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Essays on economics of natural disasters in China
Get PDFThis thesis investigates how flood management interventions and flood events shape the spatial distribution of economic development, firm adaptation, and innovation in China— one of the most flood-prone countries in the world. It examines both deliberate, policy-driven reallocations of flood risk and economic adaptations triggered by actual flooding. Chapters 1 and 2 analyze the impacts of China’s national Flood Detention Basin (FDB) policy, which redirects floodwaters into designated rural areas to protect downstream urban centers. Chapter 1 uses reduced-form empirical methods to quantify the economic costs taken by FDB-designated counties, while Chapter 2 develops a spatial general equilibrium model to assess the broader economic benefits of the policy. Chapter 3 investigates the role of floods in shaping the geographical pattern of patenting activities. Together, the three chapters provide a comprehensive analysis of how both flood risks and flood management strategies influence the geography of economic activity and adaptive responses in China. Chapter 1 examines the economic costs of China’s Flood Detention Basin (FDB) policy, implemented in 2000. Under this national policy, the government designated 96 counties to host FDBs — low-lying areas intended to absorb excess floodwater during extreme weather events. While protecting downstream urban centers, this policy imposes concentrated flood risks on rural counties. Using difference-indifferences methods, the chapter documents significant economic costs for FDB counties: a 10.7% reduction in nighttime light intensity, a 15.9% decline in new firm entries, and a 19.7% drop in fixed asset investment. These losses are persistent and primarily driven by firms’ aversion to locating in high-risk areas, rather than migration responses by individuals. Overall, using causal identification tools, this chapter shows that FDB policy has led to a substantial economic cost in counties selected to take more flood risks. Chapter 2 builds a structural spatial general equilibrium model to quantify both the aggregate benefits of the FDB policy. The model captures trade linkages across FDB counties, protected cities, and the rest of the country. Counterfactual simulations reveal that the policy indeed enhances national output by protecting high-productivity urban centers. Overall, the benefit to cost ratio of the Flood Detention Basin policy exceeds one. However, these gains come at the expense of lower-productivity rural areas bearing the flood risk. The model shows that removing high-productivity counties from the FDB list would not substantially reduce output gains, while greatly improving equity. These findings suggest that the current FDB configuration may overprioritize output over equality. The results indicate the necessity for a more balanced compensation scheme to support vulnerable regions. Chapter 3 explores how floods shape the spatial distribution of innovation in China. Using satellite-derived flood maps and detailed patent data, I created a dataset to measure collaborative patents among different regions. The chapter finds that floods decrease local patenting activity but simultaneously encourage cross-county collaboration in innovation. A one-day increase in average flood duration is related to a 12% increase in collaborative patents between counties. These partnerships are especially strong between counties that share similar flood histories and are more likely to yield disaster mitigation technologies. Mechanism analysis shows that historical flood experience—rather than unexpected shocks—drives the shift toward collaboration, suggesting a strategic adaptation to long-term climate risks
The politics of ethical self-becoming: an ethnographic study of South Asian women’s (re)positioning in broken transnational marriages in the United Kingdom
Get PDFThis thesis draws on 18 months of person-centred, ethnographic fieldwork and ongoing contact exploring broken transnational marriages, domestic abuse and destitution experienced by South Asian brides migrating to the United Kingdom without natal family in proximity. It interrogates the process of their ethical self-becoming as they persevere and “keep going” through several challenging life events. To investigate self-becoming, I developed “Ethical (Re)positioning” – an analytical tool with a cartographic approach to examine intertwining forces shaping self-becoming over time and space. It interrogates how women navigate interweaving dynamics of familial, legal, social and medical structures, interpersonal relationships, thoughts, and emotions in gendered migration. “Ethical (Re)positioning” illuminates migrant brides’ challenging (re)positions as they await delayed spousal visas, experience domestic abuse, face deportation, fight for rights to UK residency, struggle with poor language and digital skills, and achieve economic independence. It emphasises their predicaments, concerns, doubts, fears and “multiple ethical dilemmas” in and across their (re)positions. It reveals their “carceral escapes” whereby escaping one challenging (re)position often leads to new controlling social, legal, familial, or economic structures. This thesis argues that ethical self-becoming is a shifting, non-linear, reflective and reactionary process across (re)positions, unfolding within life challenges and devotional practices, with variable outcomes, where joy, faith, hope, despair, courage, and forbearance are emotions and practices. This thesis challenges the assumption of supportive kin and community networks within South Asian transnational marriages. It refines theories of Muslim subjectivity within the anthropology of Islam, which often centre on ethical self-cultivation shaped through formalised practices. It revises the concept of “moral breakdown” in the anthropology of ethics, which overlooks people’s experiences of “multiple ethical dilemmas” across complex ethical (re)positions, where returning to an unreflective state of everyday moral dispositions is rare. This thesis offers a novel analytical approach to studying gender, migration, kinship, and Muslim female subjectivity
Essays on outsourcing, automation and economic justice
Get PDFThis thesis examines how domestic outsourcing and automation shape labour market outcomes, and how the philosophy of John Rawls can inform normative economics and economic policy. It is structured around three distinct essays. The first essay provides the first empirical analysis of the impact of domestic outsourcing on workers in the UK, using matched worker-firm data and focusing on cleaners and security guards. I estimate wage penalties of 2.8% and 5.6% respectively, and show that contractor firms pay systematically lower AKM wage premiums than in-house employers. These differences reflect both lower rents per worker and, for security workers, weaker rent-sharing—highlighting the role of firm-level practices in driving wage inequality. The second essay uses a novel proprietary survey of UK manufacturing sites between 2005 and 2023 to examine the employment effects of CNC machine tools and industrial robots. I show that both technologies are associated with significant increases in employment at adopting plants – between 6% and 9% after four years – compared to a control group of non-adopting plants. I also find positive spillovers on employment among industry competitors and a positive aggregate impact on industry-level employment, challenging the view that automation necessarily displaces workers. The final essay argues that the standard economic interpretation of John Rawls—as an advocate of redistribution justified by a maximin social welfare function—misrepresents the spirit and substance of his theory. I argue that Rawls offers a richer conception of justice, grounded in reciprocity and focused on access to economic power and the social bases of self-respect. I outline the core features of a Rawlsian normative economics—plural in values, grounded in measurable primary goods, and psychologically realistic; and propose a policy agenda centred on predistribution and meaningful work. Together, these essays contribute new evidence on how firms and technologies shape labour market inequality, and offer a rich non-welfarist framework for rethinking the goals and design of economic policy
Essays in labour economics
Get PDFThis thesis examines factors that influence economic and labour market outcomes throughout the life-cycle, with a focus on the importance of place. The first chapter examines the role of local labour market conditions on educational take-up and human capital investment in England. I match administrative data on firms and students to document the variation in the level and field of skills demanded and study whether local skill demand shapes local students’ educational attainment. I document a positive cross-sectional correlation between the skills demanded in local jobs and education choices. But, using a dynamic difference-in-difference strategy, I find at most a very muted response to large increases in local demand for degrees or specific skills for subsequent cohorts of students making educational investment decisions. The second chapter turns to the question of geographic mobility, using PSID data to shed light on the generational dynamics of (internal) migration. I find that children born in a different state than at least one of their parents have approximately 20-25 percent higher short-term and medium-term interstate migration rates, and 50 percent higher lifetime mobility rates. These differences are robust to controlling for a wide set of observables, and are consistent across subgroups by education and gender. These findings have significant implications for spatial sorting models and our understanding of intergenerational transmission of economic opportunity. In the third chapter, we assess the career earnings losses that individual Swedish workers suffered when their occupations’ employment declined. Our estimates show that occupational decline reduced mean cumulative earnings from 1986–2013 by no more than 2%–5%, with larger losses for those initially at the bottom of their occupations’ earnings distributions. This loss reflects a combination of reduced earnings conditional on employment, reduced years of employment and increased time spent in unemployment and retraining
Essays on macroeconomics and corporate finance
Get PDFThis 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
New means to old ends? The social democratic politics of financial reform in France and Spain (1981-1996)
No full textThis dissertation seeks to answer the question: why did the Left engage in financial liberalisation reforms since the 1980s? Existing accounts of the politics of financial liberalisation have focused on external constraints, notably capital flight or currency speculation, that forced them to abandon their ideological commitments and converge on pro-capital reforms; on the rise of influence of orthodox economists within Left parties; or on the expansion of credit to resolve distributive conflict. This leaves unanswered how Left parties could hope to win over their constituencies if they broke radically with social democratic policy goals. This thesis argues that financial reforms were an attempt by social democratic parties to build a new ‘growth model’ after Keynesian recipes for growth and employment had stopped working. Rather than a radical paradigm change, reforms constituted ‘second order change’ (Hall, 1993), whereby policymakers change the instruments to pursue old objectives, such as full employment and raising living standards of lower income strata. The thesis examines the cases of the governments of the Parti Socialiste in France and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español in Spain from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. Both parties pursued financial liberalisation but reform trajectories varied with the policy imperatives of the parties. In France, the aim of restoring productive investment tried to create a “finance-led growth model”, whereby savings mobilised for investment would in turn generate returns for a wide class of “popular shareholders”. In Spain, an obsession with anti-inflationary priorities tried to limit public spending, which was seen as inflationary. Financial reform thus tried to boost welfare-substituting instruments such as private pensions. In both cases, these reforms continued to be defended even when they did not result in broad-based benefits, as reformers believed that taking “corrective action” within the new growth model would suffice to fulfil their original social democratic objectives
Scales of dispossession: policing the threshold of Syrian lives in Istanbul
No full textThis thesis offers a critical mixed-method account of a few Syrian migrant friends living in Istanbul in the last decade. From their gaze I situate Istanbul within a loose carceral landscape, at once grounded within the city streets and situated within a wider geographical arc, encompassing European asylum policies and the Turkish government’s occupation of North Syria. I examine their lives through foregrounding three frames in Istanbul – the policing of space and legal categorisations, the practices of property relations, and the situated Syrian tourist worker. Through close ethnographic engagement with their lives, combined with interviews with journalists, lawyers and human rights workers, critical discourse analysis of newspaper reports, and historical analysis, I analyse each frame as sets of practices and relations which are entangled in wider geographical and temporal scales. I deploy two central concepts in order to critically interrogate these further – dispossession and carcerality – and draw out the multiplicity of power, working across disciplinary, biopolitical, spatial and sovereign registers, through which they operate. Drawing on theories of political belonging, urban space, bordering, black and feminist geography, and racialisation, this thesis is an attempt to map some of the contours through which the figure of “the migrant” is being produced, criminalised and punished across multiple scales, grounded in the streets of Istanbul
The application of judicial review doctrines to automated administration in the United Kingdom
No full textThis thesis evaluates the application of English doctrines of judicial review to uses of automation and machine learning in administrative decision-making. The thesis undertakes a close analysis of five doctrines of judicial review that are likely to be engaged by the use of automation and machine learning technologies in government. These doctrines are: reviewability of decisions, the Carltona doctrine, fettering of a discretion, irrelevant considerations and the duty to give reasons. The significant contribution of this thesis is that to date there has not been a granular and sustained treatment of how the grounds of review might apply to automated decision-making in the UK state. This thesis seeks to fill this gap in the literature and contribute to knowledge through an extended examination of the five selected grounds of review. The thesis answers the question: how will these doctrines in their current forms likely apply to uses of automation and machine learning in government? The thesis seeks to examine to what extent these doctrines are capable of meeting their original objectives in an environment of changing administrative behaviour due to uses of automation and machine learning. The thesis argues that some of the grounds of review examined provide a doctrinal foundation which can be flexibly applied to a new automated context and can exercise significant restrictions and constraints over unfair or unlawful uses of automated decision-making in government. Other doctrines demonstrate a more significant clash between what the law currently requires from a decision-maker and whether the technology can satisfy those requirements. By examining these grounds of review in detail I seek to shed a light on the aspects of judicial review’s doctrinal architecture that are and are not readily applicable to uses of automation and machine learning. Through this analysis I lay the foundation for future conversations and research about which areas of review require evolution or where further legal regulation of automation and machine learning is required to respond to this new administrative context
The state and its competitors in African(a) political thought
No full textIn this dissertation I argue that the core of the anticolonial project of the postcolonial state was to secure dignity for its people and that the normative yardstick for its success or failure should be whether it has secured such dignity. While maintaining the salient critiques of state failure literature, especially the critiques of its racist and colonial foundations, I argue that we should nonetheless have criteria for declaring a postcolonial polity failed, and it is these criteria I develop in the thesis. I also argue that state failure can and sometimes should be succeeded by the adoption of alternatives to the state, including anarchic alternatives. Given the record of the state in relation to the realisation of dignity, I argue that anticolonial utopia may in fact only be realisable at a distance from the state. To make this argument, I revisit the twentieth century debates that surrounded the coming-into-being of the postcolonial state forms, the record of the state especially in East Africa, and the alternative forms of polity that coexisted with and even challenged the state—what I call the state’s competitors
Thesis in macroeconomics and Chinese economy
No full textThis dissertation examines the heterogeneous macroeconomic impacts of industrial and environmental policies on firm behavior, innovation, and regional development in China. The first chapter studies the effects of robot subsidies in the manufacturing sector. Exploiting variation in subsidy rollout across municipalities, I find that robot subsidies, while designed to be uniform across firms, disproportionately benefit larger firms at the cost of reducing new firm entry. I then build a theoretical framework to highlight how financial frictions cause a uniform subsidy to favor capital-rich firms, creating a trade-off between average automation gains and productivity-reducing dispersion. A calibrated dynamic model shows that a 20 percent subsidy raises output by around 1.2 percent but reduces total factor productivity by around 2.4 percent due to exacerbation of misallocation. The second chapter investigates the impact of electric vehicle (EV) subsidies on innovation along the supply chain. Using a newly compiled dataset of over 1,000 municipal subsidy policies, I document sharp differences in effectiveness across subsidy types. Innovation and public procurement subsidies significantly boost both downstream and upstream patenting, while investment and purchase subsidies show limited impact. These findings underscore the importance of aligning policy design with supply chain dynamics to foster industrial upgrading. The third chapter evaluates the economic consequences of flood control policies that real-locate environmental risk. Exploiting the designation of 96 counties as Flood Detention Basins (FDBs), I show that these counties experience lower firm entry, reduced investment, and declining nighttime lights. A spatial general equilibrium model reveals that while FDBs increase national flood resilience, the economic burden falls disproportionately on rural areas. Together, these chapters shed light on the distributional and efficiency trade-offs of industrial and environmental interventions in a developing economy context