutritional impact did they have on the diet of German consumers? The historical record suggests that these food products were universally despised, using terms like ‘indigestible’, ‘disgusting’, and ‘vile’, but were these products—as a rule—really inferior to the foods they were replacing? Or did contemporary associations with class, culture, and the natural order influence consumers’ perceptions of these much-maligned goods? Furthermore, how did the introduction of these goods affect the course of government food regulations? On all of these points, the historiography is largely silent. This thesis will address that gap by conducting a dedicated study of the role played by ersatz food products during the war, using previously unexamined primary sources to direct a critical lens onto these fascinating substitutes. Rather than being a mere symbol for deprivation, an empirical analysis of ersatz food products reveals how they helped to sustain the nutritional durability of the German home front, yet also eroded public confidence in the government’s regulatory efforts—simultaneously contributing to the survival of consumers while hastening the collapse of their morale. By addressing the research questions above, this thesis argues that ersatz food products were a symptomatic response of a food system under incredible stress, and that by better understanding these substitutes, we can better understand the complex dynamics of the German food crisis itself
High-dimensional time series analysis: imputation and testing Kronecker product structure on tensor factor models, main effect factor models, and spatial autoregressive models
Full text linkHigh-dimensional time series are increasingly ubiquitous, which leads to an urgent need for statistical methodologies correspondingly. The emergence of tensor time series, where data are arranged as general tensors (e.g. vectors, matrices) at each timestamp, poses new challenges to researchers and practitioners. This thesis sheds light on time series analysis from factor modelling to spatiotemporal analysis. First, we explore how to estimate the factor structure in a tensor factor model with missing data and weak factors. With a rank estimator proposed, we introduce an imputation procedure by leveraging all estimators and discuss how to perform practical inference. We elaborate on the performance of our method with two real data examples on portfolio returns and national economic indicators, respectively. We also attempt to answer a fundamental question on tensor factor modelling: can we test if a factor structure is violated on a given tensor time series while preserved on the flattened series? Generally put, we are interested to understand whether the factor structure is mode-related or not. We formulate the testing problem and provide a residual test with theoretical guarantees, followed by extensive data examples. For matrix time series, we design a factor model with time-varying main effects in addition to a common component to disentangle row and column information of the observed matrix. It assumes a more general structure than the prevalent matrix factor model with Tucker decomposition in the common component governing only the “joint” effect. We establish theories for statistical inference and propose a test on the necessity of our model. We apply our model to study a set of taxi traffic data and discover an “hour” effect within. Lastly, we contribute to the field of spatial econometrics by presenting a spatial autoregressive model with time-varying spatial weights, featuring the spill-over effects among cross-sectional units contemporaneously in the observed vector time series. We circumvent the difficulty of selecting spatial weight matrices by penalised estimation. A set of industrial profits is analysed through our approach