余琴. / "2013年8月". / "2013 nian 8 yue". / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-232). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in Chinese and English. / Yu Qin.

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This critical overview draws upon a portfolio consisting of two book chapters, three journal articles and one conference paper all published in international publications between 2011 and the present. The papers have been underpinned, supported and disseminated through 18 conference presentations and a variety of interventions with the commercial environment, all undertaken during the same period. The outputs are crossdisciplinary encompassing technology, acoustics, psychoacoustics, business, music, psychology, physiology, cultural studies etc. The work is tied into two sets of funding from the Higher Education Academy (HEA) focussing on the use of emergent technology to develop music producers’ expertise. The work therefore represents a cohesive but diverse set of outputs, and is reflective of the technologically-driven nature of the creative industries, and the multidisciplinary experience of the author.

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Drawing attention to the material politics of the Saudi regime, this dissertation genealogically explores the ways in which the imperatives of the modern state and its oil economy came to structure the production of Arabia's history, social life, built urban environment and concepts of nationhood and religiosity. It examines cultural artifacts and commemorative spaces as evidentiary networks through which official historical knowledge moves and becomes visible. It does so first through a study of the construction and memorialization of "official" Saudi history via textbooks and archives, and of historical elisions therein. In order to discern how breaks with the past are configured within disciplinary history, the dissertation begins with a sociocultural history of late Ottoman Arabia on the eve of Al Sa`ud's territorial conquest. It reveals the ways in which early twentieth-century Arabia's shared transregional histories and emergent socio-intellectual and political worlds were transformed with the aim of developing Al Sa`ud's territorial empire into a petro-state. In the second venue of inquiry, I analyze spatial transformations characteristic of Saudi Arabia's oil modernity as central to practices of statecraft and capital accumulation by comparing the urban and cultural redevelopment plans of Riyadh and Mecca. The erasure of alternative accounts of state formation through commemoration in Riyadh and destruction in Mecca is, at heart, a continuation of Al Sa`ud's imperial project and its deep-seated violence to the everyday, the spiritual and the temporal. This dissertation is a material and spatial reading of the regime's mechanisms of political legitimation, one that focuses on the infrastructure of Saudi petro-modernity and on sites that are rarely considered in discussions of the state, despite their centrality. From the mundane lifeworlds of archival and planning documents and the spaces that house them to the spectacular commercial and archeological megaprojects, these simultaneously constitute monuments to oil modernity and serve as pillars of political governance. The projects of historical memorialization and urban planning are material realizations of the regime's late twentieth-century strategies for political legitimation and economic diversification, especially following the crisis of the 1990 Gulf War. In highlighting everyday practices of state making, I suggest new sites and modes for reading the Saudi state as an unfinished, unstable work-in-progress. I argue that oil capitalization (which produced the theory of the rentier state) is being eclipsed, increasingly, by speculation, real estate and distinctive logics of built form.

The social scientific study of globalization's increasing flows of commodities, financing, knowledge, media, and people has been a productive ground for investigating changing connections among geographically distant people and their consequences. In spite of this recent focus on movement and flows, however, I suggest that our knowledge of globalization is incomplete without an understanding of the infrastructures of stoppage that underlie and determine the ongoing shape and directionalities of that movement. This dissertation lays out an argument for patents as one such critical legal infrastructure of global stoppage that provides unique insight into the changing roles and challenges confronting China and Taiwan within global systems of production, consumption, creativity, and copying. The dissertation's ethnography of patents in practice is based on 20 months of fieldwork on the production of technological knowledge and property in it within a Taiwanese LED (light emitting diode) company that produces patents between Taiwan and the United States and products between Taiwan and China. I argue that the processes by which knowledge is extracted and translated from the lab to the law decouples the knowledge from its origins in machines, materials, and engineers. This decoupling enables patents to circulate separately from these and provides owners with new control over global flows of engineers, tangible commodities, and usable knowledge. Alongside my Taiwanese interlocutors, I argue that patents are best understood as weapons of competition: more similar to non-disclosure agreements or aggressive pricing tactics than copyright or other forms of “intellectual property.” As weapons, the deployment of patents encourages the production of new patents much more than it does technological innovation. As they are currently practiced, patents therefore enable flows, but do so only in particular directions. It is through this stoppage that high tech patents create and maintain global divisions of labor, profit, and environmental risk.

This dissertation focuses the corporate behaviors in a dynamic world with uncertainty. Especially, I am interested in how firms tradeoff their investment and cash savings when external financing is costly. The first two chapters fit into this theme. One considers optimal investment and financing policies when uncertainty itself is time-varying, the second investigates how firms prepare themselves against devaluation risks. Both chapters build dynamic corporate theories and test them empirically. The third chapter steps back by asking why aggregate volatility is time-varying and why is it persistent in a dynamic general equilibrium with endogenous growth. I show that endogenous asset allocation between different assets can be the reason. In the first chapter I study how firms manage their cash savings, financing, and investment when aggregate uncertainty is time-varying. I develop and estimate a dynamic model featuring aggregate uncertainty shocks, costly external financing, investment irreversibility, and time-varying risk premia. In my model, firms have a precautionary-savings motive and real options to wait, both of which interact with time-varying uncertainty and are reinforced by state-dependent risk premia. My model confirms previous findings that firms save more in cash and invest less when aggregate uncertainty is high. In addition, I show that in the high uncertainty states, (1) firms with high profitability and low cash are more likely to delay equity issuance, (2) firms with low profitability and high cash are more likely to delay payout, and (3) aggregate equity issuance and payout are both lower. Finally, counterfactual experiments show that (1) a model without dynamic uncertainties cannot explain the observed firm behaviors in high uncertainty states, and (2) time-varying risk premia amplify the impact of the aggregate uncertainty shocks. In the second chapter, I investigate the relationship between investment and cash savings in a special setting: devaluation episodes in emerging markets. Devaluation events are typically anticipated by the economy but affect local firms in the tradable versus nontradable sectors differently. Tradable firms expect higher cash flows but nontradable firms expect lower ones, even their current cash flows are stable because of the currency-pegging. I build a model to show that, investment and cash savings are both complementarity, because of future prospects, and substitution because of limited current cash balance. Before devaluation, tradable firms invest more due to better expectation of the future but have to substitute for a lower cash savings tomorrow. Empirically, I use difference-in-difference approach and two devaluation episodes in Mexico and Argentina to test these predictions. I find strong evidence in Mexico that tradable firms invested more than nontradable firms and save less, as the devaluation was approaching. Evidence in Argentina is not strong. We discuss the potential remedies and future works to do. The final chapter explores asset allocation decisions and endogenous growth volatilities in an economy with endogenous growth. Firms have two produced inputs, capital and technology. When a representative firm optimally allocates the investment between the two inputs, both the consumption growth and its volatility are functions of the economy's technology-to-capital ratio. As a result, not only the long run consumption growth is volatile, but also its volatility is endogenously stochastic. Moreover, after a large negative or positive shock, the economy is away from its optimal allocation. This takes time for the economy to travel back to the optimal allocation because of the convex adjustment costs. As a result, both the consumption growth and its stochastic volatility are persistent. Finally, we discuss the asset pricing implication of the model and show that it microfounds Bansal and Yaron (2004) long-run risk model with time-varying volatilities.

This thesis studies three game theoretic models of pricing, in which a seller is interested in optimally pricing and allocating her product or service to a market of agents, in order to maximize her revenue. These markets feature a large number of self-interested agents, who are generally heterogeneous with respect to some payoff relevant feature, e.g., willingness to pay when agents are consumers or private cost when agents are firms. Agents strategically interact with one another, and their actions affect other agents' payoffs, either directly through social influence or competition, or indirectly through a review system. The seller has demand uncertainty and strives to optimize expected discounted revenues. I use either a mean-field approximation or a continuum of agents assumption to reduce the complexity of the problems and provide crisp characterizations of system aggregates and equilibrium policies. Chapter 2 considers the problem of an information provider who sells information products, such as demand forecasts, to a market of firms that compete with one another in a downstream market. We propose a general model that subsumes both price and quantity competition as special cases. We characterize the optimal selling strategy and find that it depends on both mode and intensity of competition. Several important extensions to heterogeneous production costs, information quality discrimination, and information leakage through aggregate actions are studied. Chapter 3 considers the problem of optimally extracting a stream of revenues from a sequence of consumers, who have heterogeneous willingness to pay and uncertainty about the quality of the product being sold. Using an intuitive maximum likelihood procedure, we characterize the solution of consumers' quality estimation problem. Then, we use a mean-field approximation to characterize the transient dynamics of quality estimates and demand. These allow us to simplify and solve the monopolist's problem, and ultimately provide a characterization of her optimal pricing policy. Chapter 4 considers the problem of a seller who is interested in dynamically pricing her product when consumers' utility is influenced by the mass of consumers that have purchased in the past. Two scenarios are studied, one in which the monopolist has commitment power and one in which she does not. We characterize the optimal selling strategy under both scenarios and derive comparisons on equilibrium prices and demands. Our main result is a characterization of the value of price commitment as a function of the social influence level in the market.

Despite being the largest migratory movement between two states in modern history, the origins and operation of Mexican migration to the United States has not been a major research topic. We lack a comprehensive view of Mexican migration as it was established in early twentieth century and reproduced throughout the century as a system that reached from Texas borderlands to California and to western agricultural regions and beyond to Midwestern farming and industrial areas, a system that continued to be circular in nature even as permanent settlement increased, and which was in constant interaction with families, villages, and towns throughout Mexico. This interdisciplinary, bilingual, and transnational project is one of the first histories of the creation of migrant networks narrated from multiple geographic and institutional sites, analyzing the relationship between state agents, civic organizations, and migrants on both sides of the border. My project utilizes a statistical analysis of migration trends combined with qualitative research in order to show how migration arose as a mass phenomenon in Mexico and extended into the United States. This dissertation argues that large scale Mexican migration was created and operated through an interconnected transnational migrant economy made up of self-reinforcing local economic logics, information diffusion, and locally based social networks. I demonstrate that town-based interpersonal networks formed the engine that propelled and sustained large scale migration. Migrants needed transportation, capital, and information to travel north. Town-based networks provided all of these things. I follow the spread of migrant routes, explaining the creation of Mexican communities in the US Showing why communities were located where they are and their links to the larger economy of migrant labor before turning to Mexico and showing the effects of migration on sending communities. Migration evolved from a wave of mainly men into a broad based phenomenon, drawing in families and communities through remittances. I argue this is because a set of self-reinforcing economic logics were being created on both sides of the border. These logics are separate, but linked to the economic conditions that framed migration- the pull of the industrialization of the American West and the Mexican north with its relatively high wages- and the push of the chaos and violence of the Mexican revolution and Cristero Wars. Likewise, these logics could not have occurred without the demographic pressures of population growth in central Mexico, and the economic transformations of the Porfiriato. As more and more people participated in migration, they sent back information and remittances, which in turn made it easier for others to follow their path. Circular migration reinforced this dynamic as migrants returned home on a large scale, bringing back knowledge and experience. Together, these practices constituted the migrant economy and made central and central-north Mexico the engine of migration in the twentieth century. This new economy made it easier to move, but also tied many families and towns into continuous migrations in order to achieve economic stability. Ultimately this project shows the creation of the political economy of migrant labor between Mexico and the United States.

This dissertation includes three papers related to climate, resource use, and market applications for sustainable development in developed/developing countries. The first paper describes the development of a game-theoretic economic model investigating the linkages between credit and insurance markets for smallholder farmers, and how a new market tool (weather index insurance) may help to overcome credit constraints in rural financial markets of developing countries. The second paper extends consideration of agricultural climate-risk management to potential skill in predictions of late-season rainfall over monsoonal Indonesia, with the aim of better understanding: (i) forecast skill and risk in this region, and (ii) how forecast information may be better tied with financial market products, such as index insurance, to improve smallholder farmer incentives, decision-making, and livelihoods under climate risk. The third paper, in turn, looks at forest resource management in Canada, and what the application of new carbon constraints and a market for carbon would mean for investment, production decisions, and indicators of sustainable forest management in the Canadian boreal, both in respects to the management of the landscape (i.e. the forest resource), and the development of the forestry sector and forest-based communities.