What explains variation in fiscal capacity over time and across sub-national units within the same country? In this dissertation, I argue that incumbent political elites, anticipating the redistributive consequences of democratization, can hollow out fiscal capacity. Places where such a phenomenon is likely to occur are those characterized by high levels of social-status inequality arising from historical inter-group segregation. I examine fiscal capacity in colonial Indian provinces and demonstrate that an exogenous episode of limited franchise expansion to lower-status groups was followed by a period of declining fiscal institutions. I use a novel historical dataset spanning 43 districts in the provinces of Madras and Bombay between 1914--1925 and qualitative evidence from legislative proceedings in the two provinces, and find that tax institutions declined in the districts with higher levels of status inequality, as opposed to inequality in wealth. This decline was more pronounced in the reform years, as upper-status groups anticipating the ascendance of lower-status groups into politics hollowed out tax institutions. Next, I examine a case of political mobilization in contemporary India and demonstrate that an announcement by the Government of India in 1990 to implement affirmative action for lower-status groups was followed by a rise in the right-wing vote share for the Bharatiya Janata Party after 1990. Using survey data and electoral data, I finds that both wealthy and poor upper-status Indians voted for the right-wing after 1990 in places where there was greater status inequality in 1931 -- a pattern that did not exist in previous elections. These findings provide evidence for the claim that when upper-status groups face threats to their social standing, cross-class solidarities emerge in support of anti-redistribution parties.

In this dissertation, I explore various fundamental challenges of inequality that developing countries continue to grapple with. The first chapter seeks to understand the role of social and cultural norms in explaining the persistent gender gaps in the labor markets. The second chapter studies how schooling decisions are made in the presence of liquidity constraints. Both the above questions are answered in the context of India. The third chapter adds to our understanding of the relationship between decision-making power within households and intimate partner violence in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite recent gains in women's educational attainment and reproductive agency, substantial gender gaps in the labor market still remain, particularly in developing countries. In my first chapter, I study the impact of culture and social norms in explaining this puzzle in the Indian setting. In particular, I examine the role of the male-breadwinner norm, which dictates that husbands should earn more than their wives. I first establish a sharp discontinuity in the distribution of the share of the wife's income at the point where the wife’s income exceeds the husband's income. I theoretically show that this pattern can be best explained by gender identity norms which make couples averse to a situation where the wife earns more than her husband. I also provide empirical evidence that this aversion has real implications for the labor market outcomes of the wife. First, the wife is less likely to participate in market activities if her potential income is likely to exceed her husband’s. Second, she earns less than her potential if she does work and can potentially out-earn her husband. Evidence from observing couples over time and bunching methods supplement these results. Moreover, these results are more pronounced in couples where the husband is making the labor market decisions of the wife and where other regressive gender norms are prevalent. My second chapter, co-authored with Dhruv Jain, studies the importance of liquidity constraints in determining the schooling decisions of households in developing countries. Evidence across developing countries suggests that parents are often credit-constrained when making schooling decisions for their children. But little is known about the severity of this constraint. In this chapter, we ask if temporary shocks to liquidity affect parents’ decisions regarding the schooling of their children. We use a shock to available cash in the economy induced by India’s 2016 demonetization to identify this effect. The policy made 86% of currency-in-circulation illegal overnight, and individuals could deposit old notes at the bank in exchange for new ones but with significant withdrawal limits. We identify the impacts of demonetization’s severity by leveraging discontinuities in banking access across Indian districts. Difference-in-discontinuity estimates show that districts that experienced more severe liquidity shock saw an increase in dropouts from private schools but no effect in free public schools, consistent with the presence of real credit constraints. Moreover, enrollments in future periods remained unchanged, suggesting a more permanent effect. The third chapter of my dissertation, co-authored with Aletheia Donald, Cheryl Doss and Markus Goldstein, studies the relationship between decision-making within households and its impact on intimate partner violence (IPV) in 12 Sub-Saharan African countries where 36% of women are affected by IPV. Using the wife’s responses to survey questions, we find that compared to joint decision-making, sole decision-making by the husband is associated with a 3.3 percentage point higher incidence of physical IPV in the last year, while sole decision-making by the wife is associated with a 10 percentage point higher incidence. Similar patterns hold for emotional and sexual violence. When we include the combined responses of the husband and wife about decision-making in the analysis, we identify joint decision-making as protective only when spouses agree that decisions are made jointly. Notably, agreement on joint decision-making is associated with lower IPV than agreement on decision-making by the husband. Constructs undergirding common IPV theories, namely attitudes towards violence, similarity of preferences, marital capital, and bargaining, do not explain the relationship. Our results are instead consistent with joint decision-making as a mechanism that allows spouses to share responsibility and mitigate conflict if the decision is later regretted.

Across the ever-humming terrain of New York City, an infrastructure dedicated to five boroughs’ and five decades’ worth of hip-hop history is blossoming under the steadfast cultivation of fans, artists, scholars, entrepreneurs, and communities working and living in the music’s birthplace. And yet, contemporary accounts of the march of gentrification through the city are often measured in terms of its effacement of New York’s hip-hop landscape, as well as other black urban centers that inflect the national imagination around Black Music and hip-hop. According to these accounts, the accessibility of this music culture’s local legacies is affected by the ways urban wealth inequality overlaps with the spatial inheritances of race. With these considerations in mind, in this dissertation I trace the relationship between genre, sound, memory, and displacement. At a broader level, this research attends to the impact of gentrification on the historical, sensory, and aesthetic ecologies of neighborhoods and cityscapes, asking how in turn they can curate a sense of recognition, and thus belonging, for both longstanding and recently arrived residents. With a neoliberal contextualization of New York City’s official sound and cultural policies serving as a top-down, place-based framework, I chart local-level encounters between the aural boundaries and aesthetic imaginaries that inflect the habitus of musical genre workers—and the inhabitants of neighborhoods they do work in—and the imagineered sonic assemblages developers seek to impose in courting a well-heeled, white demographic. Keeping an eye on the ways past and present discourses on hip-hop, and the minstrelized legacies of genre in the United States, mediate such encounters, I specifically view locality in this work through commemorative hip-hop projects emerging within the shifting habitus and regulatory regimes of transitioning neighborhoods. Such an exploration demands attentiveness to the racial and right-to-the-city politics these projects serve as they engage the symbolic aura hip-hop has accrued since the early 1980s as a focal point for heated public debates (Rose, Hip Hop Wars). At length, I illuminate how these politics, and projects that anchor them, signal a heightened moment of American genre drama, as hip-hop historicity, canonization, and memorialization interface directly with urbanization, manifesting: a particular anxiety around the potential that contemporary rap partakes in gentrification through a resurrection of the pained-but-jolly black body of minstrelsy, producing scenes of genre subjection; the potential to inhabit, territorialize, and reconstruct racialized property at the level of the individual; possibilities for evading a reinscription of corporeal politics that, as in the heyday of minstrelsy, leave open room for the counter-genre praxes established under it; forms of lyricism and vocality important to such counter-genre praxes and narratives; and finally, approaches to mediating the overlap between economic inequality and the spatial inheritances of race, and the social production of place. Ultimately, this research makes a strong case for the way musical affect and affectation carry the potential for an enduring and powerful influence on gentrification’s revisionary structuring of the body politic.

This dissertation is an intellectual history of the language of political economy in Mexico. It examines a period from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, through the writings of six individuals. I refer to political economy as a “political language” in the sense established by the Cambridge School of intellectual history, as a set of “idioms, rhetorics, forms of speaking about politics, distinctive language games, each one of which has its own vocabulary, rules, language, preconditions and implications as well as tone, and style.” My project is not a history of the Mexican economy or economic policy. Rather, it explores the persistent preoccupations, assumptions, and repertoires of image and metaphor that consciously or unconsciously informed debate, shaped political struggle, and drew the boundaries of the thinkable and sayable in the still-emerging sphere of the economy, while also drawing attention to the ways that political economy remained tightly interwoven with political and moral programs and values. Following the Polanyian premise that the economy is as much a cultural field as politics is, and that as culture, political and economic discourse are inseparable at the root, the dissertation as a whole makes a contribution to expanding Latin America’s “new political history” and “new intellectual history” into the realm of the economic. It also broadens the Cambridge School’s history of political thought and political economy to include Mexican interlocutors, who confronted the key political, economic, and philosophical questions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a different setting in historical space and time. Mexican thinkers creatively engaged the foundational issues of European political economy: commerce and monopoly, luxury and political virtue, industrial development and the role of institutions. But they also challenged established dogma and raised new questions: the significance of conquest and ongoing violence to the social order and national development; the woes of excessive inequality; the problem of latecomer development; and the questionable applicability of universalized theory. At a crucial moment in the transformation of Atlantic society, the language of political economy in Mexico was a vibrant site of creativity and contention that remains relevant today.

The American Dream promised success to Americans in the nineteenth century. This study analyzes the possibilities for average individuals to succeed in rapidly growing Dallas, Texas from 1880 to 1910. Success is measured in terms of occupational, property, and geographical mobility. Available materials dealing with average persons from Dallas: tax rolls, city directories, and the manuscript census for 1880 are evaluated, The focus of this study is primarily on the black population, but for comparison whites and immigrants were also studied. A sample of 216 whites, 212 immigrants, 210 blacks, and 81 mulattoes was randomly drawn from the 1880 census schedules. These men were traced through directories and tax rolls for the period from 1880 to 1910. Information was also tabulated on the female heads of household in Dallas in 1880.

The primary focus of this thesis is on the causes and macroeconomic implications of inequality. The first two chapters of this thesis concern firm size (measured by sales) inequality. The rise in inequality in the upper tail of firm size distribution has important macroeconomic implications on the product market, the labor market and aggregate productivity growth. In Chapter 1, I seek to understand how acquisition and innovation drive the rise in the upper tail firm size inequality. This question is motivated by the fact that as top firms pull increasingly farther from the rest of the firms, they did not grow into superstar firms on their own. I construct a new dataset to track the dynamic ownership of firms and their patents to identify the mechanisms through which acquisitions drive the growth of the acquiring firms via innovation. I then examine the implications of these innovation mechanisms on upper tail firm size inequality — in terms of both stationary distribution and transition dynamics — using a range of firm random growth models. In chapter 2, I study what do changes in top sales shares signal about changes in large firm dynamics. I use an accounting decomposition to identify two sources of top sales shares growth: (i) incumbent top firms grow bigger; (ii) new top firms replace old top firms. I then build a continuous-time random growth model to infer the growth dynamics of firms at the upper tail of firm size distribution. In Chapter 3, in collaboration with Tam Mai, Istudy the implications of occupational and regional inequality on the labor market after the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This thesis is a collection of three independent essays that applies microeconometrics techniques to empirically study topics in development and labour economics. The first chapter uses evidence from a natural experiment in Bangladesh, where households were treated to different types of transfer, food grains and cash, at different periods in time, to test the effect of these transfers on household consumption behaviour. Using the fixed effect instrumental variable model, the estimation results show that though in-kind transfers did cause households to consume more grain than they would have chosen under equal-value cash transfers, the impact on calorie consumption and children health status is minimal. Households that received cash were able to reallocate their funds more effectively, and chose to spend their extra income on clothing and children's non-food consumption, while at the same time spending no more on vices. The second chapter investigates the dynamics of living standards in Thailand. Income and earnings processes are first modelled after the statistical Galton-Markov process before being extended to follow a more structural permanent earnings model. Empirical estimations of income and earnings persistence in Thailand employ both constructed pseudo-panel data from Thailand's Labour Force Surveys and the Townsend Thai panel data. Galton-Markov estimates found conditional persistence to be low in Thailand. However, quantile regression estimates find that persistence is low at the bottom of the distribution but high at the top, indicating a divergence in earnings as time passes. A study of the covariance structure of earnings finds that total variation in the earnings process is predominantly driven by moderately persistent transitory components following the AR(1) process. The third chapter attempts to empirically fit the power-law distribution and study the dynamics of inequality, especially at the upper end, of the income and consumption distribution in Thailand. We find that using the popular but incorrect method based on the linear regression approach will lead to researchers drawing a wrong conclusion. Regression estimates of the power-law exponent, a, provide strong evidence of power-law fit in Thailand. However, from the implementation of the superior Clauset et al. method, the evidence in support of the power-law fit is much weaker. Estimates of a for both income and consumption suggest that there is low inequality at the top in Thailand but further inspection finds that there is a high level of persistent between-group inequality between the top and bottom ends of the distribution. In addition, following Battistin et al. (2009), we find weak support for Gibrat's law of proportional random growth as the income-generating process in Thailand.

This dissertation examines how colonial histories converge with models for capitalist futures in Sierra Leone, framed by ongoing debates around the governance, accumulation and distribution of social goods. It explores how managerial logics of risk, human capital, resilience and corporate social responsibility informed the remaking of the state following a decade of civil war and military intervention. And it attends to the politics of reconstruction pursued in contexts of radical upheaval, examining material infrastructures and subjectivities as sites of transnationally mediated cultural transformation continuous with colonial memory and practice. An ethnographic and historical study based on 18 months of field and archival research in the Western Area (or Freetown Peninsula) of Sierra Leone, the dissertation contributes to debates around care, agency and social value, as well as the fraught relationship between knowledge and expertise in contexts of political, spatial and economic experimentation. Developing an approach that denaturalizes calamity and foregrounds long-term structural violence, chapters trace the growing cognizance of the relation between ecological risk and speculative practices in land and real estate markets in the country, briefly hailed as “Africa’s fastest growing economy” between 2012-2015. Examining the role of financial institutions, humanitarian agencies and contractors from the perspective of numerous stakeholders—including flood survivors and ex-combatants, builders and land brokers, urban planners and architects, World Bank officials and local conservationists—I demonstrate how reconstruction in Sierra Leone intensified dynamics of financialization under conditions of questionable sovereignty, reflecting entrenched hierarchies of rank within global labor and commodity markets and the long-term vulnerability of marginalized citizens to increasingly quotidian forms of harm. The dissertation argues for a methodological shift that understands official demands for citizens to embody their “resilience” as an enduring anticipation of catastrophe, one that has developed in tandem with normative aspirations for the “good life” in Sierra Leone. In contrast with the universal claims of liberal community, democratization and material renewal that accompanied the end of war, I track how manual work involved in excavating the foundations for residential sites in the new suburbs of Freetown coincided with a broader panic around the rising value, obscure origins, and growing scarcity of property, examining moral accounting around the relationship between prosperity and the uneven distribution of social injury. By situating ethnographic material on building, work and wealth alongside debates on global inequality, disaster capitalism, race and the poetics of history, I demonstrate the variety of social factors that sustain the violent futurity of growth. More pointedly, I argue that Sierra Leone reveals a shrinking zone of accountability for the human costs of development “by any means necessary,” as disasters increasingly reflect the retreat of the state in its capacity to protect or preserve human life. Ultimately, the dissertation underscores the contradictions of liberal governance in the wake of empire, new imperial relations in the face of old, and the seemingly premature claim of freedom therein.

Human capital development is one of the key factors in human development in which the state plays a tremendous and critical role. Policies and systems established by the government to enable education, trade and socialisation help or undermine human capital development. The study argues that in the post-apartheid era, the government has moved on from apartheid human capital development to equal human capital development. The state has moved away from providing a fragmented system of a racial and exclusive education and training system to a non-racial and inclusive education and training system that creates equal opportunities for learning for all races. The study identified several challenges that hinder human capital development and recommended that there is need for the current government to create clear working relations between various bodies administering the post-school system. In order to arrive at those findings, the study adopted a quantitative research methodology. / Economics / M.Com. (Economics)

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / I examined a panel of all 50 states over a period of 30 years between 1981 and 2010, estimating a random effects model to examine the relationship between the party of a state’s governor and changes in pretax and transfer income inequality. Though the literature has quite consistently shown that income inequality increases more quickly under Republican governors or when policies favored by Republicans are implemented, I find no evidence to support this, though this is perhaps because I did not allow a long enough lag time for new policies to have an effect. I did, however, find that pretax income inequality increases more quickly under Democratic presidents than under Republicans, in spite of the fact that all previous research shows the opposite to be true. I suspect that this unusual finding is the result of a quirk in my 1981-2010 time frame, namely the effects of the shift in welfare policy under the Clinton administration in the 1990s.