Thesis (doctoral) - Universität, Frankfurt. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-286) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1927. / "Bibliography of major cycles": p. 144.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thèse-Toulouse. / At head of title: Essai de synthèse professionnelle.

The world of 1975 was different the one of 2013 because of profound and big political, economic and technological changes. The food availability increased due to changes in production and distribution which made them more accessible and, because of that, the consumption of food in Kcal per capita increased in all countries.Urbanization and technological changes also contributed to the development of a sedentary lifestyle and to the development of a food industry ready to satisfy the necessities of a constantly growing urban population thru palatable and ready to eat products.This thesis analyses the relationship between economic growth and the increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity during the period of 1975-2013 at a global level and studies the driving economic factors behind that development.

This thesis contributes to our understanding of the economics of international migration. It consists of three chapters exploring some of the consequences and implications of human migration. Chapter 1, ‘No Country for Young Men’, studies the effects of international migration on the schooling and labour outcomes of left-behind children. While a large literature on the topic already exists and focuses on Latin America and China, little is known about how migration affects left-behind individuals in other parts of the world; and Central Asia in particular. The study concentrates on Tajikistan, the country with the highest level of remittance inflows relative to the size of the economy. Using panel data tracking the same children over time, I find important and gender-differenced schooling and labour supply responses. In a nutshell, young males are found to benefit from the migration of one of their household members, while young women are not. The second chapter, ‘Invasive Neighbours’, provides new evidence on the effect of immigration on electoral outcomes in developing countries. The Dominican Republic is used as case study as it provides a highly interesting context to analyse this issue. The vast majority of its immigrants come from neighbouring Haiti, and together the two countries share the island of Hispaniola. I find robust evidence that higher immigrant concentration is associated with greater support for the right-wing political coalition that has traditionally been more opposed to immigration. At the same time, the popularity of the centre-left coalition is found to decline in localities experiencing larger inflows of foreigners. Political competition, citizenship and identity considerations seem to be shaping voting behaviour and individual attitudes towards immigrants in the Dominican Republic. The third and last chapter, ‘The Elusive Quest for Social Diversity?’, analyses the effect of social housing supply on ethnic and social diversity in France’s largest metropolitan areas. High income countries generally rely on the provision of affordable housing through various schemes to both facilitate access to decent accommodation and encourage social diversity at the local level. The analysis takes advantage of a national policy reform to shed light on the issue. I find strong evidence of a positive relationship between social housing and ethnic diversity in local labour markets with large immigrant networks and strong labour demand. Social housing provision also affects the distribution of households’ income at the local level. This chapter contributes to the small but growing literature on the impact of social housing developments on the neighbourhoods in which they are built.

This thesis consists of three essays on the political economy of development and focuses on topics related to democratization, redistribution and conflict. It studies one the largest countries in Latin America, Colombia, and examines mostly his history during the 20th century. The first chapter, "Buying off the Revolution: Evidence from the Colombian National Peasant Movement, 1957-1985", studies the relationship between democratization and redistribution during periods of revolutionary threats. Far from causing an increase in broad redistribution (e.g. social spending), I show that the state organization of a social movement that extends the political rights of the threatening group can be used to identify rebel leaders and provide private goods to them, in return for preventing social unrest and demobilizing their supporters. I study the context of the organization by the state of the most important social movement in Colombian history -the National Peasant Movement (ANUC)- during the decades of a threat of Communist revolution (1957-1985), when the government gave ANUC direct political participation in the executive branch and economic support. Using three newly digitized data set of the Colombian municipalities, I find that this reform did not lead to higher broad redistribution towards the peasantry but it led to an increase in targeted redistribution in terms of public jobs and lands. By matching the names of the peasant leaders to the beneficiaries of the land reform, evidence suggests that peasant leaders disproportionally benefited from land reform and that targeted redistribution towards the peasant leaders was a mechanism to restrain the Communist threat. Finally, I find suggestive evidence that buying off the rebel leaders was an effective counter-revolutionary strategy as it led to less revolutionary activities after the support to ANUC was terminated (1972-1985). The second chapter, "Roads or Schools? Political Budget Cycles with different types of voters" also studies one form of democratization: the franchise extension. It uses a new Colombian data set (1830-2000), to analyze how changes in the electoral legislation with regard to the characteristics of voters (in terms of education and income levels) have affected fiscal policy in election years. In line with economic theory, I show that after the male universal suffrage law was reformed in 1936 the composition of the expenditure shifted towards social spending (like education, health, and welfare benefits) but there was a decrease in spending on infrastructure and investment projects (like roads). Consistent with the literature, I also find: 1.The timing and the size of the political budget cycles changed after 1936 and 2. After 1936 there was a shift in the funding mechanisms from indirect tax revenues to more debt. In addition to democratization and redistribution, the third chapter examines the causes of the civil conflict in Colombia. The third chapter "On the agrarian origins of civil conflict in Colombia", co-authored with Fabio Sanchez, investigates the impact of land dispossessions by landlords on the origin of the civil conflict in Colombia. The study exploits variation in floods to identify how peasants’ land dispossessions during the export boom (1914-1946) determine the rise of rural guerrilla movements and the consolidation of their rebel activities. It uses a novel municipal-level dataset on natural disasters and land dispossession, and documents that municipalities experiencing floods during the years 1914-1946 were substantially more likely to have land dispossessions than municipalities where floods was not severe. Floods reduced temporarily the conditions of the land and its value, facilitating the dispossession of the peasants of their lands by large landowners. Using a matching-pair instrumental variable approach, we show that the historical dispossession of lands by landlords that led to the rise of peasant grievances is associated with the presence of the rural guerrilla movement -The Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC)- during the first stage of the Colombian civil conflict. We propose two mechanisms through which previous land dispossessions facilitated the emergence of rebel armed groups and use a mediation analysis to test the indirect effects. On the one hand, exposure to previous civil wars gave military training and access to weapons and military experience to the rural population that likely created incentives for the formation of rebel groups. On the other hand, the ideological politics of rebellion by the Communist party exacerbated the grievances and helped to the emergence of rebel armed groups.

Yugoslavia provides a fascinating historical setting to analyse the consequences of socialism – the greatest socio-economic experiment of the 20th century. Yugoslavia was one of fastest growing countries in the world until the late 1970s. During this period, it followed a different institutional trajectory compared to other socialist economies. But, during the 1980s, economic growth came to a standstill, and the country eventually descended into civil war. This doctoral dissertation is motivated by the aforementioned observations. It seeks to analyse them. The core of the thesis is composed of three closely related, but self-standing, papers. The unifying theme of the three papers is economic development in socialist Yugoslavia. The first paper revisits aggregate economic growth in Yugoslavia. I find that distorted labour incentives caused the slowdown of the Yugoslav economy. I argue that labour-managed firms hindered the ability of Yugoslavs to work. Since Yugoslavia was extremely heterogeneous, the second paper moves below the aggregate level in order to reconstruct the regional development trajectories. I find that regional income divergence was caused by the failure of the poorer regions to converge towards the employment rates and efficiency levels of the richer regions. I argue that this failure was caused by labour-managed firms as well, whereby they had a spatially uneven economic impact. In Yugoslavia, regional economic tensions were reinforcing, and were reinforced by, ethnic tensions. In the third paper, I explore ethnic relations by analysing the formation of Yugoslav national sentiment and its economic effects. I find that ethnically diverse municipalities were conducive towards the formation of Yugoslav sentiment because they stimulated ethnic intermarriage. In addition, I find that municipalities that contained a larger amount of self-declared Yugoslavs experienced a lower population fraction of deaths during the Bosnian War of 1992-1995.

This thesis consists of three independent chapters on development economics and Japanese economic history. The first chapter analyzes the effect of railroad construction in the Meiji period (1868–1912) on technology adoption and modern economic development. By digitizing a novel data set that measures the use of steam engines at the factory level and determining the cost-minimizing path between destinations as an identification strategy, I find that railroad access led to the increased adoption of steam power by factories, which in turn induced structural change and urbanization. My results support the view that railroad network construction was key to modern economic growth in pre-First World War Japan. The second chapter analyzes the effect of time horizon on local public investment in the Edo period (1615–1868). I use a unique event in Japanese history during this period to identify the effect. In 1651, the sudden death of the executive leader of the Tokyo government reduced the transfer risk of local lords, especially for insiders, who supported the Tokyo government during the war of 1600. Using a newly digitized data set and a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that after 1651, regions owned by insiders increased the number of public projects more than regions owned by the other lords. I discuss other possible channels to interpret the effect of tenure risk, but I find no strong support for these alternative channels and conclude that the results support a longer time horizon effect. The third chapter provides more general background and a complete description of the data availability in Japan in the 17th–20th centuries, to discuss future research directions. It would aid reexamination of the history of Japan and other East Asian countries, which have experienced different economic and political paths.

South African insurance companies have made substantial in-roads into the low-income segments of the insurance market. The strength of microinsurance—insurance products designed specifically for low-income individuals—has been fueled almost exclusively by the sale of funeral insurance products, an unsurprising trend considering the immense cultural value that many South Africans place on funerals. Insurance companies have managed to achieve scale by tapping into community-based infrastructures, which serve as low-cost distribution channels for these products. The incursion of “insurance culture” into this space has thus resulted in a market ecosystem in which formal and informal institutions are in fluid states of tension and cooperation. Building on institutional theory and adopting ethnography as its primary methodological approach, this thesis examines the institutional dynamics underpinning South African microinsurance markets. Based on fieldwork I conducted from June 2015-April 2016 (based primarily in Cape Town and the neighboring township of Khayelitsha), my thesis will highlight the ways in which formal and informal institutions interact to produce regulatory outcomes that enable and/or constrain individual actors. While these institutional structures shape individual decision-making with regard to risk management, I also consider the ways in which individuals exercise agency to navigate shifting institutional landscapes and effect change in underlying structures. Thus, this thesis contributes to the debates on microinsurance, as well as on financial inclusion more broadly, reframing them within this complex interplay between institutions and actors.