This dissertation is composed by three papers whose unifying themes are the origin and impact of fiscal institutions. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it highlights the usefulness of the concept of fiscal capacity for the macroeconomics and international finance literatures by demonstrating its impact on sovereign default and fiscal dynamics during the Great Depression. Limits to the ability to tax have clear implications for macro-financial research, but are neglected by much of the literature. Second, my work contributes to the fiscal and state capacity literature by focusing on municipal level fiscal institutions in Brazil. Although research in this field is burgeoning, our understanding of the origin and impact of fiscal institutions in many parts of the world, including Latin America, is still very limited, particularly at the sub-national level. In terms of structure, the dissertation is a backwards journey from the impact of fiscal institutions to their origin. The first paper studies one of the ultimate outcomes of fiscal dynamics – sovereign default – by analyzing the debt crisis of the 1930s. The second paper takes the collapse in public revenues during the Great Depression as a starting point and demonstrates that fiscal institutions were a fundamental factor in the dynamics of fiscal aggregates. By shifting the focus to a single country and a different time period – the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries – the third paper demonstrates that slavery was deeply detrimental to the development of local governments’ ability to tax and provide fundamental growth and welfare-enhancing public goods in Brazil.

In this thesis, I re-investigate the 1931 financial crisis in Austria and Hungary with the help of new data compiled from primary sources. Our knowledge about the causes of these calamities is much less extensive than about the German crisis. The aim of my research is to provide for a better understanding of the Central European crises of 1931. Chapter 1 examines the role of international and domestic forces behind the crisis in Austria. Two newly constructed micro-level datasets demonstrate that a domestic factor, exposure to weakly performing industrial enterprises, was essential in accounting for the insolvency and possibly also for the illiquidity of the four universal banks that came under distress between 1925 and 1931. In Chapter 2, the focus shifts to Hungary, where both the national historiography and the international literature documented a currency crisis. A new database on the financial system and macroeconomic indicators reveal that the banking system played a critical role in the calamities and the country experienced a twin crisis in 1931. Chapter 3 zooms in on a particular aspect of the crisis: the political factors behind the weakness of the two countries’ banking systems. Facing social demands but their hands tied by the macroeconomic trilemma, the authorities of both countries had to resort to (ab)using the banking system to provide clandestine economic stimulus. Political interventions into banking encouraged imprudent lending and contributed to the vulnerability of the two banking systems and thereby to the crisis of 1931. Together these findings underscore the economic importance and the political risk of the banking system. They further emphasize the dramatic, and seemingly insurmountable challenges of nation building that Austria and Hungary faced in the interwar years.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the industrial district of the North Staffordshire Potteries dominated the British earthenware industry, producing local goods that sold in global markets. Over this time the region experienced consistent growth in output, an extreme spatial concentration of physical and human capital, and became home to some of the most famous Master Potters in the world. The Potteries was also characterised by a growing body of useful and practical knowledge about the materials, processes and skills required to produce world-leading earthenware. This thesis exploits this striking example of a highly concentrated and highly skilled craft-based industry during a period of sustained growth and development which offers a rich opportunity to contribute to several strands of economic and business history. This thesis presents and analyses new empirical evidence based on trade directories to examine the organisational evolution of the district. It reconstructs the district at the firm level, showing that the region’s growth was incredibly dynamic. The spatial concentration of producers and the importance of social and business networks are also explored through a new map of the region in 1802 and social network analysis. As a study of a craft-based, highly skilled industry without a legacy of formal institutions such as guilds to govern and protect access to knowledge, this thesis also offers substantial empirical and historiographical contributions to the study of knowledge and innovation during the period of the Industrial Revolution. It presents a new database of pottery patents alongside a variety of qualitative evidence such as trade literature, exhibition catalogues, advertisements and sales catalogues. Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals the low propensity to patent in the North Staffordshire pottery industry, and provides a new typology of knowledge used in the industry. It argues that the types of knowledge being created and disseminated influenced the behaviour of producers substantially, and this typology of knowledge is far more complex than those established tacit/explicit divisions favoured in historical study and the social sciences more broadly. The findings of this thesis allow us to answer numerous outstanding questions concerning the development of the North Staffordshire Potteries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When brought together in such a way, the complementary strands of research and findings presented offer a coherent narrative of an extremely complex and dynamic cluster of production that both challenges and confirms traditional historiographical tradition concerning industrial districts.

This thesis examines the practice of confiscation in the Ottoman Empire during the long-eighteenth century. It investigates what enabled, guided and motivated the sovereign to confiscate the property of elites, and how and to what extent this occurred. The contribution of this thesis is twofold. First, it provides the first systematic analysis of the practice of confiscation in the Ottoman Empire, highlighting the basis of selectivity in its application. Second, it contributes to a broader line of literature by analysing the drivers, informal constraints and persistence of historical state predation. One of the strengths of the thesis is its combination of theory and a rich variety of archival evidence, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The thesis finds that müsadere was a selective institution targeting mainly office-holders and private tax contractors. However, some were less likely to face or more capable of avoiding confiscation than others mainly due to factors related to time and location of confiscation, the bargaining position of the wealth-holder and the attributes of their wealth. Although confiscation was costly and time-consuming to enforce, the sultans were continuously interested in it because of its political and redistributive functions such as monitoring the behaviour of their agents and protecting their share in the fiscal revenue from fiscal intermediaries. They had power to do so primarily because of many disincentives of collective action among the targets of confiscation. Through the study of this practice, this thesis shows how an early modern monarch, who was not formally constrained, could and did confiscate the elite property in a time of crisis.

The thesis contains three chapters. The first chapter reports on the first large-scale randomized field experiment involving legally-recognized minorities to examine the causal effects of providing performance-based financial incentives based on social or income disadvantage on high stakes university test scores. The results are that the average test scores of the whole cohort goes down by .14 standard deviations when financial incentives were provided by income disadvantage while there is no effect on the test scores when financial incentives were provided by social disadvantage or when financial incentives were provided to all students. The chapter provides evidence of academic non-cooperation when financial incentives are offered by income status and no evidence of such peer effects when prize incentives are given by social disadvantage. The second chapter, which is a joint work with Dr. H.F.Tam, studies the impact of matrimonial laws introduced by the British in British provinces in colonial India during 1800s and early 1900s. Exploiting quasi-random variations of districts that were former British Provinces within each post-independent Indian states, we find that females have 5% lower chances of marrying under the current legal age, and 1.6% higher chance of attending school at 10-16 years old in regions that were formerly British Provinces. Furthermore, using historical Census of India 1901-1931 on marriage status of population between 0-15 years at district level, the chapter estimates the impact of Child Marriage abolition Act (1931) on child marriages in colonial India. The third chapter uses a large-scale novel panel dataset (2005-14) on schools from the Indian state of Assam to test for the impact of violent conflict on female student’s enrolment ratios. We find that a doubling of average killings in a districtyear leads to a 13 per cent drop in girl’s enrolment rate with school fixed effects.

The sterling area was a financial alliance of countries using sterling as their principal international reserves. Recent studies have highlighted how external assistance prolonged the international use of sterling in the 1950s-60s. This thesis explores the sterling area’s internal institutional arrangements (e.g. reserve management practices and the set-up of central banks), which had complex effects on the member countries. Three case studies examine reserve developments in Australia, Ireland and the UK. Together they reveal a currency construction that supported the persistent use of sterling, but lacked stability. The first paper presents a new account of Australia’s reserve management in 1950-68, emphasising the importance of reserve pooling. Acquisition of non-sterling assets in 1951-61 was limited to gold production and undermined by Australia’s balance-ofpayments volatility. Diversification (substituting other assets for sterling) only began in 1962, largely through the build-up of the IMF ‘gold tranche’. Diversification was gradual, hidden, and constrained by sterling area membership. The second paper examines the development of Ireland’s central bank, with its currency board arrangements, before and after the sterling devaluation of 1967. Before 1967, development was constrained, as an under-resourced central bank and independent commercial banks competed for sterling liquidity. Meanwhile government treated sterling area membership as a contract with the UK. Devaluation broke both constraints, leading to a forceful diversification, and centralisation of commercial bank reserves in the central bank in 1968-9. The third paper applies a contemporary methodology to review sterling crises during the years 1950-67, identifying balance-of-payments flows associated with each crisis. The ‘sterling balances’ of the sterling area underwent significant changes in all the crises, and notable (balance-of-payments) declines in those of 1951-2, 1955 and 1957. Sterling’s recurring problem was the balance of payments of the sterling area as a whole. The system’s limited cohesion failed to address this, contributing to instability.

This thesis contains three interconnected studies on China’s reform of the Household Registration System, or the Hukou System, which regulates internal migration. In Chapter 1, we describe the general institutional background of the Hukou System, look into a reform of the Hukou System adopted by local governments since 2002, and give the outline of each core chapter. In Chapter 2, we explain how the Hukou reform was gradually adopted by local governments in China. We propose a theoretical framework to describe local governments’ incentives to adopt the Hukou reform. By collecting information on the reform date at the prefecture level as well as a number of prefecture-level explanatory variables, we use two different approaches to empirically study local governments’ decisions to adopt the Hukou reform. First, we use a simple logit model to estimate how local economic factors in the pre-reform year affect the probability of early reform adoption. We group prefectures into “early reform” prefectures and the remaining prefectures based on a threshold point in time. Second, we use a complementary log-log model to model the duration of time until reform adoption. We transform our data into discrete-time duration data for the period 2002-2007 given that the reform was adopted by local governments at different points in time. Prefecture which did not adopt the reform until after 2007 are treated as censored. Our estimates indicate that prefectures with a higher degree of labour misallocation and higher demand for labour are adopting the reform earlier, and prefectures with a higher level of expenditures involving public services and social welfare are adopting the reform later. In Chapter 3, we examine whether the Hukou reform increases migration into the prefecture. Because information on migrant stocks and flows by prefecture is not consistently available to us, we construct three different indicators to capture prefecture-level migrations in China from 2000 to 2010. The first indicator refers to the number of non-agricultural Hukou holders registered at the prefecture level, which is available from 2000 to 2008. We use this indicator to capture whether the reform makes it easier for migrants to convert to a local Hukou. The second indicator refers to migration inflows from other prefectures, which is available in 2000 and 2005. We use this indicator to capture whether the reform induces new migration inflows from other prefectures. The third indicator refers to the size of total urban population, which is available in 2000, 2005 and 2010. We use this indicator to capture whether the reform increases the net migration inflows (migration inflows minus migration outflows). We use a difference-in-differences framework with prefecture-level fixed effects to estimate the reform effect on migration. Our estimates indicate that the Hukou reform increases the number of non-agricultural Hukou holders, increases migration inflows from other prefectures, and increases the total urban population in the long term, suggesting that the reform is effective in increasing migration. Also, we find heterogeneous effects of the reform for different skill groups. We find that the reform effect is larger for unskilled workers relative to skilled workers. In Chapter 4, we study how local manufacturing firms react to the Hukou reform. To be exact, we study whether manufacturing firms are growing faster in reform prefectures relative to non-reform prefectures. We focus on firm employment using the Chinese Annual Survey on Industrial Firms (CASIF) from 2000 to 2007. We use a difference-in-differences framework with firm-level fixed effects to estimate the reform effect on firm employment. We also use a propensity score matching approach to deal with the reform endogeneity suggested by the Chapter 2. Our estimates indicate that the reform increases local manufacturing firms’ employment on average. In addition, the reform impact on firm employment is larger for firms located in labour intensive industries and for firms located in industries that use migrant workers more intensively. Finally, we find that the reform also affects state-owned firms. In contrast to the non-state-owned firms that expand after the reform adoption, the state-owned firms downsize. Chapter 5 summarizes the main findings of the thesis and discusses our future research directions.

Uppsatsen kartlägger Stekenjokkgruvans historiska utveckling utifrån en politisk beslutsprocessmodell. Undersökningsperioden tar start redan vid upptäckten av Stekenjokkmalmen år 1918 men uppsatsen fokuserar främst på det tidiga 70-talet, då Stekenjokkgruvan blev en politisk fråga, fram till gruvans nedläggning i november 1988. Idag har Stekenjokkgruvan åter blivit aktuell eftersom ett gruvbolag vill återuppta gruvdriften i området. Utgångspunkten är att problematisera vad staten hade för motiv att investera i Stekenjokkgruvan utifrån en Industrial policy-ansats. Uppsatsen återspeglar även processerna i Stekenjokkfrågan med Stålverk 80 som var en annan samtida statlig industriinvestering.  Detta för att stärka bilden av hur beslutsprocessen gick till vid statliga industriinvesteringar under 70-talet och för att fånga upp vilka faktorer som påverkade beslutet. I denna uppsats dras slutsatsen att statens ingripande i Stekenjokkgruvan kan förklaras av det tidiga 70-talets regionalpolitiska målsättning. Politiken inriktades mot att minska den dåvarande utflyttningstrenden från landsbygden, genom att skapa sysselsättning i form av industrisatsningar i framförallt Norrland. Staten hade även starka samhällsekonomiska skäl att investera i Stekenjokkgruvan. Stålverk 80 kunde även motiveras av liknande anledningar men med skillnad att Stålverk 80 förväntades vara ett mycket företagsekonomiskt lönsamt projekt som till och med skulle förbättra den svenska handelsbalansen.

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This thesis is a study of the place of ‘party’ and different ways of understanding this phenomenon in eighteenth-century British political discourse, especially between 1714 and 1765. Party is one of the most basic concepts of politics. If we are looking for party in any form, the idea of partisan division may be at least as old as the earliest societies where there was competition for office. But what did ‘party’ mean in the eighteenth century? While ancient factions usually denoted interest groups representing different orders in the state, party in the eighteenth century had a range of meanings, some general and others more specific. Broadly speaking, it could either mean a parliamentary constellation vying for power, or carry the more sinister connotation of civil war-like division, with roots in the Reformation and its aftermath. In spite of the fact that the emphasis was on principles and beliefs rather than organisation in both cases, modern historians have tended to focus on the latter. The party debate was considered by political writers at the time to be profoundly important, and political life in the period simply cannot be understood without reference to party. Although ‘party spirit’ waxed and waned, ‘party’ was consistently a key word in political debate. By concentrating on the writings of Rapin, Bolingbroke, David Hume, John Brown, and Edmund Burke, in the context of political developments, this thesis presents the first sustained examination of the idea of party in eighteenth-century Britain. It demonstrates that attitudes towards party were more diverse, penetrating and balanced than previous research has managed to capture.