Poverty is quintessentially an issue of inequality or lack of social justice within and between nation states. And yet mainstream development theory and institutions of global governance continue to couch reducing poverty as a policy objective, rather than focus on underlying issues of inequality. This book confronts the failings of neo-liberalism and the global governance institutions that promote it. Social Justice and Development makes a significant contribution to current debates around development theory and policy. It explores why articulating social justice in development provides the potential for a fresh approach to global poverty, and one that would overcome the current theoretical 'impasse'. It is essentially an optimistic text that suggests how the principles of global social justice could be used to shift the development paradigm from a consensus that hinges on Washington to one that is global.

In the first chapter, I investigate how external analyst forecasts influence managerial earnings decisions. Using shifts in analyst composition effected by brokerage mergers as a source of exogenous variation, I establish a one-to-one response of firm earnings to analyst forecasts. This response is driven by accounting accruals, consistent with short-termist earnings management. I find that the market perceives these accruals as costly to the firm. I present a model where this behavior emerges as a rational equilibrium, confirmed by a calibration that mirrors a one-to-one forecast-earnings relationship. Calibration outcomes align with real-world earnings and forecast patterns. In the second chapter (co-authored with Harrison Hong and Jeffrey Kubik), we estimate the cost to capital of climate policy. Many US states have set ambitious renewable portfolio standards (RPS) that require utilities to switch from fossil fuels toward renewables. RPS increases the renewables capacity, bond issuance, maturity, and yield spreads of investor-owned utilities compared to municipal producers that are exempted from this climate policy. Contrary to stranded-asset concerns, the hit to overall firm financial health is moderate. Falling cost of renewables and pass through of these costs to consumers mitigate the burden of RPS on firms. Using a Tobin’s 𝒒 model, we show that, absent these mitigating factors, the impact of RPS on firm valuations would have been severe. In the third chapter (co-authored with Lukas Fischer), we identify a source of peer group influence that is plausibly orthogonal to information provision, yet nonetheless affects economic decision-making: the shock to an equity analyst of their undergraduate college football team winning the NCAA Championship Game. We find that analysts’ forecasts respond positively to their undergraduate school’s football team winning the NCAA final. We then show that the shock of ‘winning’ spreads within an analyst’s brokerage, positively influencing the forecasts of their colleagues. Brokerages where the degree of this diffusion is greater have lower female representation in their analyst teams, as well as lower ESG scores.

This dissertation studies a quiet but enormous cultural phenomenon that arose in the Soviet Union during the difficult years following World War II: amateur family photography. In the wake of enormous trauma and deprivation, millions of Soviet citizens picked up cameras and began to create images of their lives and environments. In doing so, I argue, they participated in a global trend in a specifically Soviet way. This project begins by establishing the rise of a domestic camera industry, which was the production base that allowed for the massive growth of Soviet amateur photography. Next, I examine how official cultural and economic institutions encouraged, discouraged, and reacted to the rising population of photographers. I then pivot to the work of amateur photographers themselves, exploring their self-representation through three vantage points. First, I trace some of the first mass Soviet amateur photographers: Red Army soldiers. Next, I examine family snapshot photography in Soviet Russia from 1945 to 1956. Finally, I focus on the personal photography of Russian and ex-Soviet displaced persons camps in Germany following the war. Through these three perspectives, I argue that Soviet and ex-Soviet amateur photographers created a new, unique visual language, interpreting their lives through their cameras. This dissertation seeks to answer two main questions. First, why did the Soviet state, in the wake of World War II and amid widespread shortage and famine, consistently expand camera supply and fuel a boom in amateur photography? Second, what sorts of photos did Soviet amateur photographers take, and how can they deepen our understanding of post-war Soviet culture? I argue that the Soviet state invested in cameras initially as a military technology, with the camera evolving into a consumer good over the course of the war and its aftermath. With their new cameras in hand, amateur photographers took photographs much like their international counterparts, highlighting their private lives and using common visual cliches to stage and set individuals as the focus of their images.

Mrs Thatcher's third electoral victory in the summer of 1987 appeared to confirm and consolidate both the success and the popularity of the political and economic experiment attempted during her eight years in office. Thatcherism is perhaps most remarkable for guiding Britain out of the dark decades of the 1960's and 1970's when relative economic decline was the chief cause of a governmental and institutional paralysis that inevitably led to policy failures, "u-turns'', and defeats at the hands of the trade union movement. At a time when governmental effectiveness had been diluted, the hold of public expectations, symbolic of "consensus" or "Butskellite'' politics, showed no sign of loosening; despite the fact that welfare statism retained it's grip over the British public, years of economic decline and governmental ineffectiveness (symbolised by Heath's defeat by the miners and the "winter of discontent" under Callaghan), meant that fiscally, government commitments, both old and new, were outreaching their grasp and ability to deliver. It was speculated by many of the period's more prolific writers that public recognition of successive governments' inability to manage the demands of a modern economy was leading to severe, if immeasurable, credibility and legitimation problems. To what extent have the Thatcher policies solved these seemingly intractable problems? Has Thatcherism found a solution to the demands of social democratic Britain? What is the real extent of Britain's economic recovery? Is there a "new consensus" that underpins the Thatcher challenge to the "mal Anglais''? These questions will be central to this paper's analysis of the extent of the restoration of British governability in the Thatcher years. / Master of Arts

My thesis examines the discursive similarities between the public political voice of Thatcherism and the "bureaucratic" policy voice of Community Care Documents. The similarities I am searching for between the rhetoric and the documents involve mythical representations of the family, the free market and the community. The argument of the thesis is that the construction of meaning in the policy documents is at least partially supported by discursive representations present in the public discourse. These representations mythologize: first, the role and form of the family; second, the role of women in caring within the family; and third, the role or capabilities of the market; and fourth; the "failings" and "breakdown" of the welfare system. I also argue that these representations exist within certain key social and economic conditions relating to "late capitalism" or more, exactly, the model of flexible accumulation and market regulation prevalent in Britain during the eighties. I conclude by arguing that if language does have a role in power relations, then it can be useful for policy analysts to learn some of the models of linguistic or discursive analysis. Such an inclusion would especially be useful in understanding the difficulties that women and other "minorities" have in finding a voice in the policy arena. / Master of Arts

Attacks on public administration are commonplace in today’s anti-bureaucratic approach to government. The legitimacy of public administration has long been questioned. Public administration is not one of the three branches of government explicitly formed by the Constitution. Further, public administrators are not elected by the people. Numerous attempts have been made to develop an idea of legitimacy that is grounded in the Constitution and that renders public administration consistent with the representative character of American government. A recent attempt presents public administration as an institution of governance that is derived from, and grounded in, the Agency Perspective. This perspective provides a new foundation stone for the legitimacy of public administration. Central to the perspective is public administration’s ability to evoke dialogue in a way that takes into account the public interest and brings about communities of shared meaning. This literature, however, does not provide a specific enough perspective, i.e., a perspective that has been given a practical specification. Simply exhorting public administrators to evoke dialogue is not sufficient. Public administrators who are encouraged in this general manner will have no choice but to look to what they know: interest group liberalism. Public administration needs a more specific alternative to interest group liberalism and a new methodology from which public administrators can work. In the research at hand, a new methodology is developed and demonstrated. The outline of the new methodology can be seen through the lens of principled negotiation. This literature maintains that negotiation from the positions of the various parties involved in a conflict, as is characteristic of interest group liberalism, is inefficient. Principled negotiation, on the other hand, recognizes that vital interests, not positions, are the key to creating consensus and achieving collaboration. The difficulty with this approach is that people, either as individuals or as role occupants in organizations, typically are unaware of their vital interests. Therefore, it is the task of the negotiator or, in this case, the public administrator to help surface these deeper interests. The new methodology is grounded in the literature of structuralism. Structuralism is a social theory and a method of inquiry (Gibson, 1984:2) that provides a means of looking beneath the surface of events or issues to identify patterns of meaning that are not evident at the surface. The work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure served as the basis for modern structuralism (Sturrock, 1988:6). Working from Saussure’s writings, Claude Levi-Strauss "treats all forms of cultural expression as language and he assumes that like language it is all [structured] by unconscious laws that constitute a grammar for each" (White, 1983:12). In a similar vein, the structuralist undertaking in this research views the vital interests of the related groups and role occupants as the "underlying grammar" that structures the various approaches to policy formulation. This research employs a case study design to which the theory of structuralism and the technique of structural analysis have been applied. The case study is that of national long-term care policy. Role occupants from 23 national organizations involved in long-term care policy were interviewed. The role occupants are key people involved in long-term care policy formulation for the organizations for which they work. The organizations' long-term care position papers were obtained. Using a process of structural analysis, the position papers and interview transcripts were analyzed to identify vital interests. An analysis of linguistic elements such as metaphors and other figures of speech, justifications, preferred meanings, and recurrent terms was conducted. In addition, content analysis was carried out with the aid of a computer program. The vital interests identified through these analyses served as the basis for the development of a strategy to shape the national long-term care policy debate. / Ph. D.

The study of macroeconomics and finance has evolved tremendously over the last few decades---significant advancements have taken place in both gaining access to an increasing scale and scope of observational, policy and private data, as well as empirical methods to derive novel economic insights from such data. In this dissertation, I attempt to shed light on three problems broadly across macroeconomics and asset pricing, taking a data-driven approach to answer them. For the first essay, we construct a novel dataset which captures the geographic incidence of government revenues and expenditures. Government revenues and expenditures revenues and expenditures occur on three different levels in the United States: local, state, and federal. At all levels, government revenues and expenditures add and subtract resources from the private sector. The dataset encompasses all revenues and expenditures at the county-level and thus allows to see the net resource allocation through the government. We use this dataset to document several new facts about the relationship between economic activity and the resource allocation by the government. The governments' resource allocation is generally redistributive. That is, levels and changes of median income are associated with the level and changes of net resources. Second, we evaluate response of governmental revenues and spending in response to the China shock. We find a decline in total governmental receipts in counties that are hardest hit, while a muted response of total governmental spending. The aggregate response conceals a lot of heterogeneity: a decomposition at the governmental level shows an increase in expenditures and lower receipts at the federal level; at the local and state level we find a simultaneous reduction of receipts and spending. The latter is a consequence of the balanced budget constraint. Overall, total government spending is approximately constant while total receipts are falling. As a result, the insurance function of the federal government is offset by a reduction at the state and local level which renders total government spending neutral to the China shock. This stands in contrast to prior research which has focused on the federal response. In our second essay, we attempt to answer the question---how should an investor value financial data? The answer is complicated because it depends on the characteristics of all investors. We develop a sufficient statistics approach that uses equilibrium asset return moments to summarize all relevant information about others' characteristics. It can value data that is public or private, about one or many assets, relevant for dividends or for sentiment. While different data types, of course, have different valuations, heterogeneous investors also value the same data very differently, which suggests a low price elasticity for data demand. Heterogeneous investors' data valuations are also affected very differentially by market illiquidity. Lastly, in the third essay, we examine the economic impact of droughts on asset markets, specifically on land valuation. Specifically, we focus on farmland valuations in California---one of the most productive farmlands in the world. The semi-arid climate makes its valuation particularly sensitive to the amount of surface and groundwater water available for irrigation. The detailed administrative transaction data from the counties' assessor offices allows us to estimate repeat sales indices as opposed to a hedonic model which make our results less likely to be affected by omitted variables. We find that parcels with better access to freshwater see a larger appreciation in land values from 2011 to 2020; whereas we find no statistical significant differential price change between 2000-2011. The differential change in land values points towards large economic effects of water scarcity with beliefs about future climatic conditions being updated due to two severe episodes of drought and signals of legislative willingness to curb groundwater overdraft.

No / The software industry in the People's Republic of China has been growing rapidly over the last decades and has played a significant role in the economy. Alongside the industrial development, it appears that a comprehensive competitiveness assessment of this growing industry needs to be conducted. This paper draws on Porter's ''diamond'' theory of competitive advantage of nations and the suggested improvements of the framework from relevant scholars to assess the growing competitiveness of China's software industry. In particular, the focus is on the role of government policies and corporate strategies in shaping the competitiveness of the industry in China in comparison to the top players in the world. Specifically, the paper pays attention to the competitiveness of industry in China as to how and why it has developed the way it has in recent years and what have been the facilitating and impeding factors that has strengthened or weakened the industrial development. In the discussion and conclusions, the overall competitiveness status of China's software industry is evaluated and the diamond framework is reappraised in light of the industrial analysis and the previous research.

No

‘The Body on the Threshold: Histories of Rape in Colonial North India’ analyzes political, judicial, and diplomatic records of sexual violence in the modern Indian provinces of Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh from roughly 1820 onward. I explore these colonial archives to reappraise the problem of rape in modern India and how it has come to be conceived and misconceived spatially. With the colonial emergence of India’s contemporary legal and penal system, I argue, a new criminal law of rape transformed public space—local roads, forests, village fields and pastures, railway carriages, and town streets—into constitutively dangerous and exclusionary space, about which a perverse cultural and political consensus prevailed that nothing could be done except that women and girls fear and avoid such space when possible. This notorious and longstanding exclusionary injunction upon mobilities and freedoms in modern Indian social life is a gendered common-sense, and structuring of the commons, that I aim to defamiliarize. As a new, ostensibly ‘decolonized’ criminal code with a restructured rape law comes into force in India this year, I offer a cautionary obituary for the law it replaced, and the past India seeks to leave behind.Bringing a combination of spatial, socio-legal, and micro-historical approaches to bear upon colonial judicial archives, I work tangentially to their central object: the criminal court proceeding. To explore how the jurispathic incentives of colonial criminal law engendered unsafe public environments, I work to pull the concept of rape out of the silo imposed by these court proceedings, which reflect the epistemic distortions of a regime that narrowly prioritized punishing only brutally violent rape upon victims below the age of consent—setting evidentiary precedents that affected the governing of rape in much of the British Empire. Employing sources such as crime reports, police handbooks, diplomatic letters, and native newspapers, I focus on instances of what might be referred to today as ‘stranger rape’: rape committed in ‘public’, often brazenly, at the margins of political conflicts over sovereign power and direct rule, such as border wars, princely revolts, and cattle-smuggling feuds. I recruit histories of short-distance migration and the public/private circulation of women within the marriage system, among others, to counter assumptions about South Asian women’s inherent immobility and seclusion. I also index emerging procedural and forensic technologies of the colonized Indian body politic—which reinforced an understanding of rape survivors as unreliable, and of most rape accusations as fabricated—to local ideas about public safety and state responsibility, which were often premised on caste-differentiated and retributive ethics of justice. I trace how pre-colonial practices of social exclusion, scapegoating, and outcasting—and the complex dispute-resolution systems that mandated such punishments—were absorbed into an ecology of colonial violence and territorial occupation, attempting to emplace the evolving meaning of rape within broader transformations in politics and social life under colonialism. I argue that the authority to sanction rape—to both punish and prescribe—became foundational to jurisdictional and territorial conflicts between propertied castes, local power-holders, and functionaries of the British Indian colonial state.