This thesis presents three empirical chapters on local labour markets, mineral booms, beliefs, conflict and uncertainty. All the analysis was conducted using Peruvian data and context. The first chapter finds that Peruvian individuals exposed to violent events during their impressionable years trust less government institutions, and feel less identified with their neighbours, while more identified with religious groups. The estimated effect is small and heterogeneous depending on the identity of the perpetrator. The effect on identification with groups of population is also heterogeneous by the indigenous origin of the individuals. Owners of an agricultural plot embedded in a cooperative setting at the local level exhibit even smaller levels of identification with their locals while higher levels of identification with their ethnic group. In line with recent literature, these findings suggest that conflict has a small but persistent effect on the formation of trust and identity, which is a central feature to understand the interaction between culture and institutions, and ultimately to understand the persistent consequences of wars. The second chapter studies the relationship between democratic beliefs and economic uncertainty. I explored whether uncertainty experienced during the impressionable years of the individuals is a key factor behind the formation of the democratic beliefs. Results showed that this type of uncertainty had no effect on the determination of democratic beliefs. Combining uncertainty with the exposure to authoritarian regimes did not change the result. This result is robust to different definition of rural individuals, the interaction of uncertainty and degree of experienced authoritarianism, and different formative periods. Current uncertainty, on the other hand, was unable to fully explain the formation of democratic beliefs. The final chapter investigated the local labour effects of mining booms. Using two rounds of population census for 1043 districts in Peru I documented that large-scale mining activity had a positive effect on local employment over 14 years. The effect was differentiated by industry, skill and migration status. Employment grew by 4% faster by one standard deviation increase in the mineral prices. Both high and low skilled workers enjoyed similar employment increase, however only low skilled workers experienced a decline in unemployment. Using data from 10 annual household surveys I found that, consistent with a model of heterogeneous firms and labour, wages for low skilled workers in districts close to the mining activity was 5% higher by every standard deviation increase in the index of mineral prices. Additional evidence with the census data suggested that to a large extent locals working in the mining or the agricultural sector filled the new employment opportunities. Together these findings suggest that large-scale mining activity increases the demand for mining and agricultural local employment, and the wages in the local economy.

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My study examines a category of data--the logistics of classical Greek warfare--that has not been used before for ancient Greek economic history. This examination provides much new evidence for Greek economies in the fifth and fourth centuries. Close readings of contemporary literary evidence--especially Thucydides--shows that classical Greek amphibious and naval expeditions military forces always acquired their food from markets provided to them by cities and traders. A systematic comparative analysis confirms this conclusion by demonstrating that the economic and politico-social structures of classical Greek states meant that the market was the only institutional mechanism available to them to feed their navies and amphibious forces--in contrast to other European and near Eastern pre-industrial states which could use mechanisms such as requisitioning and taxation-in-kind to acquire provisions to supply their military forces. I then produce estimates of the amounts of food purchased by classical Greek military forces in the markets provided to them by cities and traders by combining data on standard daily rations (from contemporary literary and epigraphical sources) and caloric requirements (established from an analysis of classical Greek skeletal material and WHO/FAO research data) with the relatively precise figures we have in contemporary historians for army and navy sizes and lengths of campaigns. These calculations provide many more figures for trade in grain and other foods in the classical period than we currently possess, and figures that are mostly much greater in scale. The analysis of the provisioning of Greek overseas warfare provides, then--for the first time--evidence for a regular and large-scale seaborne trade of grain in the classical Greek Mediterranean; it shows a world where the development of marketing structures and networks of merchants was sufficiently strong to permit tens of thousands of men to get their food through markets for years at a time. Demonstrating the existence of a regular and substantial overseas trade in grain in the fifth and fourth centuries is crucially important for a wider understanding of classical Greek economies because the existence of such a trade made possible increased urbanization and specialization of labor, and itself could only have been made possible by sizeable reductions in transactions costs for maritime commerce: it therefore provides evidence for the foundations of economic growth in classical Greece.

With women's increased education and labor market participation in the last few decades the labor market has changed considerably. At the same time the interaction between household activities and work have been constantly evolving, affecting household dynamics and family outcomes, such as fertility, marriage and divorce. The first chapter explores the effect of unrestricted access to the birth control pill on young people's career plans, using annual surveys of college freshmen from 1968 to 1980. In particular it addresses the question of who was affected by the introduction of the birth control pill by looking at career plans of both men and women, and by separating the effect by level of academic ability and race. The results show that unrestricted access to the pill caused high ability women to move towards occupations with higher wages, higher occupational prestige scores and higher male ratios. The estimated effects for women with low grades and from low selectivity colleges are in the opposite direction. Men were also affected by unrestricted access to the pill, as their aspirations shifted towards traditionally male dominated occupations, across all ability groups. The biggest effect of unrestricted access to the pill is found to be on non-white students, both among men and women. The paper uses Census Data to compare the changes in career plans to actual changes in labor market outcomes. When looking at the actual career outcomes, early access to the pill affects both men and women -- shifting their careers towards traditionally male dominated occupations associated with higher wages. Early access to the pill is also associated with significantly higher actual income for men. In the second chapter I look at the relationship between increased access to reliable fertility controls and men's disappearance from teaching. As the pill has been found to have a substantial effect on women's family responsibilities, career investments and labor market outcomes, men's bargaining position in the marriage market is likely to have changed considerably. Teaching stands out among the career choices of male college freshmen in terms of average income and prestige. The effect of the shift in bargaining power on men's career choices is hence likely to be prominent in the teaching sector. Between 1968 and 1980, the ratio of male college freshmen planning to become a teacher fell from 12.4% to 2.4% and the share of males among those who aspired to teach dropped from 30.6% to 19.7%. Using nationally representative data on the career plans of college freshmen I find that unrestricted access to the birth control pill bears a negative relation to the likelihood that men plan to teach, while changes in the strength of teacher unions and relative wages of teachers have limited effect on their career plans. Men's aspirations shift away from teaching towards occupations that are associated with higher average income like accounting and computer programming. The results are supported by equivalent findings looking at actual career outcomes in the Census Data. The third chapter focuses on the role of discrimination and the possibility that education as a tool to reveal ability is more important among women than men. As social networks tend to run along gender lines and managers in the labor market are predominantly male, it may be more difficult for women to signal their ability without college credentials. Moreover, women may use education to signal their labor market attachment. A game theoretical model of racial discrimination and educational sorting, introduced by Lang and Manove (2011) is applied to examine the gender gap in schooling attainment. As the gender gap differs between demography groups, being more prominent for blacks and Hispanics, the model is estimated separately for each race or ethnicity group. Using data from the NLSY79, the results in the paper are consistent with a model where education is more valuable to women, due to signaling. As predicted by the model, education as a function of ability (measured with AFQT scores) is more concave for women than for men. For over 88 % of the whites in the sample women choose higher level of education given their ability, than do men. On the other hand, the model fits the data better for whites than for blacks and Hispanics, and therefore fails to explain the observed differences across race and ethnicity groups.

This dissertation examines the political processes that gave rise to the antipoverty norm; the moral principle that abject poverty is dehumanizing and must be eradicated. I trace the origins of this norm to a critical juncture in the 1990s when the end of the Cold War ushered in a euphoric moment while, at the same time, crises loomed large on the international stage, where governance structures of an earlier era seemed like ancient relics no longer capable of managing problems of a new world order. As the World Bank and IMF were attacked for their conditionality programs, the UN was overwhelmed with competing peacekeeping missions. Declining foreign aid and increasing conflicts relegated development to a lower rung of importance. As official development assistance fell, donor countries found themselves debating the future of development assistance and their role within it. While international organizations created after World War II reflected on their relevancy in a changing world, they found in poverty a strategic response to their varying crises of relevancy. Consequently, towards the end of the twentieth century, diverse international organizations with diverging mandates, including IMF, WB, UN and OECD, converged on the central goal of poverty reduction. The constitution of the antipoverty norm--manifested in the Millennium Development Goals--was in turn essential to its consolidation. The multidimensional definition of poverty within a human development framework offered a holistic approach to poverty reduction that fit the mandates of participating development organizations. As such, poverty reduction created an arena for consensus without threatening state interests or organizational agendas while at the same time accommodating donors' domestic priorities. Four distinct features of the MDGs--ontological freezing, target setting, standardization, and quantification--induced these goals to dominate the international development agenda within a short time period. By making poverty a problem internal to the state and setting standardized, time-bound, and quantifiable targets to monitor progress on countries' poverty reduction priorities, the MDGs became part of development discourse and practice. Aid recipients used the MDGs to show their use of funds to reduce poverty in their countries, while donors used the MDGs as performance tools to demonstrate the effectiveness of aid to their citizens. This iterative process of data collection, analysis, and performance evaluation helped solidify the use of the MDGs while constructing the antipoverty norm as the ultimate goal of global development. In that process, instead of seriously critiquing and reforming extant global governance structures, the convergence on poverty reduction resulted in a reinvention of development orthodoxy and maintenance of status quo.

The Common Good offers new perspectives on the early modern global revolution in ideas of economy and the polity. It argues that the modern Chinese state emerged from the disenchantment of a moral economy that had dominated since the sixteenth century. Monetization and commercialization produced both concepts of public goods and institutions pertaining to public properties that drew from medieval prototypes. Having no place within the formal legal system, the governance of these resources relied on supernatural justice, rituals of generosity, and a rhetoric of virtue that brought together popular practice and learned culture. By the nineteenth century, however, these moral and supernatural elements were superseded by new modes of accountability that replaced gods with notions of the public or the people, and by new technologies of public writing and reckoning that privileged numbers and calculations as reliable evidence. This shift in arbiters of trust generated what can be called an “accountable managerial state,” in contrast with the “agrarian legislative state” that persisted throughout the previous centuries in imperial China. At first glance, this trajectory bears a superficial resemblance to that of Europe during the early modern period. My analysis reveals, however, that these were native developments, originating at the level of local societies in China before working their way upward to the state level. In short, my research has brought entirely indigenous set of Chinese ideas and institutions into a global history of the state and political economy, as well as opened the way for rich comparative study with other parts of the world.

This thesis deals with the optimal design of pensions systems in the face of demographic changes. Though the chapters differ in terms of the key questions addressed, the unifying theme remains which pensions system yields the highest welfare under differing economic conditions. We use a standard overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents to address the various questions. The role of the pensions system varies between consumption smoothing and redistribution, or a combination of both. The provision of pensions, whether universal or targeted, has a signficant impact on capital formation and by extension on a host of economic aggregates and welfare. Capital is always higher under a fully-funded scheme. Under certain conditions, it is optimal to have no pay-as-you-go pensions in place and a fully-funded scheme is thus optimal. With a redistributive pensions system, the welfare gain of the poor exceeds the fall in the welfare of the rich thereby resulting in an increase in aggregate welfare. This thesis thus brings together the issues involved in pensions design in a theoretical framework and aims to provide an insight into the various channels at work.

This thesis analyses inflation dynamics in eight Asian countries. The second chapter analyses inflation persistence and exchange rate pass through (ERPT). The findings on inflation persistence show that for most countries this declines after the Asian financial crisis. The findings for ERPT are more mixed and vary by country. The role of Inflation Targeting Framework (ITF) on inflation persistence and ERPT is also examined. The estimation results suggest it is too early to generalize that ITF exerts a consistently discernible influence on inflation dynamics across this group of Asian ITF countries. The third and fourth chapters focus on the impact that world oil and world food price shocks have on domestic prices. On average, the pass-through of the world oil price is higher than for world food prices. Another finding is that the domestic food supply capacity of a country succeeds in dampening the effect of world food price shocks. The fifth chapter employs disaggregated data on prices to examine inflation dynamics in Indonesia. The main finding is that price behaviour exhibits heterogeneity. Disaggregated prices are more flexible in response to sector specific shocks and are more sluggish in response to macroeconomic shocks. In response to deposit rate shocks, the price puzzle becomes weaker after the full implementation of ITF.

This thesis explores the premise that during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras there existed a significant and influential division within the working class of England's industrial towns and cities. This division, based largely on economic factors to do with the size and regularity of earnings, manifested itself first in the type and locality of residence, which in turn emphasised and reinforced the division of the working class into an upper section of better-paid usually more skilled and regularly-employed and a lower, poorer section of the low-waged and casually employed. Whilst it is not suggested that this produced "working classes" rather than "a working class", it did, nevertheless, result in two sections among the wage-earning class whose members pursued in many significant ways quite different ways of life. Economic differences allied to residential segregation meant that each section: developed different notions of such concepts as "rough" and "respectable" and did not by any means share beliefs as to what constituted acceptable or "deviant" behaviour. These and other questions are pursued by an examination of the years from 1871 to 1914 in the Birmingham neighbourhood of West Sparkbrook. The chronology has been set to make possible the use of census material and oral evidence, and the neighbourhood was chosen because, although it was in these years mainly an area of middle and upper working class housing, it had within it clearly differentiated pockets of lower working class housing, and so makes significant comparisons possible. After an examination of the growth of West Sparkbrook as a residential district, an analysis has been made of the institutions, habits and behaviour of the people of the district. Documentary, archival and oral evidence has been called on to examine the cultural schism in a number of exemplary areas. Differences in housing, schooling, working and shopping have been considered, and attitudes towards drinking, gambling and fighting. The differing roles and responsibilities within the family of men, women and children have been shown in the different groups, as well as leisure behaviour and the role of religion and of religious and charitable institutions in the lives of the community. From this picture emerges a clearer idea of the limits imposed on behaviour by the notions of "rough" and "respectable", and the extent to which these notions were developed by each group within its specific social, economic and cultural environment.

This thesis provides an empirical analysis on how Foreign Direct Investment could affect economic growth. The analysis focuses on China and two East Asian countries, South Korea and Taiwan, for the period from 1980 to 2006. A VAR system is applied to China and the other two countries, while innovation analysis, including variance decomposition and impulse response, is then undertaken to evaluate the influence of shocks on each variable. Cointegration analysis is introduced to capture the long-run equilibrium relationships. The results suggest a small negative effect of FDI on economic growth in China and Taiwan, and no significant influence on economic growth in South Korea. But we find that FDI could be attracted by rapid economic growth of all these countries. The traditional elements for growth, such as capital and labour are demonstrated to play important roles in stimulating economic growth, while the sustainable elements suggested by new endogenous theory, such as technology development and human capital, are found playing different roles across countries with respect to their strategies of development. In addition, a simultaneous equation model is estimated to capture the effects of policy instruments on output, FDI and other endogenous variables in China. Both direct coefficient effects and multiplier effects are calculated. The results indicate that the changes in capital formation, employment and human capital could decelerate the economic growth, while the changes in technology transfer and saving could have III accelerating effects on the change in output directly. FDI could affect the change in economic growth indirectly through an accelerating effect on capital formation and human capital. For the impacts of policy instruments, It draws a conclusion that the monetary policies, fiscal policies and commercial policies committed by the government are indeed appreciative for accelerating economic development in China. Together with the specific empirical results for China and other two East Asian countries, this thesis provides a more comprehensive framework to study the relationships between economic growth and FDI, with the VAR system focusing on the general overview and the simultaneous equation model targeting on the intermediates.