Does past migration matter for economic development in the long-term? Does an area’s history in migration affect economic performance long after the initial migration shock has faded away? And – does it matter what type of immigrant settles in a territory for the economic impact of migration to persist in time? This dissertation examines the long-term economic impact of migration, connecting migrant settlement patterns at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century to present day levels of income per capita. It firstly estimates the effect of different compositional features of the historical migrant stock on long-term economic development levels in the United States (US), a country founded and essentially formed by migrants. Secondly, it tests whether there is a link between past European and recent Latin American migration to the US to identify whether one potential transmission mechanism could be at play in transferring the migrants’ economic impact across time. The results of the analyses conducted using a variety of methods – OLS, IV, and panel data estimation techniques – provide three novel insights. Firstly, historical migrant stock is one of the very few historical county features that still explain current levels of development. In contrast to other factors, such as past income and education levels or industry structure, the influence of past migration on economic development does not seem to fade over the very long-term. Secondly, compositional aspects related to the historical migrant stock remain highly decisive for economic development outcomes more than 100 years later. The diversity of the migrant population, the gender balance, as well as the average distance travelled by the migrant stock over a century earlier still influence regional economic development levels today. All three features have growth-enhancing implications over the short as well as over the long-term. Lastly, past migration – irrespective of the presence of family connections, ethnic ties, or migration networks – shapes the geographical patterns of successive migration waves spanning multiple decades and even generations. An area’s migration history acts as a crucial pull factor for future migrants and is at the root of the formation of migration-prone and migration-averse regions. Consequently, previous migration contributes to ‘rework’ the places of destination, making them more attractive for future generations of migrants. All in all, the findings show that migration not only matters for economic development, but that its economic influence determines the success and prosperity of territories and the well-being of their inhabitants over the very long-term.

This thesis consists of three chapters addressing three different yet related issues on the impact of economic change on labour markets. In chapter 2, I assess the impact of United Kingdom (UK) job polarization at the worker-level by examining changes in the underlying labour reallocation. I use an annual random sample of UK employees from 1975 to 2015, based on NESPD and ASHE, following workers employed in a PAYE-registered job. To abstract from compositional changes, I conduct the analysis at the group level, distinguishing three age and gender groups. First, I identify distributional changes accounting for aggregate job polarization by decomposing employment share changes for low, medium, and high skilled employment into distributional and compositional changes. Second, I conduct a counterfactual exercise for changes in transition rates to compute their contribution to job polarization at the group and aggregate level. I find job polarization to be associated with a negative impact on young workers, who become more likely to start their career in low skilled jobs, and male workers, who experience longer non-employment periods. These changes combined can account for at least two thirds of the decline in the aggregate medium skilled employment share. Reallocation between job types appears unimportant. In chapter 3, I examine changes in the distribution of non-employment spell durations associated with job polarization. I estimate the duration distribution in terms of survival functions, considering all exits to employment. I suggest a competing risks model allowing to decompose changes in survival functions into changes in hazard rates to low, medium, and high skilled jobs. Based on findings from chapter 2, I argue that changes in the hazard rate to medium skilled jobs are associated with job polarization. Survival functions are estimated non-parametrically for flow samples, based on NESPD and ASHE, of UK workers of six demographic groups entering non-employment in successive expansionary periods from 1975 to 2015. To organize the discussion, I distinguish short-term, longer temporary and permanent spells, finding that job polarization is associated with a general shift towards longer temporary spells, suggestive of longer reallocation periods, and male workers also becoming more likely to be permanently jobless, suggestive of a failure to reallocate. Women experience no comparable distributional changes, suggesting results are driven by aggregate and group-specific factors. In chapter 4, I test whether skill-biased technological change (SBTC) differs across OECD countries. SBTC is often held to be an exogenous shock common to developed countries. I argue that seminal contributions establishing SBTC do not assess comparative aspects. Extending the approach by Katz and Murphy [1992] to a cross-country context, I test for SBTC differences using annual country-level panel data for 14 OECD countries from 1986 to 2010. I find evidence for significant variation. I explore whether differences are systematically related to institutional measures, for which I find tentative evidence.

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.

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.

<p>Då många klassiska och populära sagor har illustrerats av ett flertal olika konstnärer finns det ett intresse i att analysera hur detta påverkar läsarens tolkning av sagan. Vilka episoder väljer illustratören att ta med? Lägger han/hon fokus på personerna, miljön eller någon specifik känsla t.ex.? Dessa är några av de aspekter som inverkar på hur sagan kommer uppfattas. Illustreringarna kan göra att sagan känns mer riktad mot en yngre läsarkrets eller vara mer tilltalande för äldre barn eller vuxna. Jag har för avsikt att analysera Den lilla flickan med svavelstickorna en saga av H.C. Andersen som sedan den trycktes första gången i mitten av 1850-talet getts ut i ett stort antal versioner både utan och med illustrationer. I min analys har jag tagit med fyra konstnärers illustrerade versioner av sagan. Jag vill belysa hur texten lämnar illustratören både med ett antal valmöjligheter, samt med ett antal problem och begränsningar då han eller hon åtar sig att i bild återge sagans handling och gestalter. Genom analysen hoppas jag kunna förtydliga hur bildkonstnärerna har hanterat dessa val och begränsningar på ett varierande sätt och hur deras lösningar i sin tur påverkar läsarens slutliga tolkning av sagan.</p>

Då många klassiska och populära sagor har illustrerats av ett flertal olika konstnärer finns det ett intresse i att analysera hur detta påverkar läsarens tolkning av sagan. Vilka episoder väljer illustratören att ta med? Lägger han/hon fokus på personerna, miljön eller någon specifik känsla t.ex.? Dessa är några av de aspekter som inverkar på hur sagan kommer uppfattas. Illustreringarna kan göra att sagan känns mer riktad mot en yngre läsarkrets eller vara mer tilltalande för äldre barn eller vuxna. Jag har för avsikt att analysera Den lilla flickan med svavelstickorna en saga av H.C. Andersen som sedan den trycktes första gången i mitten av 1850-talet getts ut i ett stort antal versioner både utan och med illustrationer. I min analys har jag tagit med fyra konstnärers illustrerade versioner av sagan. Jag vill belysa hur texten lämnar illustratören både med ett antal valmöjligheter, samt med ett antal problem och begränsningar då han eller hon åtar sig att i bild återge sagans handling och gestalter. Genom analysen hoppas jag kunna förtydliga hur bildkonstnärerna har hanterat dessa val och begränsningar på ett varierande sätt och hur deras lösningar i sin tur påverkar läsarens slutliga tolkning av sagan.