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White shoes in gray areas : a conceptual history of regulatory arbitrage
No full textDefence date: 03 June 2025Examining Board: Prof. Peter Frank Drahos (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Martijn Hesselink (European University Institute); Prof. Desmond Manderson (Australian National University); Prof. Imelda Maher (University College Dublin Sutherland School of Law)The term regulatory arbitrage gained currency in the financial regulatory literature of the 1980s to describe clever strategies firms used to avoid or mitigate regulatory burdens. It captured broader attention after the financial crisis, when banks came under scrutiny for structuring their assets and affairs deliberately to avoid regulations. Since then, commentators have seized on it to describe a broad array of practices across diverse economic sectors. Despite the term’s prevalence, there is scant agreement on the scope of activities it describes. For some, it is merely a catch-all for legal avoidance from time immemorial. Answering calls for work placing this concept in a richer context, this project retraces regulatory arbitrage’s expansion not only as a real-world phenomenon, but equally as a unit of discourse. Regulatory arbitrage is a conceptual metaphor, based on the audacious assumption that every legal principle has its price. It is also a grammatical metaphor: a noun used to describe a process (in lieu of a verb). As such, it naturalizes the behavior it describes as eternal and inevitable, fostering a dangerous conventional wisdom that all regulation is futile. It also obscures the identities of its beneficiaries, curtailing conversations about how uneven access to sophisticated legal advice exacerbates wealth inequality. Through this lens, the concept appears inextricably linked with the ascendancy of financialized business models across the contemporary economy, especially legal practice. It reflects the paramount importance contemporary capitalism, fueled by advances in technology epitomized by artificial intelligence, places on quantitative measures of value. It encourages an instrumental perspective on law, reinforced by law and economics thinking and declining faith in the law’s capacity to vindicate countervailing non-economic values. In so doing, it casts what might otherwise be seen as brazen attempts to undermine the rule of law as innocent efforts to enhance the law’s efficiency.Chapter 3 'The calculus of compliance: the costs of cost-benefit analysis' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'Law, commodification, and the distribution of resources'(2024) in the journal 'Global jurist'. Chapter 4 'Attorney work product: the commodification of compliance' draws upon an earlier versions published as an articles 'Commodification and EU law : a genealogy' (2023) and 'Facing the fiction : can the European Union regulate fictitious commodities and capital?' (2023) in the journal 'European law open'
Abuse of dominance and the commodification of cyberspace
No full textDefence date: 19 February 2025Examining Board: Prof. Nicolas Petit (European University Institute, supervisor); Prof. Dina Waked (Sciences Po, external co-supervisor); Prof. Giorgio Monti (European University Institute); Prof. Filippo Lancieri (Georgetown University)This thesis explores the relationship between abuse of dominance case law in Europe and the commodification of intangible resources in the digital economy. Digital platforms focus on extracting value from intangibles such as user information, intermediated content, web traffic, advertisable web space, and user groups. As these intangibles are gradually integrated into productive processes, they become objects of commodification. To increase the necessary control over these new commodities, digital platforms employ technological and contractual arrangements, as well as traditional legal institutions like intellectual property. These appropriation strategies can lead to entitlement conflicts between platforms and other economic agents. The enforcers of Article 102 TFEU need to address these entitlement conflicts, and their intervention inevitably shapes regimes of control and exclusion over digital intangibles. The thesis draws on Hohfeld’s and Calabresi & Melamed’s theoretical frameworks to model how competition law enforcers resolve conflicts by reallocating entitlements and instituting them under property rules, liability rules, or inalienability rules. The application of this framework allows to envision alternative competition remedies for existing cases, which may also inspire future enforcers of Article 102 TFEU. The thesis concludes that competition law has become a corrective tool for the process of commodification. From time to time, it reorganises the mechanisms that allocate control over intangible resources in society. Once entitlements over intangibles are exchanged on markets, competing claims over them can be solved through the market itself, through command and control, or - most interestingly - through a range of solutions between these extremes. As enforcers navigate these options, they should consider the long-term implications of the entitlement regimes they create. In the context of commodification, the prohibition of abuse of dominance has become a tool to redistribute entitlements involving new commodities and to adjust their future tradability.Chapter 2 'Rivalrous intangibles: Entitlement conflicts in competition cases' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'Entitlement problems in digital markets and how antitrust shapes the appropriation of network externalities' (2021) in the journal 'Competition and regulation in network industries'
Banking transitions : essays on branch closures and fintech lending
No full textDefence date: 27 March 2025Examining Board: Prof. Giacomo Calzolari (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Thomas Crossley (University of Michigan, Co-supervisor); Prof. Xavier Vives (IESE Business School); Prof. Andreas Fagereng (BI Norwegian Business School)This thesis contains three independent essays studying recent trends in financial intermediation: bank office closures and the functioning of fintechs in lending marktes. In the first chapter, joint with Jin Cao, Ismael Moreno-Martinez, and Kasper Roszbach, we investigate the impact of bank branch closures on household finances in Norway. We combine a novel dataset of bank presence with individual tax records spanning from 2004 to 2019. We find that households exposed to a bank branch closure experience significant declines in wealth, loan access, and home ownership rates. We find evidence consistent with soft information losses driving the results. These effects underscore the continuing importance of physical bank presence for households, even in an era of increasing digital banking. The second chapter, co-authored with Sebastian Doerr, Leonardo Gambacorta, and Luigi Guiso, examines the effects of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) on fintech lending. By granting consumers control over their data, the CCPA enhances fintech lenders’ ability to offer lower interest rates, particularly benefiting traditionally underserved groups. Our findings suggest that privacy regulations like the CCPA can benefit fintechs over banks and enhance access to credit. In the third chapter, I develop a theoretical model to explore why fintechs have not driven traditional banks out of the lending market. The model’s starting point is fintechs’ superior screening abilities, which allow them to offer lower rates, while traditional banks maintain an advantage in monitoring borrower performance post loan issuance. These characteristics reflect how technological advancements affect competition between traditional banks and fintechs. Moral hazard post loan issuance decreases the informational advantage coming from better screening and implies that the fintech may not always have a market presence if it cannot properly discipline the borrower.-- 1 When Your Bank Leaves Town
-- 2 Privacy regulation and fintech lending
-- 3 Technology and credit market information asymmetries
-- References
-- Appendix to Chapter 1
-- B Appendix to Chapter 2
-- C Appendix to Chapter
Socialist in form, mercantilist in substance : the transformation of Soviet Russia into a mercantilist empire, 1917–91
No full textDefence date: 02 June 2025Examining Board: Prof. Alexander Etkind (Central European University, External Supervisor); Prof. Nicolas Guilhot (European University Institute); Prof. Iver B. Neumann (The Fridtjof Nansen Institute); Prof. Jeronim Perović (University of Zurich)This dissertation reinterprets the economic history of the Soviet Union through the lens of mercantilism, challenging the conventional narrative that considers the Soviet Union a failed socialist experiment. By analyzing the Soviet approach to natural resource management—particularly in the oil-and-gas, petrochemical, hydro, and agricultural sectors—this work argues that the Soviet state operated more as a mercantilist empire than as a socialist state. The dissertation traces Soviet economic policies from 1917 to 1991, showing how "aspiringly socialist" policies devolved into mercantilist stratagems. Chapter 1 examines the origins of Soviet resource management strategies, showing how the 1920 GOELRO plan laid the groundwork for mercantilism in the Soviet context by prioritizing oil exports. Chapter 2 focuses on the 1920s and 1930s, highlighting Soviet oil policies’ parallels with the resource management policies of earlier European mercantilist empires. Chapter 3 analyzes Khrushchev’s "petrochemical plan," which, despite its developmentalist goals, deepened the Soviet Union’s reliance on crude oil exports and strengthened its economic ties with the capitalist world. Chapter 4 explores Soviet hydro projects in Central Asia, illustrating how efforts to boost cotton production mirrored past mercantilist practices and fueled nationalist movements, which destabilized the USSR. The final chapter links the Soviet Union’s collapse to its mercantilist economic practices, particularly its dependence on oil exports to the west to not dilute its domestic power through agricultural reform, which left the state vulnerable to external shocks, that materialized in the 1980s and destroyed the state in 1991. The thesis aims to contribute to historiographical debates on Soviet economic history and offer a novel framework for understanding the Soviet Union’s historical trajectory. It argues that the Soviet Union’s failure was not merely due to mismanagement but was fundamentally rooted in contradictions of its resource-based mercantilist policies, which ultimately led to the state’s economic and political collapse
The slippery slope of securitisation : climate change and the international law on the use of force
No full textDefence date: 03 June 2025Examining Board: Prof. Neha Jain (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Sergio Puig De La Parra (European University Institute); Prof. Dino Kritsiotis (University of Nottingham); Prof. Christina Voigt (University of Oslo)As climate change intensifies, its causes and consequences are increasingly framed as a concern of international peace and security. The thesis explores how the securitisation of climate change relates to the international legal framework governing the maintenance of peace and security. The security impact of climate change has repeatedly been put on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council, and the lawfulness of unilateral measures in response to climate harm is starting to be considered in academic debates. I analyse these developments through the lens of securitisation theory and further undertake a doctrinal assessment of the invoked scenarios, ranging from a determination of climate change as a threat to the peace and the authorisation of Chapter VII measures to the right to self-defence. The thesis demonstrates that climate change securitisation represents a broadening of issues viewed as concerns of international peace and security. In contrast, I argue that the governing rules of jus ad bellum are characterised by a narrow understanding of what the maintenance of peace and security entails. Equating climate change with more traditional threats to the peace challenges the systematicity of the legal framework. In light of this, the thesis develops two normative arguments. One, the legal system of peace and security depends on a coherent legal practice due to the interdependent relationship between its rules and the prohibition on the use of force. Two, subjecting broad concerns like climate change to the rules and institutional power structure of the peace and security system undermines the legitimacy and effectiveness of the system itself as well as cooperative efforts to limit global warming. While security responses to climate change promise symbolic benefits, these are outweighed by the downsides. Ultimately, the thesis counters the dominant view that the current law of jus ad bellum is sufficiently flexible to address broad concerns of international peace and security, such as climate change
'Nice umbrella, but let me hold it… at least a little bit, or at times too' : explaining the security strategy of client states under the extended nuclear umbrella
No full textDefence Date: 26 May 2025Examining Board: Prof. Ulrich Krotz (Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals; former European University Institute, supervisor); Prof. Stephanie Hofmann (European University Institute); Prof. Tobias Lenz (Leuphana University Lüneburg); Prof. Hugo Meijer (Institut d'études politiques de Paris)How do countries ensure their protection when relying on extended deterrence commitments? Why do some, like the United Kingdom or France, develop their own nuclear forces, whereas others pursue nuclear capabilities without building weapons, while yet others that do cross the proliferation threshold do not acknowledge or give evidence of their arsenal? Despite the inherent credibility problem in extended deterrence and the real-world problems this creates, existing scholarship has largely failed to answer or even dedicate significant attention to these pressing questions of world politics. This dissertation aspires to fill the gap. To answer these questions, I first develop a typology of the distinct strategies client states use to enhance their security under extended deterrence. As strategic actors in their own right, client states adopt one of four security behaviors: nuclear exploration, where they evaluate whether to pursue nuclear weapons and assess their technological capacity; nuclear hedging, using their nuclear programs to pressure the patron for stronger security commitments; nuclear opacity, developing undeclared nuclear capabilities to compel patron intervention during severe security crises; and nuclear independence, leveraging the patron’s nuclear shield to build independent arsenals. Second, I formulate a theoretical framework to explain why different client states adopt different strategic responses at different times. The theoretical framework is structured as a decision tree addressing three sequential questions. The first operates at the international level, while the second and third delve into the internal dynamics of the state. First, does the client state face a significant external threat to its security? If not, the state is likely to adopt a strategy of nuclear exploration. Second, is there strong domestic opposition—either at the elite and/or popular level—to active nuclear weapons development? States facing such opposition typically pursue nuclear hedging. Third, what are the domestic distributional consequences of nuclear weaponization? States anticipating steep domestic costs for overt non-compliance with the international non-proliferation regime will opt for nuclear opacity. In contrast, those less constrained by non-proliferation pressures are more likely to choose nuclear independence. Finally, I test the theoretical framework through three case studies: West Germany (1945-1960), the People’s Republic of China (1949-1964), and Israel (1948-1967). The specter of a revisionist and potentially nuclear-armed West Germany, driven by ambitions for national reunification, stirred deep security fears on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Knowing they had bargaining leverage with the United States, West German policy-makers were able to exploit the country’s advanced technological base for a military nuclear program (Bonn was within reach of producing weapons-grade fissile material) to obtain unprecedented U.S. security concessions, culminating in shared access to U.S. nuclear weapons. The West German case underlines that the prevalence of strong domestic anti-nuclear opposition is a crucial but underused lever for explaining proliferation abstinence, particularly among countries that would have the necessary technical expertise to build a nuclear device. ii The case of the People’s Republic of China provides further strong support for the explanatory strength of domestic opposition – though in this case located at the policy-elite level – in explaining proliferation abstinence. Although the young People’s Republic was, like West Germany, confronted with serious military challenges, China refrained from pursuing nuclear weapons until its leadership reversed its position on their military usefulness. Once the decision to build an independent arsenal was made, China’s economic autarky and political isolation minimized the domestic costs of flouting emerging international norms and institutions against nuclear proliferation. In contrast, internal opposition in Israel never gained sufficient traction to undermine the country’s nuclear program seriously. Unlike China, however, Israel did not pursue formal nuclear independence despite abiding threats to its security, choosing a path of nuclear opacity instead. Consistent with the theoretical framework, the decision to maintain an unacknowledged nuclear weapons capability enabled the Israeli government to strengthen national security while averting severe damage to Israel’s outwardly dependent economy. This dissertation makes three main contributions. First, it introduces a new explanandum in the study of nuclear politics: the security behavior of client states under the extended nuclear umbrella. Second, it explains variations in the policy choices of these states using a small set of key explanatory factors. Third, drawing on historical evidence, it distills actionable “rules of thumb” to inform policy-making. In an era of growing nuclear uncertainty, intensifying rivalries, and new threats, this dissertation provides foundational research with significant political relevance for providers and recipients of extended deterrence
Evaluating EU legitimacy and accountability in the negotiation and implementation of EU free trade agreements with a focus on CETA
No full textDefence date: 29 April 2025Examining Board: Prof. Joanne Scott (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Deirdre Curtin (European University Institute); Prof. Marise Cremona (European University Institute); Dr. Joanna Apap (European Parliament Research Service)The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) concluded with Canada, and the suspended negotiations to conclude a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the US, have drawn particular attention to the European Union’s (EU) trade policy in recent years. Indeed, the EU’s most recent Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) have sparked a broad interest among EU Member States and citizens, and numerous civil society groups have opposed their approval, fearing negative effects on, inter alia, sustainable development. Regardless of how reasonable or otherwise these concerns are, the thesis considers it valuable to assess whether those negotiating and implementing these FTAs are sufficiently accountable to EU citizens. Examining this issue is especially important in light of the high standards pursued in EU primary law regarding environmental, social and consumer protection, and public health on the one hand, and given the complex institutional mechanisms established under the agreements providing for their implementation in these areas on the other. The thesis employs legitimacy achieved through accountability as the benchmark for evaluation and a theoretical framework has been developed for this purpose. To evaluate legitimacy and accountability in relation to the negotiation and conclusion of the EU’s most recent FTAs as well as in relation to their implementation, the thesis provides an in-depth study of the mechanisms available to the European Parliament and civil society organisations to hold the EU’s decision-makers to account. CETA and the EU’s Trade and Sustainable Development Review of 2022 have been chosen as the relevant case studies and empirical research (interviews and participant observation) was conducted as a means to complement the desk-based case study research. The thesis concludes that the EP needs to be proactive and work with civil society organisations to fill the existing accountability gap, particularly in the FTA implementation phase
Dark matter : sociality, space, and the haptics of queer (il)legibility in 'black Liverpool', 1967-1997
No full textDefence date: 04 July 2025Examining Board: Prof. Benno Gammerl (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Monika Baár (European University Institute); Prof. Matt Cook (University of Oxford); Dr. Leona Vaughn (University of Liverpool)In the cannon of queer British history, ghettoes and ‘urban dystopias’ (i.e., those areas racialised by ethnic concentration, economic/class failure, social behaviours of ill repute, and combinations thereof) beyond London have remained underexplored. Even in the recent proliferation of works focused on more diverse urban environments, sites signifying intersecting points of industrial decline, social immobility and exclusion, and racial marginality outside of capital cities have largely escaped queer historical enquiry. One such site is Liverpool. Once a thriving port city, by the 1990s it was the prime example of post-war Britain’s urban failures, and the 1981 ‘Toxteth Riots’ have come to define both the city itself and the district for which it is named. Toxteth – or as known by many locals, Liverpool 8 (or L8) – is the site of Britain’s oldest settled black community. It is perhaps the oldest continuous black community in Europe. Its Afro-Caribbean club scene was internationally known for much of the twentieth century and was a central cultural site in the Merseybeat era that spawned The Beatles, among other bands. Yet, while Liverpool 8 has long been a popular site of research for sonic geographers, musicologists, and sociologists, queer historians have ignored the district as a site of potential study, seemingly because its archive offers no trace of visible gay or queer social space. This project complexes and problematizes the premium on sexual legibility by exploring L8 as a space of (queer) possibility through, rather than against, its historical illegibility as a site of queer and multisexual sociality. Using oral histories of local residents, activists, and club-goers, this research proposes that the histories of Liverpool 8’s social spaces reveal a far more dynamic landscape of affective possibilities than the regimes of visuality which generate much queer historical work have or can account for
Orchestrating geoeconomic promotion : a historical institutionalist account of export finance in the European Union
No full textDefence date: 01 September 2025Examining Board: Prof. Waltraud Schelkle (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Bernard Hoekman (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Kathleen McNamara (Georgetown University): Prof. Daniel Mertens (Osnabrück University)The EU’s ‘geoeconomic turn’ is often taken for a return of the state – perhaps even further EU integration – in reaction to external challenges, and for a shift away from policymaking dominated by economic interest groups and geared towards international markets. Export finance, which represents a major share of current interventions and features recurringly in the EU’s geoeconomic agenda, is a type of interventionism which is in three meaningful ways at odds with such conceptions of the geoeconomic turn. First, it deepens engagement with global markets and works in tandem with multinationals’ economic interests; second, it is implemented primarily through financial intermediaries rather than being under strong direction by state executives; and third, despite being integral to European agendas, neither is it being leveraged into further integration, nor is its uneven proliferation across member states kept in check by the Commission. Salient aspects of geoeconomic interventionism present clear continuities with pre-existing policymaking logics, rather than strong ruptures. The dissertation investigates the political economy and governance of European export finance, to shed light on the geoeconomic turn more broadly by accounting for the continuities that shape it. In juxtaposition with dominant approaches that struggle account for these continuities, the thesis develops a historical institutionalist approach which informs three articles. Based on industrial policy data, elite interviews, policy documents, and secondary sources, the articles establish and explain continuities in geoeconomic interventionism with respective regards to (a) the relation of trade and industrial policy to multinational firms and international markets, (b) states’ capacity to exercise control and direct market processes, and (c) European integration. The articles explain how previous institutional constellations and governance shape geoeconomic interventionism by (a) empowering and shaping the preferences of multinational firms, (b) weakening state capacities for industrial intervention, and (c) making European interventionism reliant on national capacities
The business of information : the English and Dutch East India companies’ procurement in Coromandel, c. 1700-1800
No full textDefence date: 01 December 2025Examining Board: Prof. Giorgio Riello (European University Institute); Prof. Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol (European University Institute); Prof. Tirthankar Roy (London School of Economics and Political Science); Prof. Mary O’Sullivan (University of Geneva)This dissertation examines the role and significance of information in the context of the English (EEIC) and Dutch (VOC) East India companies’ procurement of cotton textiles on the Coromandel Coast in southeastern India during the eighteenth century. The EEIC and VOC were among the largest and most successful European companies, and Indian cotton textiles formed the bulk of their commodity trade within the Indian Ocean and to Europe during the eighteenth century. In the extant historical scholarship on the European East India companies’ textile procurement in India, several factors ranging from the competitiveness of markets, business competition, rising prices, deteriorating quality, hold-ups, and colonial and political power have received attention, yet information has been overlooked. This dissertation considers information, specifically accounting, commercial, material, product, and production information, as a vital element that facilitated and shaped how the EEIC and VOC coordinated decisions and actions concerning procurement. It emphasizes the role of information asymmetries between the management in Europe and agents in India and between the latter and local contracting merchants who acted as procurement intermediaries. Intermediary merchants operated on long-term contracts that specified the quantity, quality, and date of delivery of cotton textiles that they had to procure from the weavers inland. However, repeated contract breaches and non-performance meant that the EEIC and VOC experienced endemic procurement problems. This dissertation argues that, unlike the VOC, the EEIC overcame these problems through disintermediation and direct procurement from the artisan producers, which it considered an “innovation,” and shows how information was a key factor in this change