4760 research outputs found
Sort by
The threats we face: British imperial defence and the Far East, 1925-1934
Get PDFFrom 1925 to 1934, the British Empire in the Far East was menaced by two principal threats. The first – Chinese nationalism, alongside and often in partnership with international communism – was transnational in nature, attempting to make not a revision to the Far Eastern status quo but a revolution in the politics of the entire region. The second – a rising and increasingly militaristic Japan – was international in nature, intent on upsetting the regional balance of power that Britain had helped police for a generation. This thesis makes several arguments. First, that assessments and understandings of British imperial defence and strategy in the era, which heretofore have focused predominately on the international threat of Japan at the expense of the transnational threat of Chinese (and other indigenous forms of) nationalism and communism, must be reframed around a broader understanding of imperial defence efforts against both. Second, that Britain’s responses to these twin threats were dissonant. The crisis of Chinese Nationalism from 1925-1927, while transnational in nature, was also an international challenge to the status quo, and thus unique in the way that it afforded Britain the opportunity to synchronize and leverage tools and strategies, employed by both policymakers in the imperial core and officials in the imperial periphery, to counter it. The transformation of that threat from 1927 into a purely transnational challenge allowed Britain to simultaneously soften, with respect to moderate Chinese nationalists, and sharpen, with respect to radical Chinese nationalists and communists, these strategies. This vibrant, nuanced, forward leaning, and often effective campaign against communism and what it saw as malign forces of nationalism coexisted alongside Britain’s static and ambivalent efforts in understanding Japan both before and after it emerged as the principal international threat to the British-led Far Eastern status quo in the early 1930s. This dissonance both complicates and builds upon existing narratives of imperial crisis and decline and shows Britain continuing, at times, to exert agency and leadership and shape the regional environment well into the 1930s. Third, and finally, this thesis will demonstrate that such dissonance and complexity more accurately depict the realities, experiences, efforts, and achievements – or lack thereof – of imperial defence officials of all stripes, from the members of the Committee of Imperial Defence in London to the inspectors of the Straits Settlements Police Force in Singapore
Framing change: behavioural insights to facilitate the transition to more sustainable dietary norms
No full textThere is now a strong scientific consensus that a rapid and significant reduction in the consumption of animal products is needed in order to ensure a safe operating space for the planet. A multi-strategy approach incorporating behavioural interventions, along with market and regulatory mechanisms, will likely be required to change consumers’ eating habits. Insights from behavioural science can inform both interventions and communication strategies to help facilitate the transition to more sustainable dietary norms. Emerging research suggests using dynamic norms – social norm messages which emphasise how others are changing – may be effective in influencing attitudes and behaviours in a number of domains, including meat consumption. However, there have been only a few studies investigating social norm interventions to encourage sustainable diets. Moreover, the research on dynamic norms specifically is still nascent, with much to be learned about how they work and what could limit or improve their effectiveness. Evidence from behavioural science tells us that people may respond differently to information depending on how it is framed. Could there be ways to strategically frame changing diets to increase norm receptivity? In this thesis, I investigated this question across four empirical chapters which draw on literature relating to social norms, behavioural economics, and strategic communications. I began with a scoping review which assessed the extent and nature of the research on messaging interventions using social norms to encourage sustainable food choice. It revealed mixed findings on the effectiveness of such interventions, limited by significant knowledge gaps, methodological weaknesses, and heterogeneity of research designs. The next part of the thesis focussed on optimising communications by manipulating the framing of messages communicating changing dietary norms in the United Kingdom. In a series of online randomised controlled trials, I first examined the relationship between gain/loss framing of diet change and interest in adopting the new norm. Findings revealed no evidence of backfire effects, but that food neophobia could be a barrier to norm receptivity. I then tested the effect of framing shifting norms as being rooted in shared values and goals, exploring how different value frames resonated across demographic groups. Further, I investigated other factors which could influence openness to the emerging norm, including affect, response efficacy beliefs, and perceptions of who might benefit from the change. Overall, results suggested the effectiveness of value framing is limited and that, despite the new norm being seen as good for society and future generations, negative perceptions that one would not personally benefit inhibited interest in diet change. I applied the findings of these online studies in a field intervention exploring how messages emphasising the cobenefits of diet change might be used to complement other behavioural strategies to encourage sustainable dining at a university canteen. Whilst there was no evidence that the dynamic norm influenced behaviour, I did find that students’ selection of lower emission dishes increased significantly when more of these dishes were on offer. Taken together, results suggest there is a mismatch between current messaging around changing dietary norms versus predominant barriers and motivators in this domain: The emerging norm is often framed in ethical terms such as ‘healthy and sustainable’ and ‘benefitting society and future generations’, however consumers are more motivated by perceptions that plant-based foods are satisfying and that they themselves will benefit from the change. Further, they are more likely to choose plant-based offerings when they are plentiful and affordable. Yet many perceive these foods as unappealing and expensive, and plant-based items are still vastly underrepresented in the market. Thus both policies and communication strategies which circumvent these perceptual and structural barriers and align with existing hedonic and utilitarian drivers of food choice are more likely to be successful. This thesis contributes to the literature on dynamic norms by shedding light on how people in the UK perceive, process, and respond to information about changing diets, and the interplay between these factors and norm receptivity across different groups. Findings yield valuable insights for behavioural interventions and evidence to inform food policies and how they are communicated to help ensure they will be accepted and effective
Structural barriers or patient preference? A critical appraisal of the medical abortion revolution in England and Wales
No full textIn this thesis I assess the extent to which structural barriers are limiting choice of abortion method in England and Wales and the relationships between abortion method choice, inequities, and abortion stigma. I adopt three theoretical frameworks (the socioecological framework, stigma theory, and a multidisciplinary framework for understanding choice and equity) to approach abortion method choice with a systemic, critical lens using mixed methods. The methods include key informant interviews with abortion service providers, managers, and commissioners, in-depth interviews with abortion care-seekers, a multilevel analysis of national abortion statistics, and an analysis of provider survey data. These analyses highlight that the supply of surgical abortion care has been restricted by the legal framework for abortion and by other institutional barriers relating to funding, infrastructure, and workforce. Health system constraints have limited the options offered by health care providers, which generates inequities in people’s ability to make an informed decision about their abortion method. Although I find that abortion providers’ method preferences and provision are not significantly associated with abortion provider stigma, I document how abortion stigma is produced in the institutional structures of the health system in this context. This structural abortion stigma reduces access to patient-centred care, including method choice, and can reinforce individual level stigma. This thesis makes use of novel data sources and methodologies to further our understanding of the structural factors that have influenced the shift towards medical abortion in England and Wales and reveals how these constraints are imposed and experienced inequitably. The findings pose challenges for dominant discourses that focus on the potential of medical abortion to empower care-seekers and indicate the need to protect method choice. The thesis concludes with implications for policy, practice and research in England and Wales and elsewhere
Psychosocial disability activisms in India: knowledges and practices towards justice, from the margins
Get PDFThis thesis employs intersectionality and disability justice to inform a study of how activists with psychosocial disability in India understand and ‘do’ psychosocial disability. It responds to key critiques of existing literature: the absence of an intersectional lens in disability activism; the emphasis on a legalistic rights-based approach in disability; the dominance of the global North in framing the concept of ‘psychosocial disability’; the positioning of persons with psychosocial disability as objects rather than epistemic actors. My research draws on crip and critical disability theorisations as well as my own experiences as a Mad disabled researcher to analyse interviews with activists occupying multiply marginalised socio-political positions, including psychosocial disablement, in India. The analysis of 25 interview texts reveals that at the margins of the mainstream psychosocial disability activism, activists employ ‘psychosocial disability’ as a radical lens to explain, understand, and ultimately challenge oppressive structures such as casteism, fascism and militarisation, the criminal (in)justice system, and cisheteropatriarchy. They grapple with and attempt to resolve the tensions between abolition and reform in ways which bring together radical dreams and everyday practices of care and community-building while simultaneously navigating and negotiating with deeply broken medico-legal regimes. The demands of neoliberalism and fascism within movements present unique challenges for disabled and marginalised activists in India, and they undertake innovative ways to create spaces of liberation within and at the margins of a mainstream movement. The thesis contributes to disability studies and social movement literature by providing an example of what an intersectional liberatory practice can look like, the commitments that inform and animate it, as well as the struggles, challenges, and contradictions which shape it. This thesis invites activists and scholars embedded in movements of all kinds to bring a crip perspective on organising and resistance
God and Mammon: the Dissolution of the Monasteries and its consequences
Get PDFThe Dissolution of the Monasteries was the single largest transfer of wealth in English history between the Norman Conquest and today. It was immediately preceded by the creation of the Valor Ecclesiasticus, a complete survey of all Church property in England. The first paper uses a stratified sample of the Valor to create a georeferenced dataset that allows an unprecedented view into the English monastic system on the eve of its destruction. The dataset presented in this paper fills the crucial gap between aggregate overviews of the monastic system and case studies of individual monasteries, preserving a high level of detail while providing enough data and geographical coverage to ensure generalizability. Using this dataset, I demonstrate the overwhelmingly local nature of the monastic economy despite their long-distance networks, and show that the monastic system as a whole moved enormous quantities of money from the countryside into cities and suburbs. I also quantitatively confirm many of the assertions of previous historians of monasticism, including the Cistercian order’s focus on land revenue, the dominance of well-connected Benedictine houses, and the tight connections between Carthusian monasteries even over huge distances. The second paper investigates the causes of the largest rebellion ever faced by a Tudor monarch: the Pilgrimage of Grace. By combining a dataset of rebel musters and the seats of rebel gentlemen with the Valor data and a shapefile of Northern roads and shipping routes, I provide the first statistical evidence in the long-running debate over the rebellion’s causes. I find that monastic land is the only variable that consistently predicts rebellion: parishes with more monastic land were more likely to rise in rebellion and rose sooner than parishes with less monastic land. In addition, monastic land likely to contain tenants predicts rebellion much more strongly than monastic land likely to have been farmed with hired labor. This finding bolsters the argument of authors like Michael Bush, who see the Pilgrimage as fundamentally motivated by the economic impacts of the Dissolution, specifically the threat of eviction. Finally, the third paper investigates the long-run impacts of the Dissolution on individuals and the wider economy. Using a set of name lists containing status information and a new dataset created from taxation documents spanning three hundred years, I find that surname groups containing monastic land purchasers maintained a substantial wealth advantage well into the nineteenth century. This advantage is visible across a range of measures, including total family wealth, average individual wealth, the wealth of the richest bearer of each surname, and the total number of individuals with a given surname. On the broader economic effects of the Dissolution, the results are more mixed. I find a small increase in tertiary employment in parishes with more monastic land, but these effects do not scale up to the hundred level, making it unlikely that monastic land is associated with higher productivity
Rags to rags, riches to riches: essays on occupational mobility in England, 1851-1911
Get PDFThis 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
Get PDFSocial 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
Get PDFThis 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
Get PDFErsatz (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
Get PDFHigh-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