In Chapter 1, I study the effect of school absenteeism on secondary school students academic outcomes using the Chilean student strikes in 2011 as a source of exogenous variation. The strikes, led by university students but promptly joined by hundreds of thousands of secondary school students, triggered a significant drop in public secondary school attendance (a decline of about 15 percentage points in all four grades). Attendance returned to normal levels in 2012. Using the type of school that students attended in 2011 as an instrument for school absenteeism, I show that school absenteeism has negative effects on secondary school students’ results in a postsecondary high-stakes math exam and university enrollment rates. Instrumental variables estimations suggest that a 10 percentage point decrease in attendance during secondary school is related to a 9.5 percent of a standard deviation decline in the math exam score, and a 3.2 percentage point reduction in the associated probability of university enrollment. I do not find any significant effect on the high-stakes language exam at the 5 percent level. A key finding is the persistent negative effect of school absenteeism on students’ academic performance: this negative effect is present even for those students who sat the high-stakes exams three years after the strikes had ended, that is, after three years of regular schooling following the negative shock to their attendance. These results are not driven by inputs to the education production function that might have been affected by the student strikes, such as disruptiveness at the time of the high-stakes exams, school environment, teachers, class instruction, or class size. Chapter 2 presents the first value-added (VA) estimates for doctoral teaching assistants (DTAs). We focus on the undergraduate program of the Economics Department at a UK university, where the match between students and DTAs is random. We find that a one standard deviation change in DTA quality increases students’ test scores by around 8.5 percent of a standard deviation. A novel feature of our data allows us to examine within-course dynamics in the VA estimates: These are larger for assessments taken during term-time, drop for end-of-term tests and are not statistically different from zero for final exams. The analysis suggests that the lack of persistence of the VA measures might be connected with: (i) Students’ endogenous investment responses and (ii) temporal decay in teacher-related human capital. We discuss how our results can inform the broader debate on the measurement of teachers quality via the VA approach. In Chapter 3, we study the effects of a penalty points system (PPS) introduced in Spain in 2006. We find a 20% decrease in cumulative road fatalities in the five years after the reform, compared to a synthetic control group constructed using a weighted average of other European countries. Evidence suggests that the persistent reduction in road fatalities might not only be driven by deterring risky-driving behavior, but also by taking reckless drivers out of the roads. Using estimates of the value of a statistical life, we calculate that the PPS yielded a net economic benefit of €4.6 billion ($6 billion) over this period, equivalent to 0.43% of Spain’s GDP.

In this dissertation, I examine the inter-temporal variation (course) and the composition (character) of late-Victorian British exports. The first substantive chapter focuses specifically on Anglo-American trade, which was the largest bilateral flow of trade during the first era of globalization, and finds that tariffs were the sole inter-temporal determinant of Anglo-American trade costs. The determinacy of tariffs for Anglo-American trade costs only becomes apparent when the tariff variable incorporates a measure of the bilateral American tariff toward Britain, which I purposely reconstruct. I conclude that Anglo-American trade represents a major qualification to any emerging consensus that foreign tariffs were of minor significance to the trade of late nineteenth-century Britain. The next chapter reassesses the empirical validity of the Ford thesis, which argued that a short-term causal relationship between British ex ante lending and British merchandise exports operated in the late nineteenth century. Using more recent data on bilateral British lending, I find evidence of a ‘lending-export loop’, with British ex ante lending preceding merchandise exports by a period of two years. A case study of New Zealand, which had an extraordinarily high share of Britain in its imports, reveals that the relationship was conditional upon the lending being allocated to social overhead capital. In the final substantive chapter, I construct indicators of revealed comparative advantage for British manufacturing industries for the years 1880, 1890, and 1900. In contrast with previous research, I argue that the manufacturing comparative advantages of late-Victorian Britain rested in the relatively labour non-intensive industries, and this finding remains robust even after controlling for human capital intensity. Furthermore, the manufacturing comparative advantages were neutral with respect to material intensity. While the share of inter-industry (Heckscher-Ohlin) trade in Britain’s total manufacturing trade declined throughout the late-Victorian era, it still accounted for the majority of Britain’s manufacturing trade in the 1890s.

This thesis analyses the contribution of economics and statistics in the transformation of Ghana from colonial dependency to socialist one-party state. The narrative begins in 1948, extending through the years of decolonization, and ends in 1966, when the first postcolonial government led by Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown by a military coup d’état. Drawing on insights from political economy, the history of economics and the sociology of science, the study is constructed as a series of microhistories of public institutions, social scientists, statistical enquiries and development plans. In the period under consideration economics and statistics underwent a radical transformation in their political use. This transformation is epitomised by the two extremes mentioned in the title: the ‘scattered data’ of 1950s household budget surveys were expression of the limited will and capacity of the colonial state to exercise control over different areas of the country. In contrast, the 1960s dream of a monolithic one-party state led the political rulers to use Marxist-Leninist political economy as a cornerstone of the ideological education aiming at creating the ideal citizen of the socialist regime. Based on research in British and Ghanaian archives, the study claims that economists and statisticians provided important cognitive tools to imagine competing alternatives to the postcolonial nation state, finding its most extreme version in the attempt to fashion a new type of economics supporting Nkrumah’s dream of a Pan-African political and economic union. At a more general level, the thesis provides a step towards a deeper incorporation of Sub-Saharan Africa in the history of economics and statistics, by depicting it not simply as an importer of ideas and scientific practices, but as a site in which the interaction of local and foreign political and scientific visions turned economics and statistics into powerful tools of social engineering. These tools created new spaces for political support and dissent, and shifted the boundaries between the possible and the utopian.

Debates in business and economic history have focused on the role played by business ownership and organisational forms on the performance of firms, industries and economies. Alfred Chandler asserted that it was the adoption of hierarchical managerial structures and joint-stock ownership which enabled an unprecedented expansion of the scale of business in the late 19th century. This argument is widely debated and a growing literature has looked at the role played by different forms of business organisation, such as the partnership and cooperative, in enabling economic growth. This thesis contributes to these debates through an investigation of Anglo-Indian trading firms between 1813 and 1870. A new data-set of firms operating in Calcutta identified the use of various business forms to conduct trade. In this period the number of trading partnerships increased from 24 to 88, whilst the number of joint-stock firms expanded from a handful in the years before 1850 to over 170 by 1868. In the decade after 1858 the number of hybrid managing agency firms tripled, whilst the number of firms using agents grew from 57 to 183. Drawing on the ‘analytic narratives’ method a novel analysis using transaction cost and agency theories is made of four firm case studies. This analysis reveals that changes in the economic environment altered the transactions undertaken by the firms and incentivised the adoption of different forms of ownership. In turn, the internal organisation of the firms adapted to mitigate costs of agency caused by changes in ownership. These findings show that entrepreneurs sought adaptive organisational solutions to balance an evolving set of trade-offs between transaction and agency costs. Key to this process was the capacity of the partnership form to reduce the costs of agency incurred by firms operating with geographically distant actors. This resulted in the proliferation of the managing agent form. These findings reinterpret existing explanations of the evolution of firms in the Anglo-Indian trade, showing that problems of managing agents at distance remained a key challenge throughout this period.

This thesis will examine and attempt to explain how, in the first half of the sixteenth century, the central Italian port of Ancona achieved its greatest economic importance relative to other cities in the whole of its history. It will be seen that this development coincided with and was causally connected with the rise of other ports as widely dispersed as London, Antwerp, Ragusa and Constantinople. During this period Ancona was transformed from a port of merely regional significance into a major international entrepot where the raw materials and manufactured goods of the Ottoman Empire were exchanged for agricultural produce and industrial goods from Italy and Western Europe. These changes were caused by developments outside Ancona itself, in particular the political stability of the lands of the eastern Mediterranean under Ottoman rule and the growing tendency for merchants to use land rather than sea trade routes as a result of improved organisation of land haulage and the growth of piracy. The thesis has been based mainly on the hitherto unconsulted notarial archives of Ancona, and it should help to revise the view that post-medieval notarial records are of little value in studying commercial history. Other sources in Ancona itself and in the main cities with which she traded have also been consulted. The thesis is arranged in six chapters. Chapter I sets the political and commercial framework of the Mediterranean with which Ancona was to develop. Chapter II sets the city in its geographical, historical and political perspective within this Mediterranean. Chapter III consists of an examination and criticism of the sources consulted. Chapter IV is the core of the thesis, describing the commercial development if the city and attempting to explain it. Finally Chapters V and VI discuss the way in which trade was carried on in Acona. Chapter V deals with the structure of the merchant community and the way in which merchants operated, whilst Chapter VI deals with the organisation and operation of shipping.

This dissertation consists of four chapters on the economics of technology. The chapters study different aspects of innovation generation and diffusion. In broad terms, chapter one looks at how innovation spreads by social contact, while chapter two looks at welfare consequences of diffusion. Chapter three examines how information sources affect diffusion, and chapter four looks at the relation of finance with innovation generation. The first chapter empirically investigates the dynamics of the marginal propensity to pirate for computer software. We introduce a state space formulation that allows us to estimate error structures and parameter significance, in contrast to previous work. For data from 1987-92, we find a rising propensity to pirate as the number of existing pirate copies increases, and higher late piracy incidence than implied by static models. We strengthen prior results on the impact of piracy in the spreadsheet market, finding it to be the only significant internal influence on diffusion. However, when we allow for negative error correlation between legal and pirate acquisitions, we contradict earlier work by finding that, in the word processor market, piracy did not contribute to diffusion and only eroded legal sales. The second chapter is a paper forthcoming in the European Journal of Operational Research. We present an information good pricing model with persistently heterogeneous consumers and a rising marginal propensity for them to pirate. The dynamic pricing problem faced by a legal seller is solved using a flexible numerical procedure with demand discretisation and sales tracking. Three offsetting pricing mechanisms occur: skimming, compressing price changes, and delaying product launch. A novel trade-off in piracy's effect on welfare is identified. We find that piracy quickens sales times and raises welfare in fixed size markets, and does the opposite in growing markets. In our model, consumers benefit from very high rates of piracy, legal sellers always dislike it, and pirate providers like moderate but not very high rates. In the third chapter, we study the effect of different information sources on technology adoption between and within companies. Our model of economically optimising companies predicts that initial adoption will be primarily affected by information that reduces uncertainty about a technology’s performance, while intensification of intra-firm use will be mainly influenced by information that increases income from the technology. The theory is tested on data describing adoption of organic farming techniques by UK farmers. Our predictions are broadly supported by the empirical results. Information from land agents, farmers, and newspapers mainly influences initial adoption, from academia and government largely influences intensification, and from crop consultants, suppliers, and buyers influences both. Financing innovation presents informational and control problems for the financier, and different solutions are used for funding of US companies and universities. In the fourth chapter, we examine how funding characteristics influenced the change in innovation during the 2007-8 financial crisis for both. We extend prior theories of external financing’s effect on company performance during crises, firstly to university performance, and secondly to show the influence of time variation in aggregate funding. Empirical results are consistent with our theory: external dependence and asset intangibility had a limited effect on company innovation on entering the crisis, but increased university innovation. We do not describe here the limitations and gaps of the studies, and proposals for future work. Instead, they are addressed in the conclusions of each chapter.

This thesis examines the Chinese economy by focusing on three issues: convergence, total factor productivity (TFP) and industrial growth. The study of convergence was undertaken using a panel of China’s 28 provinces over the period 1979-2004. The share of physical capital in China’s output was found to be 0.23 and the provinces were found to converge at a rate of 5.6 per cent per annum. To calculate the growth of TFP for China’s 29 provinces in this period, the non-parametric Malmquist index approach was employed in the analysis. It was found that, for China as a whole, TFP grew at a rate of 2.75 per cent per annum, which accounted for 30.02 per cent of its real GDP growth. The aim of the study of industrial growth was to examine the correlates of growth of 26 industries in 9 provinces of the Eastern Zone of China over the period 2001 to 2005. The analysis identified the dynamic externalities and province-specific externalities that were important to province-industrial growth. It also discovered an evident trend in the period under study of conditional convergence within the 26 industries in the Eastern Zone.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the informal economies of post socialism as they are practiced in two rural communities on either side of the Ukrainian-Romanian border, which are now dependent on migrant worker remittances, cross-border small trading and consumption and a wide range of non-market economic practices for not only daily but also long-term survival or social reproduction. As informal economic practices have been sustained and even proliferated in the region, the thesis responds to a need to understand how local communities produce, embed and give meaning to these everyday, routinised practices in the borderlands. The thesis therefore addresses two key questions: How are informal economies in the Ukrainian-Romanian borderlands practiced?; How do communities construct and embed meanings for these practices? The themes of language, citizenship, gender and marriage enable us to understand the processes through which the practices are discursively and performatively given meaning.

This thesis explores the role of temporary staffing agencies (TSAs) in the local labour market by analysing the social interactions and relationships between TSAs and their clients. It argues that different agencies can reshape and reproduce the temporary staffing industry (TSI) and labour markets in locally specific ways. The research responds to calls for the TSI to be understood as “more than a ‘neutral’ service industry” (Coe et al., 2009a:58) and the limited body of knowledge relating to the tactics of different sized TSAs (beyond the multinationals). It examines how different sized TSAs can make markets locally – by actively creating demand, wining new business and influencing employment – or how they may be marginalised by the activities of competitors. This research fulfils the need to examine the role of TSAs in the local labour market. Pilot research identified three themes that contribute to addressing these gaps: i) the affect of local labour market characteristics on the process of recruitment; ii) the contractual and social relationships between agencies and their clients; and iii) the influence of size on the activities of agencies locally. The study took place in Birmingham and focuses on TSAs which recruit within the light industrial and driving sectors.

The first part of the thesis studies the voting behaviour of careerist experts in a secret committee where voting profiles get `leaked' to the public with a given probability. For informative voting (where every expert votes according to his posterior probability) in equilibrium, the committee must use the unanimity voting rule along with an intermediate probability of transparency. No committee that enforces informative voting can maximise social welfare, that is, informative voting and welfare-maximisation are mutually exclusive properties. Either full transparency or complete secrecy is required in a committee under the unanimity voting rule to maximise welfare. For low priors, a fully transparent majoritarian committee is better for the society than any unanimous committee. In the second part of the thesis, the transmission of information is studied where an informed media, whose interests are partially in conflict with a finite group of rational voters, transmits news items in an attempt to manipulate democratic decisions. In a common-interest two-alternative voting model where due to reputation concerns the media can credibly commit to send any news reliably, we show that even if voters welcome the news when it arrives, media's presence can hurt their ex-ante welfare in both large and small constituencies.