This thesis aims to explain the financial behavior of households and individuals in China, with a focus on the effects of the old-age dependency, household composition and healthcare systems. First, we investigate the association between old-age dependency ratio and household savings with 1995-2015 provincial-level panel data in China. The results show a negative association between the old-age dependency and the savings ratio, which is weaker in areas with higher level of government medical expenditure, financial development and insurance density. Second, we examine household composition and consumption with the 2011 and 2013 waves of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). We provide evidence that the reallocation of resources freed up when an offspring moves out depends on the lever’s age. Finally, using the 2011, 2013 and 2015 waves of CHARLS, we evaluate and compare the Urban Employee Basic Medical Insurance (UEBMI) and resident health insurance (RHI) schemes. Estimations show that UEBMI is associated with a higher level of household consumption, the utilization of healthcare services, and medical expenditure (compared to RHI). Additionally, RHI fails to help poor people in purchasing sufficient healthcare, whilst UEBMI encourages rich people to overuse healthcare services.

This study examines the international flow of ideas and goods in eighteenth and nineteenth century New England port towns through the experience of a Boston-based commercial network. It traces the evolution of the commercial network established by the intertwined Perkins, Forbes, and Sturgis families of Boston from its foundations in the Atlantic fur trade in the 1740s to the crises of succession in the early 1840s. The allied Perkins firms and families established one of the most successful American trading networks of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and as such it provides fertile ground for investigating mercantile strategies in early America. An analysis of the Perkins family's commercial network yields three core insights. First, the Perkinses illuminate the ways in which American mercantile strategies shaped global capitalism. The strategies and practices of American merchants and mariners contributed to a growing international critique of mercantilist principles and chartered trading monopolies. While the Perkinses did not consider themselves "free traders," British observers did. Their penchant for smuggling and seeking out niches of trade created by competing mercantilist trading companies meant that to critics of British mercantilist policies, American merchants had an unfair advantage that only the liberalization of trade policy could rectify. Following the Perkinses allows for a reconsideration of the Anglo-American relationship in the East Indies, especially China. For example, the special relationships the Perkinses established with the Wu family of Canton as well as the London-based Baring Brothers & Co. proved critical to their success in business. Yet these relationships developed out of the Perkinses' geopolitical position as Americans. Further, the project shows that family life, gendered ideals, and particular visions of the life cycle were central to how Americans came to terms with expanding trade and evolving markets. In the late eighteenth century, Americans began to exalt family as a sentimental unit whose central aims were personal fulfillment and the raising of future citizens. But this new ideology of family masked the institution's continued political and economic utility. Family has never been the promised "haven from the heartless world" of market perils; in fact, well into the nineteenth century it was the opposite: family was a core market institution used for protection from risk and speculation. Even as the Perkinses embraced the speculative potential of commerce and investment, familial and gendered ideals shaped how they understood profit, risk, and even what it meant to be a merchant. Finally, in recent years, scholars have integrated New England into the Atlantic World; I demonstrate the importance of New Englanders in shaping American involvement in Asia and the Pacific as well. The Pacific continues to be a central space of American empire and influence, from former colonies to trust territories. Its history merits a more robust place in American historical consciousness.

This dissertation examines the relevance of technology in explaining structural and cyclical changes in the labor and product markets. The first chapter focuses on computers and the labor market, the second chapter on electricity and the labor market, and the third chapter focuses on computers and the goods market. The three chapters rely on a General Purpose Technology and on the distinction between routine and nonroutine jobs. A General Purpose Technology has three characteristics: it has pervasive use in all industries, it improves over time, and it is able to foster other innovations. This dissertation considers the technology of computers in the second half of the 20th century and electricity in the first half. It defines "pervasive use" as the technology's ability to substitute for some types of jobs--called routine jobs--more than others. Routine jobs consist of repetitive tasks, follow an explicit set of rules, and can easily be automated by the technology. Nonroutine jobs are the remaining jobs, which cannot be easily replaced by the technology. For computers, examples of routine jobs are clerks and secretaries, since their work can be automated with information processing software, whereas examples of nonroutine jobs are managers and health aides, since their work requires creativity or personal interactions. For electricity, examples of routine jobs are laborers on the factory floor, since their work can be automated by the conveyor belt, whereas examples of nonroutine jobs are foremen and engineers, since their work requires attention or detailed calculations. The distinction between routine and nonroutine jobs depends on the technology: accountants can be nonroutine relative to electricity and routine relative to computers. The first chapter examines computers as a theoretical explanation for changes in the US labor market in recent decades. When computers become cheap and competitive compared to workers, they diffuse more rapidly and become more important in the conventional mechanism of capital-labor substitution. The model can account for recent structural changes with this trend of automation: employment has shifted away from routine occupations and the labor share of income has declined. The model also predicts that recessions accelerate the decline in routine occupations--firms prefer to destroy routine jobs during a downturn, when the opportunity cost of restructuring is low. This acceleration can account for recent cyclical changes of the labor market: routine job losses are concentrated in recessions and the ensuing recoveries are jobless.It asks whether computer adoption can account for several changes in the US labor market since the 1980s, such as the shift away from routine occupations, the decrease in the labor share of income, and jobless recoveries. As computers become better and cheaper, firms substitute away from routine occupations and into computers. This substitution becomes quantitatively more important when computers are cheaper--if computers are becoming cheaper but are still too expensive, firms hire workers in routine occupations instead and adjust their demand for computers by a small amount. This level effect is the reason why the price of computers has been decreasing since 1950 but the effects on the labor market start in the 1980s. The trend of automation when computers become sufficiently cheap can account for the structural changes in the labor market: employment shifts away from routine occupations, the labor share of income decreases, and the capital share of income increases. Furthermore, a friction in the labor market such as hiring costs implies that recessions accelerate the decline in routine occupations, even as nonroutine occupations are unaffected. Firms know that nonroutine jobs complement the technology and are increasing: if firms destroy nonroutine jobs in the recession, they will need to create them again in the recovery and pay a hiring cost. So firms prefer to hoard workers in nonroutine occupations during the recession and the burden of adjustment falls on routine occupations, which do not entail a hiring cost since their trend is declining. In the recovery, firms do not hire workers in nonroutine occupations, since they did not fire them during the recession. Workers in routine occupations may be hired back but not back to the peak level because their trend is declining. Total employment is stagnant even as output recovers, which is the definition of a jobless recovery. The second chapter examines the labor market and electricity in the first half of the 20th century. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed large changes in the US labor market, with a shift away from dexterity-intensive occupations, a productivity speedup, and low job creation. The second chapter asks whether the model of the first chapter, which explained labor market changes since the 1980s with the adoption of computers, can also explain labor market changes in the 1930s with the adoption of electricity. It supports the model's main assumption by empirically testing the model's prediction for the labor share of income. The identification strategy uses a state's initial loading on the technology to generate electricity--hydroelectric power or coal power--as an instrument for changes in the price of electricity. It also uses a newly digitized dataset for the concrete industry from 1929 to 1935 to provide plant-level measures of the labor share of income. Technical progress in electric utilities caused a decrease in the labor share of income of the downstream industry of concrete. This result supports the mechanism in the model, which can in turn explain other features of the 1920s and 1930s: structural changes in employment, a productivity speedup, and a weak recovery of employment after the Great Depression.Unlike computers, electricity prices vary across states depending on the geography of the power source--hydroelectric power or coal power--and have different trends. Hydroelectric power was highly efficient from the start and provided few opportunities for cost-saving innovations, so states like California have cheap electricity but the price of electricity is constant. Coal power was relatively inefficient and had many opportunities for cost-saving innovations, so states like New Jersey have initially expensive electricity but the price of electricity decreases over time. A state's initial loading on the coal technology is an instrument for the supply-side changes in the price of electricity. This first-stage of the regression allows identification of the causal effect on the labor market of downstream industries. The chapter focuses on one prediction of the model and asks whether states where the price of electricity decreased more also decreased their labor share of income. It uses labor market variables from the concrete industry from 1929 to 1935, digitized for the first time for this dissertation. Concrete plants sell a non-traded product and locate near their customers, not near cheap electricity, so their location decisions are orthogonal to the geography of power sources and support the validity of the instrument. The chapter finds that, consistent with the mechanism in the model, concrete plants decreased the labor share of income in response to the decrease in the price of electricity. The third chapter examines the behavior of consumption in the second half of the 20th century. The recoveries from the last three recessions in the United States were not only jobless, they were also slow. The growth rate of output and consumption after the trough of the business cycle is twice as small for the last three recessions compared to previous ones. This chapter asks whether the structural decline in employment of routine occupations can also account for recent slow recoveries in consumption. It assumes that workers in nonroutine occupations are optimizing agents who can smooth consumption by saving, whereas workers in routine occupations are hand-to-mouth agents who consume all of their income. Before the 1980s, workers in routine occupations can easily find another routine job right after the recession, so consumption decreases in the recession and "bounces back" in the recovery. After the 1980s, workers in routine occupations need to go through a period of retraining in order to find a new job, so the recovery of consumption is delayed until they finish retraining. In a simulation of the model, the recovery of consumption is twice smaller after the 1980s than before, which suggests that this mechanism may be quantitatively important in explaining recent slow recoveries.

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The nineteenth century saw the birth of economics as a distinct academic discipline in Britain, and with it a new relationship between economic thinkers, policy makers and the wider public, who played an increasingly active role in the sphere of economic discourse. One of the most contentious economic and social debates of this time was the question of population; population growth was seen as both essential to the new industrial economy, but also feared for its association with social unrest and degeneracy. This thesis aims to make sense of the changing content and nature of this debate starting from its intellectual foundation-the Malthusian theory of population-by examining the use of Malthusian theory and rhetoric in the public discourse of population throughout the century. In order to shed light on this changing discourse, this thesis contrasts two key moments in Britain's population debate; the public reaction to Poor Law reform in the 1830s and 40s, and the controversial question of birth control in the 1870s and 80s. Each of these debates can be seen as an independent, yet connected 'instance' of the Malthusian population debate, manifesting as public concern for the private matter of family size. Through an analysis of the discourse surrounding these two debates, notably the use of Malthusian language and rhetoric within the popular press, it is possible to draw some conclusions about the way economic rhetoric was used within the nineteenth-century public sphere. This thesis argues that the purposeful appropriation of Malthusian rhetoric within the public sphere represents a form of public engagement with economics that has until now been poorly understood.

My thesis is comprised of essays that study urban and environmental economic topics in developing countries. Three of the four essays study causal drivers behind the phenomenal urbanization and local economic growth in China. Its rapid growth in the recent decades provides an illustrative case for understanding how the spatial distribution of economic activities is affected by policies regulating factors of production. The fourth essay extends to another developing country, Tanzania, where the challenges posed by climate change faced by populations agglomerating in fast growing urban centers are substantial. This thesis strives to contribute to current research with my understanding of the contexts, utilization of new yet publicly available data, and novel methodology. The fist chapter, Political favoritism in China's capital markets and its effect on city sizes, examines political favoritism of cities and the effect of that favoritism on city sizes. To study favoritism we focus on capital markets, where defining favoritism is more clear-cut and not confounded with issues of city scale economies. Efficiency in capital markets requires equalized marginal returns to capital across cities, regardless of size. We estimate the city-by-city variation in the prices of capital across cities in China from 1998 to 2007. It shows how the prices facing the highest order political units and overall cross-city price dispersion change with changes in national policy and leadership. Next, the effect of capital market favoritism on city growth after the national relaxation of migration restrictions in the early 2000's is investigated. We develop a simple model to show that those cities facing a lower price of capital respond with larger population increases over the next decade, with the change labor mobility. The elasticity of the city growth rate with respect to the price of capital is estimated to be - 0.07 in the OLS approach and -0.12 in the IV approach. The second chapter, Early Chinese development zones: fist-mover advantage and persistency, studies the heterogeneous effects of China's special economic zone program by their level of government support and timing of designation. Using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach, I observe that the early national development zones in China have substantially greater and persistent success in attracting FDI compared to national zones established later, or those at the provincial level. Early national zones persistently attract higher levels of FDI inflows, attract more internal migration and are of significantly larger city sizes. To investigate whether the persistent success of early national zones is driven by their first-mover advantage or their unobservable high growth potential, I use their stronger ties to overseas Chinese investors in past waves of political instability as instrumental variable. The IV estimates are comparable to DID, suggesting the success of early national zones relative to newer and provincial zones can be attributed to their first-mover advantage. This conclusion also suggest that the large positive impacts found in China in the existing literature of evaluating place-based policies can potentially be driven by a small group of first-movers. In the third chapter, Air pollution, regulations, and labor mobility in China, I study the local economic impacts of pollution regulation in China at the time when migration costs fall. On the one hand, environmental regulations impose costs on firms, which tend to reduce local employment. On the other hand, lower pollution levels are an appealing amenity that attracts human capital to the region, possibly providing a boost to economic activity. The overall net effect of these two opposing forces is ambiguous. To investigate this, I study how local economies in China between 2000 and 2010 are affected by two significant reforms in environmental regulations and internal migration. Following the environmental reform, Chinese prefectures face new national air quality standards whose enforcement intensity can be proxied by their existing air quality at the time of the policy introduction. Meanwhile, the migration reform reduces migration costs and allows workers to relocate based on their preferences for air quality across prefectures. To formalize how air quality regulation affects local employment and city sizes by skill types following the two reforms, I first develop a spatial equilibrium model to guide the empirical analysis. To address the non-random spatial distribution of local air quality, I construct a novel instrumental variable of power plant suitability to capture a prefecture's likelihood to pollute heavily. Thermal power plants are major contributors to China's emissions, while electricity distribution and pricing are centralized. Therefore, locations with comparable economic characteristics may differ substantially in their air pollution levels simply because that some host thermal power plants and some do not. The estimation results show that air pollution regulations have an overall adverse impact on local manufacturing employment, with modest reallocation from heavy to non-polluting industries locally. There is little reallocation across space of low-skilled workers, whose employment prospects are more vulnerable under pollution regulation. However, the population of high-skilled workers in heavily polluted prefectures declines, showing their strong preference for air quality as migration costs fall. The last chapter, Cholera in times of floods: weather shocks and health in Dares Salaam, takes a slightly different perspective on urban and environmental issues in developing countries. We examine the challenges faced by urban population in Tanzania as the result of growing urban density and increasing extreme weather occurrences. Urban residents in developing countries have become more vulnerable to health shocks due to poor sanitation and infrastructure. This paper is the first to empirically measure the relationship between weather and health shocks in the urban context of a developing country. Using unique high-frequency datasets of weekly cholera cases and accumulated precipitation for wards in Dar es Salaam, we find robust evidence that extreme rainfall has a significant positive impact on weekly cholera incidences. The effect is larger in wards that are more prone to flooding, have higher shares of informal housing and unpaved roads. We identify limited spatial spillovers. Time-dynamic effects suggest cumulated rainfall increases cholera occurrence immediately and with a lag of up to 5 weeks.

This thesis examines three questions: first, do national government coalitions favour local governments connected to them to receive local public goods? Secondly, does favouritism in the allocation of public goods imply large welfare losses? Finally, how national governments form, and what are the consequences of this for national policy making? These questions are answered in the particular context of Brazil, where rich data on national politics and local public good allocation is available. The first chapter of the thesis summarizes aspects of the Brazilian context that are relevant for the rest of the thesis - covering aspects of Brazilian national politics, and of the rules for allocation of funds for local public goods. The chapter also discusses the disaggregated data on the universe of matching grant transfers from the Brazilian national government to municipalities, used in the second and third chapters. The second chapter answers the following question: are regions connected to the national government favoured to receive funding for local public goods? While a broad literature shows that "politically connected" regions receive more funds from national governments, it is unclear whether this reflects favouritism, or simply connections allowing the national government to know better the needs of regions connected to them. The chapter finds evidence broadly consistent with favouritism. The third chapter then examines the welfare losses associated with favouritism. I build a model of grant requests by cities and approvals by the national government and provide estimates of the model's parameters. Despite ample evidence of favouritism, if the only source of conflict between the national government and society is due to favouritism, the welfare losses for society due to favouritism are of the order of 0.24% of the budget for grants. The second and third chapters suggest large effects of the national coalition over local public good provision. The fourth and final chapter, instead, analyses how national coalitions interact with national policies. More precisely, do government coalitions form to include legislators ideologically close to the executive, or ideologically unattached legislators whose votes are "easier to buy"? Moreover, what are the consequences of this for policy making at the national level - in particular, for roll call votes in the chamber of deputies?

This dissertation is composed of six chapters. Based on a comparison with other recessions throughout history, the first chapter motivates studying the Great Depression from a trade perspective. The second chapter sets the stage for such an endeavour. It introduces a new macroeconomic dataset for the interwar period and investigates the prelude and global impact of the Great Depression. Highlighting the variation of its severity along two dimensions, depth and duration, within and across countries, it conjectures that trade must have played an important role for the global extent of the crisis. The third chapter tests this conjecture by resurrecting the concept of the trade multiplier. Based on a causal estimate of the multiplier and auxiliary data, it demonstrates that the trade channel can explain significant proportions of the initial depth of the Depression in small open economies. If the fall of trade was important for propagating the Depression, analysing trade frictions is imperative. The fourth chapter thus turns to the analysis of retaliatory trade policies in response to currency devaluations. It shows that tariff retaliation was an important feature of interwar protectionism. Its effects on trade were large, which casts doubts on the unqualified favourable assessment of unilateral currency depreciations. Relating to the literature on the post-war distance puzzle, the fifth chapter assesses the relative importance of tariffs and transport costs during the interwar period. Not only were tariffs the dominant trade friction during this period, but their increase rendered distancerelated trade costs relatively less important. Finally, the sixth chapter draws implications for the academic and political discourse.

This thesis is concerned with using micro-level data to examine important features of the process of development which occur on a much larger scale. Using a uniquely long and detailed dataset for a single village in India, allied with data from other sources, we explore what development at the level of a village can tell us about development at the level of a state or country. In the first chapter we introduce the village setting of this thesis - Palanpur, describe the data, and document the broad features of development experienced by the village over the course of 60 years. We focus on changes in employment, education, migration within the village - and relate these to the development of India or other areas where appropriate. The overriding picture is one of a village which has been touched by the outside world. The Green revolution initiated sustained growth in agricultural productivity. Large numbers have moved out of subsistence agriculture into non-agricultural pursuits, many of these outside the village. There have been substantial increases in education, migration, and income levels - similar in magnitude to other areas of India. The second chapter investigates how structural transformation, the reallocation of economic activity from agriculture to manufacturing and services, is experienced for economic entities smaller than countries. Despite a vast macroeconomic literature concerning structural transformation for countries along their development path there is little evidence on the nature of structural transformation at a more microeconomic level. Firstly, we document the stylised facts of structural transformation from the empirical macroeconomic literature. Secondly, we show that these stylised facts are consistent with India's development experience over more than 100 years. We then proceed to document how these empirical facts map onto progressively smaller geographic areas within India. Finally we demonstrate that these features of structural transformation hold true even at the level of a single village in India. The pattern of sectoral reallocation in terms of both income and employment shares is strikingly similar and consistent with the extant stylised facts at all levels. This result has important implications for the way we should think about the complementarity of agricultural and non-agricultural development. The third chapter explores the role of employment networks within the process of development in rural India. The relevant networks we examine are caste and extended family networks, called dynasties. We first establish that there exist job networks in nonagricultural employment for individuals working outside the village. These networks have large effects, and these effects are larger for extended family networks. We then demonstrate that these job networks exhibit competition from fellow network members. As a placebo test we confirm smaller or non-existent network effects for another type of employment believed to be less prone to job referral networks. The second part of this chapter then tests if these dynasty network effects observed for outside employment are consistent with a model of labour market network dynamics. The data are consistent with the model and display both a negative competition effect and a positive information effect. Dynasty network cohorts who arrive in the labour market prior to workers have a positive effect on their employment prospects but those who arrive at the same time have a negative impact. The chapter finishes with some evidence on the potential long run implications of these networks.