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Essays in applied economics using novel data and AI measurement
No full textThis thesis examines the transformative role of artificial intelligence in applied economics research and measurement. Chapter I surveys recent advancements in AI-powered economic measurement, positioning these tools as instruments that expand the domain of measurable economic phenomena. The chapter discusses how large language models enable economists to extract signals from vast amounts of unstructured data while addressing methodological challenges unique to AI-based measurement. The subsequent chapters present three original research contributions which deploy AI tools and novel data to address contemporary questions relevant to policy makers. Chapter II analyses the shift toward remote work using an innovative approach to classify over 250 million job vacancy postings across five English-speaking countries. By developing a specialized language-processing model that achieves near-human accuracy, the research tracks remote work patterns at unprecedented granularity, revealing insights that challenge conventional understandings of remote-work suitability. Chapter III introduces the AI-generated Production Network (AIPNET), which maps granular network structures spanning more than 5,000 product categories. Using a novel “build-prune” methodology with generative AI, the analysis reveals shifts in global trade patterns and production localization, showing movement toward more centralized upstream products and providing causal evidence of onshoring responses to supply shocks. Chapter IV investigates bank failures’ effects on firm performance by applying AI to process hundreds of millions of loan documents, developing insights into how financial shocks affect small and medium-sized enterprises during both crisis and non-crisis periods. Together, these chapters demonstrate how AI-powered measurement techniques extend the frontier of applied economics while maintaining econometric rigor, contributing both methodological innovations and substantive findings on pertinent contemporary economic questions
Branding and the production of truth: an inquiry into the instrumentalization of emotions and the human condition in marketing practices
No full textThis investigation interrogates how a distinct form of rationality, inherent to branding and marketing practices, has facilitated the instrumentalization of emotions not merely as tools for intensifying communicative impact but as mechanisms for legitimising discourses based on the conception of emotions as sources of truth and authenticity. Based on the analysis of interviews with London-based branding practitioners, and in line with Eva Illouz’s (2018) conceptualisation, I argue that the form of rationality guiding the instrumentalization of consumers’ emotions in branding is rooted in the perception of emotions as having not only an expressive status but also an epistemic status, rendering them sources of truth regarding the authenticity of human experiences. This distinction is crucial, as the critical literature on branding has primarily focused on the expressive role of emotions in branding processes. I examine the conceptions regarding the role of emotions in branding practitioners’ discourses about the strategies, techniques, and forms of knowledge concerning the fostering of customer loyalty, brand personification and culturalisation processes. In their deployment, emotions intervene as the repository of truth regarding humanness, culture and consumers’ life experiences, thus defining the authenticity of the constitutive elements of the lifeworld. The thesis concludes by arguing that the instrumentalization of emotions in branding is founded on a universalist rationality that recognises authenticity as its historical a priori, which authorises the pronunciation of truths regarding people’s lives and the human condition. This phenomenon sheds light on how the capitalist moral economy of social relations, influenced by the predominance of the ‘logic of branding thinking’ (Moor, 2014), not only accounts for the marketisation and commodification of everyday life but is an expression of how “capitalist forms of exchange came to dominate all other forms of exchange” (Aronczyk & Powers, 2010: 3)
Essays on macroeconomics and corporate finance
Full text linkThis thesis explores how capital market imperfections influence firm borrowing and macroeconomic outcomes. Chapter 1 uses U.S. syndicated loan data to show that stronger credit relationships between borrowers and lenders shift borrowing from collateral-based to earnings-based loans. I develop a model of limited commitment and asymmetric information, where repeated interactions allow lenders to learn about borrower quality. As relationships grow, lenders offer covenants linked to earnings in place of collateral, relaxing borrowing constraints. Empirically, I find that covenant use rises and collateral use declines with relationship strength, especially for smaller, more opaque firms, demonstrating a dynamic credit constraint driven by credit relationships. Chapter 2 examines the long-term shift in U.S. corporate loan contracting from covenant-based to collateral-based borrowing since the late 1990s, coinciding with a secular decline in interest rates. I develop a model in which banks and Nonbank Financial Institutions (NBFIs) differ in funding, regulation, and monitoring capacities. Lower interest rates diminish banks’ funding advantage, encouraging NBFI participation through loan securitization. In U.S. syndicated loan data, I show that interest rate-driven NBFI participation is associated with higher collateral incidence and lower covenant incidence. The results reveal a new channel through which monetary conditions influence the nature of firm credit constraints and shock transmissions. Chapter 3 studies how project heterogeneity interacts with financial frictions to shape credit relationships and aggregate investment. In a model of credit relationships under matching and liquidity allocation frictions, project heterogeneity raises continuation thresholds for low-productivity projects and lowers them for high-productivity projects, causing liquidity–productivity mismatches that amplify capital misallocation. Analytical results show that greater right-skewness in the productivity distribution increases relationship fragility. Temporary increases in the share of high-productivity projects can have prolonged adverse effects on investment, potentially pushing the economy into a no-investment equilibrium
Glimpsing "cultural democracy" within the Migration Museum and Turner Contemporary. An ethnographic account
No full textThis thesis explores cultural democracy as a dynamic and contested process, emerging through everyday encounters, institutional practices, and uneven power relations within museum spaces. At its core, it asks: How is cultural democracy—understood as both a policy discourse and a lived, contested practice—negotiated, staged, and experienced in two UK museum spaces, and what do these encounters reveal about the possibilities and limits of cultural participation today? Through a comparative ethnography of Turner Contemporary in Margate and the Migration Museum in London, the study examines how cultural democracy is articulated, implemented, and contested across organisational structures, curatorial choices, and visitor experiences. The research is grounded in three years of fieldwork (2021–2024), combining participant observation, 52 semi-structured interviews, focus groups, collaborative workshops, and informal conversations. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, bell hooks, and Donna Haraway, the thesis develops a framework that foregrounds relationality, tension, and dissensus as central to cultural democracy. It employs the metaphors of the temple and the forum to reflect on how museums function both as sites of aesthetic contemplation and as arenas for public debate. While these models provide useful heuristics, the case studies show how museums oscillate between them, producing hybrid practices that blur distinctions between authority and participation. The findings suggest that cultural democracy is best understood as a continuous struggle. What seems like participation on paper is, in reality, the result of competing forces: funding regimes and evaluation metrics, colonial legacies and de/re-contextualised collections, urban regeneration and housing precarity, architectural atmospheres and spatial codes, curatorial authority and co-creation, institutional and community labour. These forces interact unevenly, generating frictions that must be negotiated daily by educators, curators, volunteers, and visitors. Therefore, cultural democracy emerges not as a fixed outcome but as an ongoing process of mediation, contestation, and care. Methodologically, the project enacted elements of cultural democracy through Ethnographic Action Research, co-designed workshops, and KEI exchanges. These practices decentralised the research, opened dialogic spaces between institutions, and created feedback loops where participants shaped questions, interpretations, and outputs. While partial and imperfect, this approach materialised democratic practice by sharing curatorial voice, valuing situated 10 knowledge, and treating disagreement as productive. In this way, the method became both a way of knowing and a contribution to practice: a small-scale infrastructure for reflexivity, reciprocity, and institutional learning. By situating cultural democracy within these negotiations, the thesis contributes to theoretical debates in museum studies, cultural sociology, and critical pedagogy, while also speaking to policy and practice. It rethinks museums not simply as guardians of culture but as dynamic, agonistic spaces where identities, meanings, and relationships are continually contested. By foregrounding struggle and dissensus, it calls for more inclusive and reflexive approaches to cultural participation, while recognising the limits of what museums can achieve within wider social and political constraints
Sick and locked-in: a study on health status and consumer inertia in health insurance
Full text linkRecent evidence documents substantial quality differences across health plans within highly regulated insurance programs, raising the question of what prevents consumers from switching to better options. This thesis provides novel evidence of a key barrier: health risk driving consumer inertia. Using detailed administrative data from Colombia’s Regimen Contributivo, a mandated insurance program covering over 20 million ´ enrollees, it examines how health risk affects switching behavior when plans offer identical contracts but provide different effective access to medical care in practice. The setting is ideal for studying the relationship between health risk and inertia as it features standardized contracts with virtually unrestricted switching yet exhibits substantial quality differences, particularly during the collapse of two large insurers covering 30% of individuals in urban markets. The study focuses on mean care provision—the amount of medical care plans provide to enrollees with similar needs—and documents substantial heterogeneity across plans in this important dimension of plan quality. Three complementary approaches establish that health risk increases choice persistence. First, a predictive risk score based on diagnostic and demographic data shows higher ex-ante risk correlates with lower switching rates. Second, an event-study design exploiting cancer diagnoses reveals that illness causally reduces switching rates by up to 63%. Third, a structural demand model shows both age and health risk increase switching costs, with the highest-risk individuals exhibiting near-complete inertia. Unlike standard adverse selection theory, where high-risk individuals seek better coverage, this study uncovers a different phenomenon: high-risk individuals remain in deteriorating plans even when alternatives offer better effective coverage. This creates a death spiral where healthier enrollees exit first, leaving behind a riskier pool that becomes increasingly unprofitable under the program’s coarse risk adjustment, highlighting critical flaws in risk-adjustment mechanisms with important implications for managed competition in health insurance markets
The impact of political and media disclosures in the context of ESG
Full text linkThis thesis consists of three papers spanning the themes of environmental, social, and governance issues (ESG), politics, and information disclosure. The first chapter, which is solo-authored, studies how charity disclosure choices are impacted by political uncertainty and political attention. Specifically, I examine whether charities shift their public-facing website disclosures in response to their primary focus issues being highlighted in politicians’ election campaign advertisements. I show that charities involved in social causes (homelessness, immigration, reproductive rights) increase their website disclosures during elections, and that they increase their politically relevant disclosures under conditions of heightened political uncertainty. This effect is mitigated when the relevant causes are highlighted in political advertisements, consistent with charities’ need to draw public attention to their causes being tempered when politicians themselves do so. The second chapter, which is co-authored with Maria Correia and Aneesh Raghunandan, studies the impact of heightened political scrutiny on firms’ environmental performance and their propensity to engage in misconduct. We examine whether firms’ emission levels and environmental violation rates shift in response to political campaigns’ highlighting of environmental issues, measured by the broadcast of environment-focused political advertisements. We show that environmental performance improves subsequent to environment-focused political advertisements being broadcast, particularly in state-years having historically poor environmental track records where the threat of enforcement is likely to be most credible. The third chapter, which is solo-authored, examines analyst earnings forecast revisions in response to instances of corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) being highlighted in the media. I show that analysts revise their earnings forecasts downwards in response to CSI incidents implicating the forecasted firm or its industry peers, consistent with analysts updating corporate ESG risk profiles in response to new information. Thus, the thesis examines how corporate, charitable, and individual actors respond to environmentally and socially relevant disclosures made by politicians and media organizations
Essays on the economics and geography of Big Science
No full textThis thesis examines how public investment in basic research can yield broader economic benefits beyond scientific discovery. It focuses on a specific type of publicly funded research associated with Big Science: large, mission-oriented projects that span long time horizons, depend on substantial public investment, and require co-ordination among institutions. In many instances, these scientific endeavours are the result of international cooperation, pooling expertise and resources from multiple countries. It analyses the procurement activities associated with the construction, design, and operation of these research facilities as a channel through which wider economic benefits for society can be generated and tracked beyond the host location. While directly contributing to the “Economics of Science” literature, this dissertation lies at the intersection of various streams of research, including the growing literature on public procurement, as well as broader fields such as economic geography, management, and innovation studies. This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the overarching question of why governments should invest public funds in curiosity-driven scientific research, and Big Science more specifically, whose benefits are inherently uncertain and often realised in the distant future. Mounting fiscal pressures, heightened by competing demands for resources, and rising populist scepticism towards science have intensified debates over the value of investing in these scientific projects. In this context, procurement emerges as a critical channel for realising and demonstrating the economic impact of Big Science, beyond the location of the research facilities. Focusing on procurement enables researchers and policymakers to track direct financial flows, assess the diffusion of technological advancements, and identify tangible economic benefits. Most of the evidence on Big Science procurement, as well as public procurement more generally, has focused on what happens to the supplier. However, the effect could go beyond the firm’s boundaries to impact the local economy in which the supplier is located. Chapter 2 uses a state-of-the-art counterfactual approach to estimate the local economic impact of a large Big Science contract, showing that a single high-tech order can significantly boost manufacturing employment through supply chain linkages, and that the effects outside the boundaries of the firm can be substantially larger than those within, providing new evidence on the economic benefits of these scientific projects. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the impact of Big Science procurement on suppliers’ innovation, using the case study of CERN. Chapter 3 uses a quasi-experimental approach to estimate the causal effects on firms’ patenting activity and how these vary across firms and orders. I find a positive effect on suppliers, with larger effects for financially vulnerable firms. I also produce causal evidence on the impact of contracts on firms’ innovative behaviour, showing that financially vulnerable suppliers boost their R&D efforts, and younger firms are more likely to collaborate with other technological partners. Existing studies on the impact of Big Science procurement and the wider public procurement literature have mainly focused on input and output innovation metrics, such as the number of patents or R&D intensity. Chapter 4 examines whether the contracts can also influence the type of innovation firms conduct. I find a positive effect on the number of science-based patents, with the effect being larger for financially vulnerable firms. Among young suppliers, innovation also becomes more relatively novel following a contract award. Suppliers are more likely to be early citers of scientific publications, suggesting that these procurement activities provide them with priority access to new scientific research. Policymakers are increasingly viewing investments in Big Science as not only a means of advancing scientific discovery, but also as tools to stimulate economic development and innovation. However, the socio-economic benefits generated by these projects are neither automatic nor evenly distributed. Chapter 5 develops a conceptual framework to help policymakers and scientific organisations think through the trade-offs involved in Big Science procurement. It characterises the political tensions, competing objectives, and payoffs faced by different actors, offering a structured lens for navigating these dynamics and identifying policies that are beneficial for all parties involved. It then draws on evidence from the public procurement literature and the empirical insights of Chapters 2, 3 and 4 to propose stand-alone policy recommendations to maximise the socio-economic impact of procurement. It concludes by outlining a forward-looking research agenda to strengthen the evidence base on what works
Essays in corporate finance and asset pricing
Full text linkThis thesis contains three chapters in asset pricing and corporate finance. In the first chapter I investigate the hypothesis that (i) poor quality mutual funds gamble to increase their volatility and (ii) they can be found in both tails of the return distribution. Sorting funds into buckets based on their return realizations, I find evidence that poor quality funds sometimes earn extremely high returns over short horizons. These funds have lower excess returns, Sharpe Ratio, and alphas than comparable funds in one to five year horizons. I find that bad funds with high short-term returns follow extreme and transient strategies with high average factor exposures and high turnover. In the second chapter I investigate the optimal re-hiring rules of investors in mutual funds. Good and bad fund managers are compensated over multiple periods and choose behavior in the presence of career concerns: their performance is evaluated by investors making re-hiring decisions. If investors cannot commit to a re-hiring rule with profitable deviations, they only re-hire a manager who trades exactly like a good manager, forcing the bad manager to engage in costly imitation. If investors can commit to a re-hiring rule with profitable deviations, they optimally choose to re-hire any manager with any positive return. The model results match empirically observed flows in mutual funds. In the third chapter I investigate limited liability, unlimited liability, and bankruptcy for entrepreneurs with credit constraints. Limited liability offers a strictly larger choice of contracts than unlimited liability for fully liquid and illiquid entrepreneur wealth. Bankruptcy is redundant with limited liability under liquid wealth, although it is useful for entrepreneurs when access to limited liability is exogenously restricted or costly. Making bankruptcy more generous with illiquid wealth strictly reduces the choice of viable contracts. The model results match empirical findings that lower barriers to entry boosts entrepreneurship while generous bankruptcy has mixed impacts on entrepreneurship
Essays in market microstructure
Full text linkIn the first chapter, we investigate the hidden costs associated with Guaranteed Volume-Weighted Average Price (G-VWAP) contracts. Using a continuous-time mean–variance model incorporating both permanent and temporary price impacts, we demonstrate that brokers offering guaranteed execution at seemingly attractive terms exploit their market power through strategic timing of trades. Higher permanent price impact encourages brokers to front-load trades, thereby increasing execution prices and embedding hidden costs within the VWAP benchmark. In contrast, increased temporary impact flattens the broker’s trading path, discouraging rapid trades. In the second chapter, we study the implications of inverted exchanges on liquidity provision, particularly in the presence of high-frequency traders. Inverted exchanges mitigate inefficiencies arising from tick-size constraints by enabling a finer grid. Inverted venues solve the mismatch between an HFT’s price priority and a liquidity demander’s time priority. The model yields testable predictions on HFT activity and relative exchange trading volumes, which we confirm using high-frequency data. In the third chapter (co-authored with Emre Ozdenoren, Jiahua Xu and Kathy Yuan), we examine dominant currencies in Decentralized Finance. Using data collected from Uniswap, we analyze the swapping routes between currency pairs. In line with the dominant currency paradigm, we find that safety is a leading dominance attribute during bust periods, while liquidity is more important during booms. We also find that an active money market, market size, and a currency’s correlation with transaction costs are important determinants for dominance, suggesting essential design choices for future Central Bank Digital Currencies