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Timber nation: architecture, forest industry, and the construction of Finnishness
No full textThis thesis examines the politics of timber, a national resource vested with vital potentiality in Finnish architecture. Over the past decade, new engineered wooden products and decarbonisation efforts have recast timber from a modest rural material into an innovative resource for low-carbon urban development. The transformation of nature to provision the urban realm is an essential feature of urban modernity, yet urban researchers have often taken the natural resources for granted, whilst resource geographers have focused on the rural landscapes of resource production. In contrast, this thesis analyses resource-making and city-making as mutually imbricated processes. Drawing on multilocal ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with architects and public officials, the thesis argues that the resurgence of timber construction as a national project in Finland arises in response to experiences of faltering progress at different levels of society, compounded by global instability, neoliberal reforms and public austerity. In architecture, choosing timber offers a moral uplift in increasingly technocratic and financialised construction projects, but in a northern logging town it also surfaces new tensions between the promise of sustainable regeneration and intensifying forest harvesting. In suburban housing, timber represents a break from concrete to build an image of green middle-class living. Across these distinct topographies, the politics and aesthetics of timber are structured by an ideology of improvement and social differentiation that inscribes ideas of Finnishness onto changing landscapes. Even as timber architecture trades on uplifting metaphors of socioecological reconciliation, it simultaneously obscures and naturalises the extractive and exclusionary dynamics underlying the fractured present
Transnational house-keeping: cleaning and security services for the wealthy in London and Southeast England
No full textThis thesis explores the relationships between wealthy households and the workers they pay to ‘keep’ their homes through cleaning and security practices. Since the London region has become a magnet for both rich families and domestic workers from around the world, it is important to examine these groups relationally, along with the intermediaries who broker these relationships. By combining interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis, I uncover tensions between the ‘global’ narrative of luxury mobility which transcends national boundaries, and the ‘local’ practices of staff who maintain the value and status of the wealthy’s homes, with and against the barriers of citizenship. House-keepers both maintain the façades of expensive buildings and perform the aesthetic labour of deference, combining the historic respectability of the formal household with the convenience of luxury hotel services. Wealthy employers and their house-keepers today are also internationally diverse and enmeshed in digital networks, but recruiters and managers reference cultural texts like Downton Abbey to give an English gentlemanly face to an industry stratified by nationality and gender. Because of these inequalities, employers simultaneously need their cleaning and security staff to protect their property while travelling, but also fear their intimate access to their private space. By highlighting this dependence, of the ostensibly ‘global’ wealthy upon staff working in and around London, I identify the distinct rhythms of transnational house-keeping and how they enable the leisure time of employers at the expense of their staff’s own private lives. The relationship of transnational house-keeping sits in a liminal position between ‘pre-modern’ servitude and ‘modern’ contract, with the national home of Britain and the wealthy households within it both reinforcing the ideal that some should serve while others should be served. As a result, this thesis contributes to the literatures of elite studies, migration, and domestic labour
Essays on digital and sustainable finance
Full text linkThe first chapter sheds light on the impact of data risks on the increasingly digitalized financial system by examining the direct and spillover effects of bank data breaches on deposits. Leveraging a hand-collected novel dataset that identifies breaches at the bank-state level in the U.S., I find that data breaches reduce deposits at breached banks. Moreover, within the local deposit market, data breaches lead to not only a reallocation but also a net drop in deposits. Beyond the local market, I document negative within-bank, cross-state spillovers, with smaller banks being more vulnerable than larger ones. Further analysis reveals that depositor reactions are primarily driven by the demand for privacy and intensify as the scale of the breach increases. The second chapter examines the impact of digital reporting on the sustainability information environment. Exploiting the staggered implementation of the SEC’s iXBRL mandate as a quasi-experiment, I find that digital reporting induces firms to expand sustainability disclosure, reduces ESG rating disagreement, but also incentivizes cheap talk. These results suggest that digital reporting improves the accessibility and comparability of sustainability information but may undermine its quality. This chapter highlights both the benefits and unintended consequences of emerging technologies in shaping the non-financial information environment. The third chapter, co-authored with Huiyun Li and Qianying Liu, investigates the association between common ownership and corporate sustainability performance, as well as the moderating role of public attention to environmental issues. Using data on Chinese A-share listed firms, we show that common ownership is positively associated with firms’ sustainability performance, and that this relationship is positively moderated by public attention to environmental issues. The underlying channel varies with the level of public attention: the information transmission channel dominates in regions with high public attention, whereas the governance channel becomes more pronounced in regions with low public attention
Entrepreneurial subjectivity, expertise, and speculation in artificial intelligence start-ups in Taipei, Taiwan
No full textThis thesis examines entrepreneurial subjectivity in the artificial intelligence industry through an analysis of startup business founders, venture capitalists, and other entrepreneurs. In recent decades, increasing financialization has led to the emergence of a particular form of techno-optimism that is central to the ethos of these entrepreneurs. Through an ethnography based on 18 months of fieldwork, I show that AI and the economic subversions it will allegedly cause have profound effects on the self-making practices of those involved, generating forms of speculative value experienced as a sense of potential at the level of the organization and the self. To demonstrate this, the thesis focuses upon the process of subject formation in artificial intelligence work as an industry where models of the future economy are made visible through imaginative practices, including marketing, branding, and hype. I examine modalities of speculation characteristic of startup founders and organizations and demonstrate how imagined AI-enriched futures leverage their expertise while simultaneously reinscribing the epistemic authority of their work. I highlight sociotechnical practices of experts for whom breakthrough, mentorship and luck contribute to the reproduction of the expert community. The thesis draws upon science and technology studies, and social studies of finance, adding an examination of the personal lives of experts to studies of expertise and financial markets in anthropological scholarship and contributing a study of transformations in experiences of self in technoscientific capitalism to extend scholarship on the new economy
Essays in economic theory and AI
Full text linkThis thesis explores the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Economic Theory, focusing on two complementary directions. First, I examine how insights from economics, particularly social choice theory, can inform the development of AI systems. Large language models (LLMs) are trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), a process designed to align them with human preferences. However, in pluralistic societies, human values are diverse and conflicting. This raises a fundamental question: what does it mean to align an AI system with heterogeneous human values? I argue that this question can be analyzed through the lens of social choice theory. Current RLHF pipelines rely on aggregation mechanisms that lack desirable theoretical properties established in the social choice literature. As an alternative, I propose multiple frameworks grounded in social choice theory and economic theory that offer more principled approaches to preference aggregation in AI alignment. Second, I address the reverse question: how can deep learning enhance econometric methods? While machine learning has revolutionized prediction tasks, its integration with causal analysis remains theoretically challenging. Standard deep learning techniques, optimized for predictive accuracy, can introduce biases when applied to causal questions. I examine several limitations of current approaches: the challenges posed by overparameterization, theoretical and experimental issues related to early stopping, the application of Double/Debiased Machine Learning (DML) methods, and the problematic presence of measurement error in learned embeddings. Through both theoretical analysis and empirical investigation, I demonstrate how these issues can compromise causal inference and propose solutions that better integrate machine learning tools. Together, these two lines of work establish a bidirectional exchange between AI and Economics. Economic theory provides rigorous analytical tools for resolving open questions in AI alignment. Conversely, deep learning contributes powerful new methodological tools to empirical economics, expanding the toolkit available for causal inference. This thesis aims to bridge both domains, offering new theoretical insights and practical solutions at their intersection. By drawing on the strengths of each field, this work contributes to both the development of more aligned AI systems and the advancement of empirical methods in economics
Engineering the social world? An intellectual history of Facebook/Meta, 2004-2021
Full text linkThis project charts an intellectual history of Facebook/Meta from 2004 to 2021, analysing the language with which actors in and around the company came to depict the world, its transformations, and the social infrastructure they were building. Whilst intersecting with the fields of platform studies and the cultural history of computing, the theoretical framework for this project draws upon historiographical approaches to time and discourse, as well as a Gramscian framing of power. Based upon a digital archive of several thousand documents, this thesis applied thematic analysis to explore a set of underlying intellectual developments over these two decades. The empirical analysis unfolds across three interconnected dimensions: Facebook/Meta’s conception of space, its articulations of historical time, and its epistemological and ontological positionings. In exploring these underlying discursive strands, this thesis charts the emergence of what it calls a Big Tech ‘hegemonic horizon’, a particular way of imagining and structuring the world. Specifically, it shows the development of a worldview focused on the possibility of reordering global space, a discourse saturated with futurity, and an expansive systems-perspective in which the world itself becomes, and is constituted by, layers of optimisable systems. This thesis explores the intellectual development of Facebook/Meta actors within and alongside broader histories of colonialism, utopianism and knowledge production. It does so by placing this contemporary hegemonic horizon alongside earlier discursive contexts, interrogating past ways in which space, time, and science were imagined and talked about. Specifically, this research situates Facebook/Meta’s discourse within broader histories of coloniality, progressive time, cybernetics, and contestations over the World Wide Web. In so doing, this research shows not only how Facebook/Meta inherited and reassembled concepts and language from the past, but it also reveals what increasingly came to be concealed and ignored, namely, a critical humanist perspective of technology and the human subject
Essays on generalizability and evidence-use in policy
Full text linkTo increase evidence-use in policy, it is important to understand both the generalizability of evidence, and the existing use of evidence for policy decisions. This thesis comprises three papers on this topic. Chapter 1 studies evidence-use in policy, focusing on one of the most heavily evaluated anti-poverty programs — Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs). Using a novel dataset of 128 program evaluations of CCTs in Latin America and the Caribbean mapped to policy spending on the evaluated programs, I find a robust zero relationship between research results and spending. The only exception is when evaluations are timely and politically aligned. When evaluations are released within four years of the effect year and can be attributed to the political party in power, there is a positive and significant relationship between evaluation outcomes and spending. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the generalizability of evidence, using Bayesian hierarchical models to aggregate the evidence-base on gender differences in altruism and overconfidence. In chapter 2, I find that women give three percentage points more than men in dictator games, but this estimate is likely to be an upper bound due to publication bias. In chapter 3, joint with Oriana Bandiera, Barbara Petrongolo, and Nidhi Parkeh, we find that while experts believe that men are overconfident and women are underconfident, the literature suggests that both men and women are overconfident
Changes, continuities, and gender norms: exploring the household division of labour in Medellín, Colombia
Full text linkThe thesis explores how gender norms change in the context of Medellín, Colombia. It focuses on why men’s participation in unpaid household responsibilities appears resistant to change despite women’s increasing involvement in paid work. Based on 16 months of fieldwork, it critically examines the World Values Survey (WVS), commonly used to measure social norms by aggregating individual gender attitudes. The thesis argues that the design of the WVS, influenced by theories assuming linear development towards gender equality, oversimplifies the complexities of gender norm change. Using a multilevel feminist institutionalist framework, the research reveals that gender transformations have resulted in the co-existence of normative models, with more varied alternatives in Medellín’s society in flux, rather than straightforward and rapid shifts from old to new norms. A nested mixed-methods approach follows WVS variables across three levels of analysis (micro, meso, and macro), combining locally driven household surveys, qualitative interviews with survey respondents, and participant observation, to uncover the varied interpretations and responses to gender norms among socially situated actors. This approach challenges the presumed consensus reflected in survey data, revealing ambiguities and multiple meanings in how gender norms are understood and negotiated. Through its core focus, the thesis emphasises the potential of individuals and marginalised groups to transform gender norms, while also recognising the constraints these norms impose on their actions and strategies for change. This creates a tension in what forms of change are possible, highlighting both the agency and the limits of those working to shift deep-seated gender norms. The thesis further investigates men’s changing roles and the contextual factors, such as violence and informality, that shape trajectories of stability and change. It offers an intergenerational perspective that moves beyond traditional intra-household bargaining frameworks, providing a nuanced understanding of how gender norms are reproduced and contested in everyday life amidst rapid urbanisation and economic liberalisation. By linking micro-level interactions and negotiations within the family and community to meso-level changing institutions and gender norms at the macro-level, the thesis reconsiders gender norm change as a dynamic process filled with ambiguity and diversity. It underscores the need for context-specific interpretations of research tools like the WVS, informed by local realities and perspectives. It raises caution about carrying out cross-national comparisons based on these tools. These findings contribute to debates on rising female labour force participation in Latin America and the malleability of gender norms, attitudes, and social expectations at critical junctures
Essays in macroeconomic policy and behavioural bias
Full text linkThis thesis comprises three papers that examine the tension between macroeconomic policy and retirement policy in the context of behavioural bias. In the first paper, joint work with Patrick Moran, we develop a theoretical model to assess the distributional and welfare implications of granting early access to retirement accounts as a means of stimulating consumption, contrasting this approach with traditional fiscal stimulus measures. Using a heterogeneous agent model, we demonstrate that while household liquidity policy is an effective and popular stimulus tool, it burdens the poorer and more present-biased workers with the future costs of stimulus, making it more regressive than conventional fiscal policy. In the second paper, we explore how self-control issues influenced participation in an early withdrawal program during the COVID–19 pandemic, confirming that such behavioural factors played a significant role—a critical insight given that the typical illiquidity of retirement systems is often justified by concerns over individuals’ self–control limitations. In the third paper, I compare two approaches to modelling present bias— quasi-hyperbolic discounting and temptation preferences. By recasting the latter in continuous time, I can directly compare the two frameworks, showing that quasi–hyperbolic discounting is a special case of temptation preferences under some common assumptions. Whilst being behaviourally equivalent, they are not welfare equivalent and so distinguishing between them is important. Differences in the behaviour of biased agents who are sophisticated provide opportunities for identification between the two approaches
Command over time: examining the role of time demands in work-related conditionality
No full textTime-demands are embedded in activation policies and are an important dimension of conditionality. They include but extend beyond work search and availability requirements. Despite their prominence in UK policy, they are yet to receive focussed attention from scholars. This thesis offers a mixed methods investigation, across three papers, of the experiences and implications of the time demands embedded in work-related conditionality. The first paper draws on 33 semi-structured interviews with people subject to intensive work-related conditionality in Greater Manchester. It examines how work-related expectations were understood, and whether people were expected to comply with a standardised expectation of ‘35 hours’, which is evident in the policy design of Universal Credit. Building from an understanding of the multi-layered nature of conditionality in paper one, a second conceptual paper revisits work on discretionary time (Goodin et al., 2008). Here time is viewed as a resource which may be directed toward different activities and goals according to an individual’s resources and responsibilities. The framework is used to highlight key dimensions that influence a person’s availability for paid work, highlighting recognition gaps in current activation policy. The third paper estimates, through secondary analysis of time-use survey data, the feasibility for people to meet work-related conditions alongside their other minimum obligations. The paper explores the potential feasibility by simulating different activation implementation conditions and labour market scenarios. The thesis makes four contributions. First, it demonstrates the value of time demands in examining the implementation and experience of work-related conditionality. Second, it develops and applies a framework for critically examining the feasibility of the time demands that are integral components of benefit conditionality, given people’s other commitments. Third, it exposes the disconnect between policy rhetoric around tailoring conditions attached to benefit receipt (‘personalised conditionality’) and actual experiences. Fourth, it stresses the need for a broader employment support policy agenda which moves away from an individualized framing of the influences over people’s availability and working hours