The persistence of wage differentials--differentials that are inconsistent with both human capital theory and conventional Marxian theories of the working class--has led economists to reexamine the structure and historical development of labor markets and the labor process in the U.S. The central thesis of this dissertation is that such economic divisions result from differences in (implicit and explicit) bargaining power, and are the basis for the unequal returns to human capital that characterize segmented labor markets. In this dissertation, three forms of bargaining power are identified: (1) implicit individualistic power based on institutional attributes such as firm-specific human capital, (2) implicit collective power based on solidarity along lines of race, ethnicity and gender, and (3) explicit collective power exercised via unions. These forms of bargaining power are closely associated with occupation. Theoretical models are developed that identify the relationship between workers' power and wage determination. The models, which combine efficiency wage theory with non-cooperative game theory, show that the return to human capital is a function of bargaining power. Thus, groups of occupations with different degrees of bargaining power will exhibit unequal returns to human capital, i.e. they exhibit the characteristics of segmented labor markets. These models provide an explanation of labor segmentation that is microfounded in the process of wage determination. The theoretical wage models are tested econometrically, using wage data for individuals in 1970. The results substantiate the hypothesis that power-based occupational groups constitute distinct segments of the labor market. Limitations on U.S. wage data preclude a direct test of this hypothesis in the pre-War period. As an alternative, data from Massachusetts in the 1900s is used to econometrically demonstrate that occupational power attributes are good predictors of occupational earnings. Statistics identifying divisions among U.S. wage earners are constructed for 1870, 1910, 1950 and 1980. The resulting quantitative history of workers' power differs significantly from previous historical works, which posit labor segmentation as a characteristic of the post-World War II period. The results show that power-based divisions among wage earners existed in 1910, and strongly suggest that labor segmentation is a fundamental characteristic of the modern U.S. economy.

This dissertation contributes to the long-standing debate between those who argue that the enclosure of the commons was as a precondition to foster economic growth and those who defend common property regimes can be efficient and sustainable. Exploiting historical evidence from 19^th century and early 20^th century Spain, this research shows that the persistence of the commons in some Spanish regions was not detrimental to economic development, at least relative to the institutional arrangements they were replaced with. On the contrary, during the early stages of modern economic growth, the communal regime not only did not limit agricultural productivity growth, but indeed constituted a crucial part of the functioning of the rural economics in a number of ways. On the one hand, these collective resources complemented rural incomes and, subsequently, sustained households' consumption capacity. The reduction in life expectancy and heights in the provinces where privatisation was more intense, as well as the negative effect on literacy levels, strongly supports that the privatisation of the commons deteriorated the living standards of a relatively large part of the population. On the other hand, the communal regime also significantly contributed to financing the municipal budget. Deprived from this important source of revenue, local councils became unable to adequately fund local public goods and ended up increasing local taxes. Lastly, the social networks developed around the use and management of these collective resources facilitated the diffusion of information and the building of mutual knowledge and trust, thus constituting a vital ingredient of the social glue that hold these rural communities together. All things considered, the persistence of the commons in some regions provided peasants with cooperation mechanisms different from the market and made the transition to modern economic growth more socially sustainable.

Division One: “Malthus Gets Fat” (Two Chapters) Chapter One develops a simple dynamic model to examine the takeoff from a Malthusian economy to a modern growth regime. It finds that several factors, most notably the rate of technological progress and the economic structure, determine the fastest rate at which the population can grow without declining living standards; this is termed maximum sustainable population growth. It is only when this maximum sustainable rate exceeds the peak rate at which a society expands that takeoff can occur. I also investigate the effects of trade and international income transfers on the ability to sustain takeoff. It is also shown that present income growth is not necessarily indicative of the ability to sustain takeoff and that factors which increase current income growth may actually inhibit takeoff, and vice versa. Chapter Two applies the sustainable population growth framework to Britain during the Industrial Revolution. The model shows a dramatic increase in sustainable population growth at the time of the Industrial Revolution, well before the beginning of modern levels of income growth. The main contributions to the British breakout were technological improvements and structural change away from agricultural production. At least until the middle of the 19th Century, coal, capital and trade played a minor role. Division Two: “Leverage and Financial Market Instability” (Four Chapters) Chapter One develops a model of how leverage induces explosive behavior in financial markets. I show that when levered investors become too large relative to the market as a whole, the demand curve for securities can suddenly become upward-sloping as levered investors are exposed to forced liquidations. The size and leverage of all levered investors defines the minimum elasticity-adjusted market size for stability or MinEAMASS, which is the smallest elasticity-adjusted market size that can support the group of levered investors analyzed. This gives rise to a measure of instability that can predict when markets become vulnerable to a leverage-driven market liquidity crisis. Chapter Two iterates the model of Chapter One forward in time to generate an inflating bubble that suddenly bursts, reproducing many of Kindleberger's (1996) stylized facts about the dynamics of bubbles in a simple framework. Chapter Three applies my measure of instability in a historical investigation of the 1998 demise of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). I find that a forced liquidation of LTCM threatened to destabilize some financial markets, particularly for bank funding and equity volatility. Chapter Four discusses how the model applied to the stock market crash of 1929. There the evidence suggests that a tightening of margin requirements in the first nine months of 1929 combined with price declines in September and early October caused enough investors to become constrained that the market was tipped into instability, triggering the sudden crash of October and November.

This study aims to generate a more robust understanding of public attitudes regarding non-renewable natural resource markets. Employing a comparative-historical case study method, it analyzes three waves of widespread fear that swept the United States over the course of the twentieth century regarding an imminent, irreversible shortage of oil. Each of these periods of fear over oil supply availability coincided with a significant rise in the price of crude oil, only to be followed by a sudden collapse as new production came onstream in response to higher prices. The study utilizes process tracing and pattern matching techniques to examine the linkages between fundamental supply-demand conditions in the crude oil market, oil price movements, and expert predictions of and other public expressions of belief that oil in the United States would become scarcer and more expensive in the future. This dissertation’s core arguments contribute to existing theoretical debates in three ways. First, by providing a comparative historical portrait of cyclical patterns in public and expert beliefs regarding non-renewable resource availability and long-term price behavior, the study puts contemporary debates over the future of oil supply in historical perspective. It allows the rampant claims of, and widespread belief in, a global shortage of oil that have gained popularity over the last decade—most notably, in the so-called “peak oil” movement—to be situated within a broader chronological context. It also extends and deepens earlier historical work analyzing oil shortage scares in the United States, both in terms of their underlying dynamics and their effect on federal government policy relative to the oil industry. Second, the study establishes the link between fundamental supply-demand conditions in the oil market, generally reflected in oil prices, and the degree of media attention given to, and apparent public belief in, an imminent, irreversible shortage of oil in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. In so doing, it demonstrates the applicability of Shiller’s (2000, 2005) conceptualization of new era economic theory formation and popularization to observed phenomena in the oil market, but with a crucial difference. Rather than new era economic thinking taking the form of unbounded optimism about the future, in the case of the oil market new era thinking has tended to be manifested as the pessimistic belief that an impending, irreversible shortage of oil would lead to a long-term, even perpetual, rise in oil prices. The study suggests two modifications to the concept that enhance its greater explanatory leverage with regard to exhaustible resource markets: one, that often the new era predictions most widely cited during shortage scares were actually made prior to the boom in prices, to little fanfare, but subsequently deemed prophetic by new era proponents; and two, that the new era narratives often contained normative elements. Moral judgments—in particular, condemnation of the oil economy’s degradation of the natural environment—have often intertwined with predictions that the oil supply was more limited than widely believed and that prices were destined to continue rising. Third, the study demonstrates that the concept of narratives of decline, as described by Bennett (2001) and Lieber (2008), constitutes a powerful theoretical lens through which to understand trends in popular opinion with regard to non-renewable resource availability, and to asset prices more generally—a link that has heretofore gone unrecognized. It finds that a positive feedback loop tended to exist between popular fears of a new era of oil shortages, marked by a long-term rise in prices, and related narratives of the environmental and relative political-economic decline of the United States.

The thesis aims to contribute to the question of the origins of efficient institutional arrangements, which are regarded essential for economic development and long-term economic growth. In Africa most institutional frameworks were established under colonial rule and then persisted to a large extent. In this sense colonialism offers a "natural experiment" - a phase in which European institutions were transferred to African countries. The thesis investigates the influence of colonial rule on the institutional development of two countries and former British colonies: Botswana and Nigeria. It applies a theoretical model of institutional legitimacy based on the theoretic work of Douglass North and Oliver Williamson. The case studies' findings highlight the persistence of pre-colonial informal institutions grounded in cultural norms and beliefs of the local populations. In addition, pre-existing levels of urbanisation, constraints on political power and integration in colonial labour markets have been factors which influenced the transfer of European institutions. (author's abstract)

This thesis is an historical study of the formation of Thatcherite economic thinking and policymaking with a particular focus upon investigating the part played by economic ideas and economists in Thatcherism. While some economists and economic ideas are closely associated with Thatcherism, Thatcherites were hostile to the bulk of Britain’s economists residing in universities and in the Government Economic Service and skeptical of the usefulness of economic theory in policymaking. Thatcherites thought that British academic and government economists supported a ‘Keynesian consensus’ which was purported to have been in operation since the Second World War and had allegedly retarded Britain’s growth from a quasi-mythical free-enterprise Victorian high-point. However, Thatcherites were keen to win the ‘battle of ideas’ and became eager ‘buyers’ of economic ideas – Keith Joseph particularly – in a ‘marketplace in economic ideas’ which developed over the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Yet, Thatcherites were not suddenly converted to neoliberal economic thinking by the marketplace in economic ideas. Instead, Thatcherites pragmatically sought out ideas which could be adopted and adapted in combination with long-standing ideological beliefs which were hostile to the size and role of the state and in favour of ‘sound money.’ Thatcherite economic thinking developed to include sometimes contradictory strands of supply-side economics, Austrian economics, monetarism/rational expectations and public choice economics but also contained, particularly for Margaret Thatcher, elements of ‘businessmen’s economics’ and ‘housewife economics.’ A case study of privatisation policy illustrates the point that pre-existing Thatcherite thinking, such as the desire to ‘roll back the state’, provided the core underlying rationale for economic policies. Yet, Thatcherites were also able to use a jumbled amalgam of economic ideas such as Austrian and neoclassical economics to promote secondary objectives such as introducing competition when conditions were judged as favourable by Thatcherites.

The regulation of hedge funds has been at the centre of a global policy debate for much of the past decade. Several factors feature in this debate including the magnitude of current global investments in hedge funds and the potential of hedge funds to both generate wealth and destabilise financial markets. The first part of the thesis describes the nature of hedge funds and locates the work in relation to four elements in existing theory including regulatory competition theory, the concept of differential mobility as identified by Musgrave, Kane’s concept of the regulatory dialectic between regulators and regulatees, and the concept of unique sets of trust and confidence factors that individual jurisdictions convey to the market. It also identifies a series of questions that de-limit the scope of the present work. These include whether there is evidence that regulatory competition occurs in the context of the provision of domicile for hedge funds, what are the factors which account for the current global distribution of hedge fund domicile, what latitude for regulatory competition is available to jurisdictions competing to provide the domicile for hedge funds, how is such latitude shaped by factors intrinsic and extrinsic to the competing jurisdictions, and why do the more powerful onshore jurisdictions competing to provide the domicile for hedge funds not shut down their smaller and weaker competitors? The second part of the thesis examines the regulatory environment for hedge funds in three so-called offshore jurisdictions, specifically the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands, as well as two onshore jurisdictions, specifically the United Kingdom and the United States. The final section presents a series of conclusions and their implications for both regulatory competition theory and policy.

This thesis examines the measurement, applications and properties of consumer inflation expectations in the context of eight European Union countries: France, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. The data proceed mainly from the European Commission's Consumer Survey and are qualitative in nature, therefore requiring quantification prior to use. This study first seeks to determine the optimal quantification methodology among a set of approaches spanning three traditions, associated with Carlson-Parkin (1975), Pesaran (1984) and Seitz (1988). The success of a quantification methodology is assessed on the basis of its ability to match quantitative expectations data and on its behaviour in an important economic application, namely the modelling of wages for our sample countries. The wage equation developed here draws on the theoretical background of the staggered contracts and the wage bargaining literature, and controls carefully for inflation expectations and institutional variables. The Carlson-Parkin variation proposed in Curto Millet (2004) was found to be the most satisfactory. This being established, the wage equations are used to test the hypothesis that the advent of EMU generated an increase in labour market flexibility, which would be reflected in structural breaks. The hypothesis is essentially rejected. Finally, the properties of inflation expectations and perceptions themselves are examined, especially in the context of EMU. Both the rational expectations and rational perceptions hypotheses are rejected. Popular expectations mechanisms, such as the "rule-of-thumb" model or Akerlof et al.'s (2000) "near-rationality hypothesis" are similarly unsupported. On the other hand, evidence is found for the transmission of expert forecasts to consumer expectations in the case of the UK, as in Carroll's (2003) model. The distribution of consumer expectations and perceptions is also considered, showing a tendency for gradual (as in Mankiw and Reis, 2002) but non-rational adjustment. Expectations formation is further shown to have important qualitative features.