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Bringing climate scenarios to central bankers (and beyond)
No full textFor many years there has been a gulf between central banking and climate finance but today central bankers are important players in the fight against climate change. The Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) played a pivotal role in this shift. Giacomo Bressan and Maria Nieto argue that it is now time to push one step further: to make the NGFS long-term scenarios usable in the day-to-day operations of financial institutions
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
Demographic statistical evidence with a humane face
Get PDFThis thesis shows that suspicion about the existence of bias in demographic statistical studies which align with social stereotypes and potentially support one side of a major political controversy can provide sufficient grounds for rationally suspending judgment about their content and refusing to use them in decision-making. Using the framework of bounded Bayesianism, it explores the perspectives of both statistically sophisticated agents and statistically novice yet socially-aware agents towards these studies. It concludes that both types of agents can have adequate reasons to rationally reject believing and using such studies. The thesis also examines the language of statistical reports about social groups and shows how, in different contexts, they can imply harmful essentialist claims about those groups
Falling from grace: United Nations peacemaking and peacekeeping in the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1947-1982
Get PDFThis PhD thesis examines United Nations (UN) peacemaking and peacekeeping efforts in the Arab-Israeli conflict between 1947 and 1982. It explores the goals and strategies employed by the UN, their efficacy, and the belligerents’ response to them, in what could be best described as a slow yet steady fall from grace. In 1947 the General Assembly adopted the partition plan with the intention to create one Jewish and one Arab state in historical Palestine. However, a failure to implement this plan left the Arab-Israeli conflict hanging. By the end of 1982, the UN’s ongoing failure in mediating the Arab-Israeli conflict stripped it of its mediatory and peacekeeping prominence. Drawing upon an extensive range of primary sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, this PhD thesis advances four interconnected arguments: First, while many dominant powers in New York always seemingly favoured a ‘just and lasting peace’, this was often not the priority of Arabs and Israelis. Second, Arabs and Israelis cooperated with UN decisions voluntarily when it suited their interests, or when coerced by the international community. Third, UN practices that always failed were the appointment of underequipped UN envoys, the reliance on short-term condemnations, and on peacekeeping forces. Fourth, UN tactics that did work included the use of UN observers and the imposition of ceasefires. This thesis also shows that one seemingly basic technique that the UN never tried in the examined period was to attach Arab and Israeli advisers to peacemaking and peacekeeping missions, plausibly due to the assumption that unbiased mediators must be outsiders. Overall, this study demonstrates that in some cases, such as the Palestine Commission and the Lebanese government in 1982, military power did not necessarily correlate to historical significance
Essays on generalizability and evidence-use in policy
Get PDFTo 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
Essays on digital and sustainable finance
Get PDFThe 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
The impact of political and media disclosures in the context of ESG
Get PDFThis 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 in consumer heterogeneity and expectations
Get PDFThis thesis comprises three essays that examine the origins, cross-section, and consequences of household forecast errors. Drawing on harmonised micro-data from the Michigan Survey of Consumers, the New York Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations, and the ECB Consumer Expectations Survey, the first essay uncovers a single latent “pessimism” factor that declines monotonically with income. Next, the chapter investigates forecast pessimism at a more granular level, and demonstrates that the effect of income is quantitatively large. Exploiting individual level income shifts, it shows that the relationship between income and forecast pessimism survives. Lower-income households systematically over-predict inflation, unemployment, and other macroeconomic outcomes. The second essay investigates one explanation for forecast pessimism: ambiguity aversion. We ask: if ambiguity aversion drives forecast pessimism, what is the source of this ambiguity? The paper outlines two testable hypotheses and tests them. First, using survey-based Ellsberg experiments linked to expectation data, we find that more ambiguity averse agents have larger, positive, forecast errors, but that the elicited preferences covary with income themselves. Second, we find that the response of consumer expectations on receipt of a signal is asymmetric, and that this asymmetry declines with income. Taken together, these two results are consistent with low-income households acting as if they are more ambiguity averse, and the source of this ambiguity being the strength of signals households receive. The final essay embeds these distorted beliefs in a portfolio-choice framework with nominal risk. Non-homothetic robustness is employed, consistent with the conclusions of Chapter 2. When we calibrate the model, we match the empirical profile of inflation forecast errors, as detailed in Chapter 1. We next estimate the welfare cost of distorted inflation beliefs in the model and find that a modest aggregate forecast error has the potential to generate large welfare losses
Are we the people? Democratic municipalism in two European cities, in the approach to power and thereafter 2011-2024
No full textThis thesis examines the theory and practice of democratic (“new”) municipalism, as it has been expressed in Madrid, Spain and Zagreb, Croatia. In theory, municipalism aims to reclaim popular control over key dimensions of everyday urban life — from housing and infrastructure to public services — through a unique hybridization of participatory policy formation with conventionally electoral contestation. While widely celebrated in activist and scholarly discourse, however, the ability of municipalist formations to produce real-world outcomes consonant with their aims has varied sharply from place to place, and the tradition’s present vitality and capacity to produce new liberatory openings is in question. This research, grounded in a constructivist and critical epistemological framework, traces the intellectual and historical lineage of municipalism from its roots in libertarian socialist thought, through the horizontalist movements of the early 21st century, to its political crystallization in Ahora Madrid and Zagreb je NAŠ!. It blends textual analysis and a program of semi-structured interviews with close observation of the urban environments in question. Through detailed reconstruction of these two efforts, the study identifies municipalism as a participatory, feminist, agonistic and commons-based practice that proposes to challenge neoliberal hegemony from within the urban polity. It also assesses the limitations of the municipalist form, including its vulnerability to institutional capture, its theoretical looseness, and its retreat from mass participation into academic and elite spaces. The thesis contributes to the sociology of urban place and governance by clarifying the conditions under which municipalist experiments succeed, the assemblages they form, and the residual value they may offer to future emancipatory movements. Ultimately, it argues that while municipalism may not presently function as a mass political vehicle, its constituent practices retain relevance for prefigurative politics and the democratic stewardship of urban life
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