Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Essays On International Trade And Economic Growth, Mateo Hoyos

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation I study the relationship between trade and economic growth, with a focus on developing economies. I specifically provide a critical review of the consensus view in trade and growth, according to which a liberal trade regime is generally the best policy stance to promote growth. In the first essay of this dissertation, I provide evidence that the relationship between trade policy and growth may depend on economic structure: tariff reductions are followed by higher levels of GDP per capita for manufacturer countries, but lower levels for nonmanufacturers. Testing for mechanisms, I find the heterogeneity seems to be …

Essays On Market Inefficiencies Arising From Information Asymmetry And Market Power, Ming Ge

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation comprises three chapters that empirically investigate various kinds of market inefficiencies arising from seller misbehaviors. The first two chapters focus on physicians' overtreatment in healthcare markets. A standard reputation system falls short of effectively curbing overtreatment due to the credence-good nature of such a market: patients cannot tell whether a high-cost treatment recommendation (versus a less costly and complex treatment) is necessary even after the service is completed. In the first chapter, I propose a novel solution to reinstate the function of reputation by combining a reputation mechanism with patient search for second opinions. I conduct a laboratory …

Three Essays On Macroeconomics And Development, Guilherme Klein Martins

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a collection of essays that relate, in different forms, macroeconomic policies to economic development. Essay 1 provides evidence that austerity shocks have longrun negative effects on GDP. Besides addressing the important gap in the growing fiscal research regarding the short time horizon of the estimations, the paper analyzes two other important assumptions made in the literature regarding the (i) symmetry of episodes of fiscal expansion and contraction and (ii) uniformity of fiscal multipliers for different sizes of shocks. We use narrative fiscal shocks and propensity score reweighting in a local projections setup to account for the potential …

The Economics Of Information And Communication Technologies In Our Society, Augusto Espin

Doctoral Dissertations

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) play a fundamental role in today's society. As ICTs they become more mature and widely adopted, societies become more dependent on their use to operationalize daily activities. However, there are multiple societal impacts of ICTs that are not yet well understood. In this dissertation, I explore three different aspects of ICTs that have been widely discussed by media and industry during recent years. I analyze these topics from an economic perspective, contributing to the debate with rigorous modeling and the ensuing discussion of its implications. First, I study the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had …

Three Essays On The Political Economy Of Cultural Production And Creative Labor, Luke Pretz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the relationships between capital, cultural production, and creative labor. Essay one theorizes the basis for the intensification of pop music stardom following the introduction of on-demand streaming technology. Prior to the emergence of on-demand streaming, record labels and broadcasters had a mutualistic relationship, wherein the near cost-free music provided by record labels formed the basis for radio broadcasts, which in turn formed the basis for the consumption of that music. Following the emergence of on-demand streaming the mutualistic relationship was ruptured. Broadcasters, in the form of streaming platforms, transitioned to the cost-efficient cultivation of masses of highly …

Three Essays On The Political Economy Of The Cfa Franc, Francis Perez

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is organized into three essays. The second essay provides a historical overview of the CFA franc and explores why the CFA franc has survived for so long. It argues that a historical and dialectical materialist analysis of the CFA’s history can best explain both its extraordinary longevity and the periodic major reforms to its functioning. The third essay assesses whether the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) has an independent monetary policy by examining the relationships between BCEAO’s foreign reserves and base money, and between BCEAO and the European Central Banks’s policy rates. The fourth essay evaluates …

Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I advance a political ethnography of critical infrastructure to better understand terminal capitalism, in which the waste products of commodification and resource depletion are destroying the ecological systems that support life. My object of study is the massive disjuncture between individual knowledge and intention, and these catastrophic collective planetary outcomes. Theoretically, I develop critical infrastructure theory to diagnose these destructive structures. By “infrastructure,” I mean systems of material and discursive flows fundamental to sedentary human organization, connecting local actions with global systems. Such infrastructure is “critical” in three senses: A) denoting the most important forms of infrastructure …

Essays On Anti-Discrimination Legislation Enforcement And Sex-Based Discrimination In U.S. Labor Markets, Carly Mccann

Doctoral Dissertations

This project focuses on gender and anti-discrimination legislation enforcement in U.S. labor markets. In this dissertation, I examine the efficacy of existing legal and political institutions in place to redress employer sex discrimination. This work provides new understandings of sex discrimination by focusing on the experiences of pregnant workers, an understudied population that continues to lack adequate workplace protections. My research utilizes new administrative data containing formal charges of discrimination filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to provide new insights into the workplace experiences of pregnant workers as well as employer responses to anti-discrimination enforcement. Chapter 1 analyzes …

Four Essays On Peace Consolidation And Ethnic Reconciliation In Postwar Sri Lanka, Narayani Sritharan

Doctoral Dissertations

In four essays, this dissertation explores the process of peace consolidation and economic recovery from the devastating conflict of 1983-2009 in Sri Lanka. This dissertation addresses a timely and important topic. The findings make an important contribution to the literature on economic development and peacebuilding, specifically on the role of foreign aid in alleviating the risks of conflict and helping countries rebuild their economies after conflict. The dissertation highlights important political economy dimensions that help illustrate social and political dynamics that lead to conflict, such as regional and ethnic inequalities, which also influence post-conflict reconstruction. In addition to a historical …

Essays On Advertising, Sodium Intake, And Soda Taxes, Ezgi Cengiz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation empirically explores the economics of advertising, sodium intake, and sweetened beverage taxes in food and beverages industries in the United States. I use recent advances in econometrics and statistics and provide causally interpretable results to deepen our understanding of how individuals respond to changes in advertising and public health policies in consumer packaged good industries. In the first chapter, titled “Is traditional advertising effective? New evidence from mass-produced lager beer in the United States,” I present new evidence regarding the effectiveness of traditional advertising on product demand for mass-produced lager beer in the United States using …

Employer Power: Consequences For Wages, Inequality And Spillovers, Ihsaan Bassier

Doctoral Dissertations

In several countries, wages have stagnated and union membership declined, even as productivity has increased. The established view of employers helpless to the labor market's invisible hand has increasingly come under question. Attention has turned towards the power of employers to set wages; yet only recently have the data required to investigate this – observing workers at their employers – become available, and then mostly in richer countries. My first chapter, “Monopsony in Movers” (co-authored with Arindrajit Dube and Suresh Naidu), proposes a new credible estimation strategy to measure employer monopsony power. We build on the idea that employers with …

Work, Workers, And Reproducing Social Control: Racial Post-Fordism And Alternative Systems, Hannah Rebecca Archambault

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation interrogates the composition of workers, work, and class, as processes in contemporary capitalism and in other existing or future systems. The first section develops a theoretical framework to understand work and workers which draws on Autonomist Marxist, Black radical, and Marxist feminist literatures. This includes considering new forms and organizations of work that arise from current capitalist economic relations, racialized work, and reproductive work. With this framework I build a theory of racial post-Fordism as the current system of economic relations. In the next section, I apply this theory of racial post-Fordism to work and workers in the …

An Economy Of Care: George Eliot's Middlemarch And Feminist Care Ethics, Madison V. Newman

Masters Theses

This thesis assesses the centrality of care relationships in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and, by doing so, seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of individual and collective morality. Using the ethics of care as a methodological framework to acknowledge the importance of care acts and successful care relations – especially those complicated by the presence of dichotomized socioeconomic hierarchies – will allow readers to engage more fully with this text, its author, her relations, her characters, and the community of readers; reading Eliot’s work from this lens will allow us to validate every interaction, every thread of connectedness, and every act …

The Political Economy Of Consumer Credit Expansion And Real Exchange Rate Policy In Dual Economies, Esra Nur Ugurlu

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents three essays on the political economy of consumer credit expansion and real exchange rate policy in dual economies. The first essay analyzes the structural change implications of consumer credit expansions using a dual-sector growth model. In the model, policy-induced increases in banks’ willingness and ability to lend result in new consumer lending, boosting aggregate demand and average wages in the nontradable sector. Under fixed relative wages and mark-up pricing in the tradable sector, wage pressures translate into inflationary pressures. The inflation-targeting central bank raises the policy rate to contain inflationary pressures. This intervention causes a real exchange …

Three Essays On Social Justice Issues: Health, Gender, And Policing, Travis B. Campbell

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation empirically examines three pressing social justice issues in the United States. In the first chapter, titled "Black Lives Matter's Effect on Police Lethal Use-of-force," I explore the influence of Black Lives Matter protests on police lethal use-of-force. A difference-in-differences design finds census places with protests experienced a 15% to 20% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 300 fewer deaths. This decrease was prominent when protests were large or frequent. Potential mechanisms behind the reduction include police agencies obtaining body-worn cameras to curtail force and depolicing following a so-called `Ferguson Effect.' Fewer property crimes, but more …

Three Essays On Public Policy And Welfare In Developing Countries, Alvaro Jeronimo Callejas

Doctoral Dissertations

Developing countries typically implement public policies that modify the market structure to reach a specific goal. However, in this attempt to achieve a policy objective, policymakers may not consider unintended consequences caused by firms' and consumers' optimizing behavior. Moreover, the reaction of market agents to the implemented policy may undermind its effectiveness or lead to an outcome opposite to the one persuaded. This dissertation uses a set of structural models to assess the welfare effect of both intended and unintended consequences of public policies introduced in developing countries. In the first chapter, we evaluate the welfare implications of a public …

Three Essays On Growth And Distribution In Dual Economies, Adam Aboobaker

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three essays on growth and distribution in dual economies. The first of the essays explores short run implications of the relationship between hierarchical consumption preferences, redistribution, and structural change for the robustness of conclusions from neo-Kaleckian models. Integrating class-based heterogeneity to consumption patterns, inspired by notions of a hierarchy of wants, into a dual-sector model of a semi-industrialized economy generates qualitatively distinct results from those that typically follow from contemporary Kaleckian models, even when retaining the core features of the latter class of models. The results depend on the shock to income distribution emphasized and …

What Drives The Fracking Boom Crime Relationship? A Fixed-Effects Analysis Of Crime During The Pennsylvania Fracking Boom, Webster Batista-Lin

Masters Theses

The rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing(fracking) over the past two decades has led to an increasing interest in the relationship between natural resource booms and crime. Since the onset of the fracking boom, numerous anecdotal accounts and an increasing body of empirical studies have suggested that fracking has a significant, positive impact on crime. However, the mechanisms behind this relationship are poorly understood. This study uses a high-resolution dataset and a unique, fixed-effects approach to decompose the effect that fracking has on crime into increases due to the introduction of new wells and increases due to the presence of existing …

Three Essays On Labor And Marriage Markets: Farm Crisis And Rural-To-Urban Migration In The United States, 1920-1940, Jennifer Withrow

Doctoral Dissertations

Race and gender create differential responses to, and outcomes of, economic crisis. In this dissertation, I study the intersection of race and gender in the context of steep declines in farm commodity prices during the U.S. farm crisis of the 1920s and 1930s. Against this backdrop, women altered their marriage timing, increased their labor force participation, and migrated off-farm. Previous quantitative studies of this period typically omitted women due to challenges linking women from one historical census to the next after marriage. I create new datasets following women over both decades and draw on archival sources to explore the impact …

Three Essays On The Political Economy Of Global Inaction On Climate Change, Tyler A. Hansen

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation contributes three essays exploring the political economy of global inaction on climate change. Chapter 1 asks whether climate stabilization means the end of capitalism. Two influential perspectives within environmental political economy—the “degrowth” perspective from ecological economics and the “revolution” perspective from ecological Marxism—answer in the affirmative. If they are right, climate policy programs within capitalism, like the Green New Deal, are non-solutions. I evaluate their arguments, concluding that while environmental sustainability in general likely requires moving beyond capitalism, climate stabilization in particular does not. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, I conclude the chapter by outlining a …

Post-Conflict Recovery Or Conflict Recurrence: A Comparative Analysis Of Economics, Colonial Histories, And Natural Resource Mining In Burkina Faso And Togo, Izabela Frechette

Masters Theses

Directed by: Professor Meredith Rolfe

What are the factors that contribute to peace after civil conflict? What are the factors that contribute to conflict recurrence after civil conflict? In this comparative analysis, Burkina Faso’s military coup in 1988 and Togo’s military coup from 1987-1990 provide two most similar cases that allow for a better understanding of what leads to peace or conflict recurrence. Colonial histories, economics, and natural resource mining are three major factors present in this comparative case analysis that explain why Burkina Faso’s conflict has ended with peace while Togo’s conflict has recurred.

Through a colonial history analysis, …

Care Work In Chile’S Segregated Cities, Manuel Garcia

Doctoral Dissertations

This project combines diverse theoretical and methodological tools to examine the relationship between space and care work in Chile. The chapters are stand-alone articles that come together to tell a single story. The social production of urban space has marginalized thousands of female caregivers from the labor market as Chile’s care system unravels. I argue that community caregiving could simultaneously improve the conditions of caregivers and dependents. Chapter 1 examines the role of residential segregation in reproducing Chile’s meager female labor market participation rates. I use spatial and econometric analysis to show that the social forces that segregate Santiago create …

The Political Economy Of The Cost Of Foreign Exchange Intervention, Devika Dutt

Doctoral Dissertations

Central Banks around the world increasingly intervene in the foreign exchange market for a variety of reasons, such as maintaining exchange rate stability and maintaining a buffer against the impact of capital flight. In fact, research shows that central banks can lean against the macroeconomic policy trilemma through maintaining reserves and intervening in the foreign exchange market, and thereby secure policy space. However, securing this policy space can come at substantial cost. This dissertation explores the political economy of these costs of foreign exchange intervention. Chapter I discusses the concept of the direct cost of intervention, calculates these costs for …

Essays On Franchising In The Service Industry, Jung Hwan Koh

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I explore behavior of firms in franchising, a form of vertical structure that lies between vertical integration (a single firm) and vertical separation (separate firms). Even though franchising contracts outline legal terms and conditions for franchisees (downstream firms) and obligations for franchisors (upstream firms), conflicts between these two parties can arise due to information asymmetries and principal-agency problems. Rather than analyzing these problems, I explore specific conditions in which either a franchisee or a franchisor can exercise more control over the other party and thereby increase its profits. Specifically, I examine the role that: a) multi-unit ownership …

Three Essays On Learning And Conflict Applied To Developing Countries, Amal Ahmad

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation uses microeconomics to study questions of learning and conflict in developing countries. The first essay studies how much rural producers in developing countries can learn from their own experience to redress important information gaps about their crop. It builds a theoretical model of learning from experience and applies it using a rich dataset on cotton farmers in Pakistan. I test whether farmers learn from cultivation experience about the pest resistance of their seeds and use this information to improve selection and productivity. I find no such learning effect and this conclusion is robust to several parameters that could …

Three Essays On Socio-Institutional Ecosystems & Labor Structures, Jonathan Donald Jenner

Doctoral Dissertations

In three essays, this dissertation explores the relationship between the social and the economic, with an eye to how social and institutional formations affect economic outcomes. In the first essay, I construct a theoretical base by developing the metaphor of ‘ecosystem’ as a frame for thinking of the various interrelations between social processes and economic phenomena – the socio-institutional ecosystem analysis. In invoking ecosystem as a central metaphor, this dissertation calls into focus the interaction between the economic and the non-economic, recognizing the multiplicity of causal inter- and intra-relationships between the two. I deploy this analysis in two substantive case …

Essays On Exchange Rate Shocks And The Political Economy Of Local Fiscal Policy In Brazil, Raphael Rocha Gouvea

Doctoral Dissertations

Do exchange rate shocks have distributional consequences? Does employment respond to exchange rate shocks? Do political parties matter when it comes to governing cities? Each chapter of this dissertation attempts to answer one of these questions in the Brazilian context. In the first chapter, titled Large devaluations and inflation inequality: evidence from Brazil, I show that prices of tradable goods/lower-priced varieties increase significantly more than the prices of nontradables/higher-priced varieties. These relative price changes may lead to inflation inequality when household consumption baskets are different across the distribution of income. Using Cravino and Levchenko (2017)'s methodology, we show that …

Petco Park: Evaluating Economic Health Of The Dining Establishment Industry In The Vicinity Of A Downtown Major League Baseball Stadium, Georgy Shukaylo

Masters Theses

This thesis analyzes the economic health of the dining establishments in

Downtown San Diego, CA, specifically in the vicinity of Petco Park. Opened in

2004, Petco Park is home to the San Diego Padres, a Major League Baseball

franchise. In addition, it serves as a venue for outdoor concerts and shows. The

venue is used for most of the year due to an expanded Major League Baseball

schedule, especially compared to other professional sports. Much of the

transformation of San Diego’s Downtown can be attributed to the late 1990’s East

Village Revitalization Plan, which included municipal anchors like the San …

Essays On Women And Work In India And On Other-Regarding Preferences, Sai Madhurika Mamunuru

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a collection of three essays. In Essay I, I explore declining female workforce participation in India and propose the following explanation: Traditionally, Brahmin (upper caste) women were more secluded and did not work outside the house, while non-Brahmin, often poorer, women did. With increased income, non-Brahmin families withdraw women from the workforce in order to signal their enhanced social status. This is a part of a larger process of cultural emulation referred to as the Sanskritization of non-Brahmin families. Using a nationally representative panel dataset, I show, in favor of this hypothesis, that while Brahmin women’s participation …

Three Essays On Political Economy Of Uneven Development: Space, Class And State In Pakistan, Danish Khan

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation delineates the underlying dynamics of the political economy of uneven development by focusing on the dynamic interaction between socially produced space, class and the state in the context of postcolonial capitalism in Pakistan. The first essay (chapter two) focuses on the political economy of urban slums in the context of a postcolonial city of Islamabad, Pakistan. It presents a new conceptual framework of ‘expulsionary development’ to illustrate that the growth of slums and high-end gated housing enclaves are two sides of the same coin at the urban scale. Dispossession and urban sprawl are the underlying factors which mediate …