Further income redistribution is an obvious way of alleviating child poverty. However, whether this effectively improves life chances of children growing up in poverty is debated, and there might be less expensive ways of doing so. Drawing on competing models explaining intergenerational persistence of poverty, this thesis investigates some of the links between childhood poverty and later economic outcomes in the UK. Aiming to identify policy areas where intervention would be helpful, it examines continuities and changes over time in these links and mechanisms that create them, analysing longitudinal data from people born in 1958, 1970 and the 1980s. This thesis shows that a negative effect of childhood poverty on adult earnings remains for the 1970 cohort (although not for the 1958 cohort), even after controlling for educational attainment in particular, and for other individual and family characteristics. This appears to be a reason that intergenerational persistence of poverty is stronger for the younger cohort. Teenage occupational aspirations do not seem to explain this residual effect, but unemployment in early working life contributes to it. An original contribution is the investigation of different effects of childhood poverty on later onset of and exit from unemployment, and the relative strength of the effects of parental worklessness and income poverty on these outcomes. A main finding is that income poverty more strongly affects the rapid onset of unemployment following employment, although parental worklessness appears to be associated with the slow exit from unemployment. The results suggest that policy interventions in education or (potentially cheaper) interventions affecting youth aspirations would not completely remove the disadvantage experienced by children growing up in poverty. There is therefore evidence that further income redistribution would be beneficial in improving their future life chances, while the findings suggest that the design of income redistribution also matters.

The three chapters in this thesis consider the role macroprudential policy can play in economic booms and busts. The first two chapters concern the recent housing boom in the United States. Whilst it is popularly thought that a significant easing of credit standards caused the boom, the econometric attempts to establish this are largely inconclusive. The fall in real interest rates also fail to account for the magnitude of the boom, suggesting buyers' irrational exuberance. I approach this problem in a new way using tiered housing data that separately covers the price movements of cheap and expensive houses. During the US boom, the cheapest houses had the largest relative price gains in 51 of 52 metro areas studied. In the first chapter I use a simple model to show that this pattern could not have occurred without an easing of credit standards: without this, buyer exuberance or a fall in interest rates would produce the opposite pattern. Chapter two examines alternative explanations for the tiered pattern, including changes in housing supply, speculation and differential income growth. I show that these variables are not responsible for the pattern, but that, in keeping the theory, there is a statistically and economically significant relationship between credit easing and the relative performance of low and high tier house prices. Taken together, the two chapters conclude that the housing boom would have significantly smaller if policy had prevented credit standards from easing. The third chapter considers credit traps; a situation in which a severe financial crisis gives rise to a prolonged period of low lending to, and stagnation of, the real economy. We introduce a model in which credit traps are possible, then consider what macroprudential policy can do to help the economy escape from a trap, and to reduce the chances of falling into one.

Recently, the field of comparative political economy has turned to the Chinese economy. Coherent interpretation of the drivers and fundamental institutions of China’s economic system had been frustrated by the coexistence of, on the one hand, continuously developing capitalist institutions and a burgeoning market economy, and on the other, the persisting and proliferating authoritarian system of economic administration. Therefore, commonplace dichotomous frameworks of capitalism/ socialism, or coordinated/market economies are but of little avail. Building on concepts from regulation theory, this thesis argues that the current system is one wherein state and market institutions support a distinctively industrialist orientation. The Leninist apparatus of bureaucratic controls has come to instill a dynamic wherein economic performance begets political influence, and political stature commands control of capital. Financial markets complement industrial demands for capital, while the ostensibly ‘liberalist’ reorganization of the public sector and welfare system have attenuated the financial pressures on enterprise exerted by labor. As a result of the common interest of political actors and industrialists in the continuous expansion of productive capital, growth has occurred predominantly through investments in fixed capital. Stringent limitations exist which undermine achievement of long-term sustainability of the current state-industrialist nexus. Lack of compensatory mechanisms for disenfranchised constituents and the dearth of indigenous innovation are pertinent problems, and moreover, mutually reinforcing. On the one hand, without a continuous increase in relative surplus value (i.e. output per worker) a more egalitarian distribution of income seems unlikely, while on the other, the lack of individual purchasing power subverts intentions to transition towards a model of growth premised on domestic consumption. Indeed, exceptions exist (for example within the telecommunications industry), but ultimately growth in upstream sectors requires commensurate growth in downstream industries. The Chinese ‘variety of capitalism’ is indeed an idiosyncratic one, but seems to have exhausted its potential.

Consumer choice has become a key reform trend in the provision of public services in Western European welfare states. Research on the welfare effects of choice reforms – including greater provider choice for the individual and competition between providers – has largely focused on economic evaluations of the extrinsic (outcome) effects of choice, thereby leaving its intrinsic, or procedural, value unexplored. The overarching objective of this thesis is to investigate the welfare effects of choice in the provision of health and long-term care (LTC) and their implications for equity. The thesis utilises the subjective well-being approach – incorporating both procedural and outcome utility from choice – to measure welfare effects based on quantitative analysis of survey data. Welfare effects and equity implications are examined in relation to: competition in health care in the English National Health System (NHS); choice of care package in the German long-term care system; and individual preferences and views of choice as a priority in the provision of health care in three NHS countries. The thesis argues that both service characteristics – extent of competition, information availability, technical complexity – and individual capabilities – ability to process information, capacity to manage transaction costs, availability of private support – influence the benefits that individuals derive from choice. Results suggest that choice policies have an overall positive welfare effect in both health and long-term care. However, while direct evidence of outcome improvements is found, the empirical analysis only finds indirect evidence of procedural utility. Middle class characteristics, primarily income and education, are found to have a positive influence on the benefits of choice, amounting to evidence of inequitable facets of choice policies. The middle class further exhibits preferences for choice over and above other characteristics of health care systems. Overall, this thesis advocates a holistic approach to the analysis of choice, incorporating its procedural value and paying particular attention to the equity implications of the choice situation, information processing and differences in available options as well as preferences for choice.

This thesis examines incidences of violence in Mexico related to the trade in illegal narcotics from the election of President Felipe Calderón in late 2006 to the election of his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, in mid-2012. The thesis, which is arranged methodologically as a single case study, begins with an examination of the state of literature on violence, crime and warfare. The theoretical basis is specified by subsequent inquiry into the role of illegal narcotics as a driver of violence, and together, these theoretical chapters form the basis of the hypothesis, that under certain circumstances, the drugs trade can create a market of violence, in which non-political actors are incentivised by their constraints to engage in acts of violence not normally associated with criminals. The next three chapters comprise an empirical examination of the hypothesis – the first on historical inflection points in Mexican history and the US/Mexican relationship along with the geographic and historical challenges, as illustrated by the border region around Ciudad Juarez and the violence in Guatemala, the second on the divergent structures and strategies of selected Mexican drug trafficking organisations as a window into the nature of the overall conflict, and the third on the effects of Mexican and American governmental strategies to control the violence. The thesis concludes that while drug violence in Mexico does have the overall shape of a market of violence, developments toward the end of the period studied give some hope that the constraints will change and markedly reduce the incentive for violence. Policy ramifications and the overall future of drug violence given the uncertain future of prohibition are considered in the conclusion as well.

The main theme of this thesis is the social, economic and political response of a single community to economic dislocation in the interwar years. The community under consideration is Clydebank., The thesis is divided into several parts. Part I establishes the development of the burgh and considers the physical framework of the community, mainly in the years before 1919. The town's characteristics are examined in terms of population structure and development between the world wars. In the last part of this section there is a review of the economic structure of the burgh and changes occurring in it between 1919 and 1939. In Part II consideration is given to the actual extent and form of the unemployment affecting Clydebank at this time, and comparison is made with other communities and geographic/economic areas. Attention is then focussed more narrowly on the actual individuals suffering unemployment in the burgh during the 1930s, in an attempt to personalise the experience of the unemployed. Part III reviews central and local government responses to the situation in which Clydebank found itself oetween 1919 and 1939. Central government policies discussed include unemployment insurance, public works, the Special Areas legislation, assistance in the construction of the 534 "Queen Mary" and the direction of financial support to areas of particular need. Amongst local authority actions described are additional local support for the poor, public works, efforts to attract new industry to the town, attempts to deal with the housing problem which was particularly acute at times of high unemployment and measures to maintain health standards in the community. In Part IV the responses of the community to unemployment and government policies are detailed. The burgh's commercial sector is surveyed as are developments in leisure provision, religion, temperance and crime, and local politics. A number of individual responses are also given consideration such as migration, commuting, changes in birth and marriage rates and suicide.

Amazonia is both a diverse ecological space and a complex social place in which the conservation of its varied forest and aquatic environments cannot be divorced from the fate of its human inhabitants. Rural society is comprised of a wide range of socioeconomic, cultural, and historical groupings that includes several types of peasants or peasantries. One of the most important segments of contemporary rural society in Amazonia consists of traditional or historical peasantries, caboclo society or the so called "indigenous rural population". Events of recent decades in the Brazilian Amazon have shown that the region is susceptible to rapid degradation from modem pressures of development and an expanding population. Approaches to sustainable development need to reflect the diversity and complexity of the regions' social and physical environments. Caboclos are important for their historical place in Amazonian social ecology and for their potential contribution to the search for viable solutions to sustainable development. Sustainability will be achieved on the basis of incorporating sustainable livelihoods into a development paradigm that maintains and improves the social use of resources and the integrity of ecosystems. Rubber tappers in the state of Acre are a type of Amazonian caboclo. Their livelihoods exhibit many of the attributes of resiliency and adaptability that characterize peasantries. Resources are used, based on the demands and capabilities of household economies and in recognition of their dependence on the forest and its resources. The livelihoods that rubber tappers pursue are to a large degree, ecologically sustainable; rubber tappers are practitioners of sustainability. The diversity and flexibility of their livelihoods is geared towards low impact, long-term use of forest resources and is highly adaptable to variable socio-political, economic and environmental conditions. Extraction of forest resources is a major component of rubber tapper livelihoods that encompasses rubber tapping, Brazil nut collection, hunting, fishing and myriad uses of other forest resources. Their livelihoods also include a farming system that is adapted to both the social conditions of rubber tapper society -limited capital and technology, dependence on household labour - and to the ecological constraints of Amazonian environments - weak tropical soils, seasonal changes, and variability. The composition of their livelihoods permits each sector of the household economy to function within local environmental constraints and to escape the need to independently fulfill household subsistence requirements. Extractive reserves provide a locally derived model of socially acceptable, conservation oriented development.

This thesis analyses institutional and organisational reform in the Former Soviet Union and Russia in order to examine the effects and existence of path dependency and institutional competition in the development of the Russian oil industry. Based on a New Institutional Economics and Transaction Costs Economics framework the thesis establishes a link between the evolution of the oil industry and the institutional matrix associate with the structure of state power. In the post-Soviet setting path dependency is created by the state's continued reliance on a patrimonial structure of state power. Resource and time pressure and the lack of a popular reform consensus resulted in the domination of the former mode of state power over the constitutional-bureaucratic system favoured by the International Financial Institutions. The transaction cost premium associated with the constitutional-bureaucratic structure and the appropriation of income and resources created a bias towards the historic structure of state power. Thus state survival was an important factor in creating path dependency. However, the thesis reveals that due to the less ideologically based political foundation there is greater room for institutional competition. While such competition has remained low at the state administrative level the thesis finds there is some evidence of institutional competition at the industry level. Two corporate strategies (the Soviet Styled Company and the Western Styled Company) have emerged from the original Holding Type Company. These two strategies display different approaches to income extraction, development strategy and ownership structure. The two strategies constitute the basis from which potential institutional competition in the oil industry may develop.

Milton’s use of economic tropes has attracted very little critical attention, and the connections between economics and theology in his thought have not yet been explored. Blair Hoxby’s Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (2002) focuses on the influence of economic ideas on Milton’s political thought, arguing that the poet persistently associates trade monopolies with autocratic abuses of monarchical power. David Hawkes places Milton’s lifelong professional usury at the centre of his 2009 biography, John Milton: A Hero of Our Time, and his 2011 essay, ‘Milton and Usury,’ fruitfully reads key passages from Paradise Lost in relation to contemporary tracts on usury. Hoxby and Hawkes have astutely highlighted the relationship between economics and Milton’s thought, but neither scholar has pursued these connections into Milton’s theology. Economic ideas lie at the very heart of Milton’s soteriology, and my thesis offers a historicised investigation of Milton’s corpus, demonstrating that the tropes of contemporary economic thought were crucial to his understanding of sin and, more importantly, salvation. Chapter 1 traces the roots of this economic soteriology to the economic and theological treatises of the 1620s and early 1630s, which argued that money must be not stockpiled but circulated, and that salvation was a transaction between man and God. Chapter 2 considers how Ben Jonson and George Herbert, whose work Milton was familiar with in his youth, used The Staple of Newes (1626) and The Temple (1633) to respond to contemporary developments in economic and theological thought. Chapter 3 reads Milton’s early works as studies of hoarding and consumption, traced through the debate over sexual stockpiling in Comus (1634), the sinfulness of a hoarding nation in the History of Moscovia (early 1640s), and the clergy torn between their compulsions to covet and consume in Of Reformation (1641). Chapter 4 finds in Gerrard Winstanley’s Fire in the Bush (1650) an explicitly economic understanding of the Fall, and demonstrates how Milton’s political and religious writings of the 1650s betray an anxiety that the English cannot govern their economic appetites and, therefore, themselves. Chapter 5 examines how Milton uses tropes of investment, profit, loss, and repayment in the Christian Doctrine and Paradise Lost (1667) to represent redemption as a transaction between Jesus and God on man’s behalf. Chapter 6 reads the History of Britain (1670) as an indictment of isolationist economic policies, with Milton demonstrating that free interactions between peoples facilitate national refinement, and thus strangers become saviours.

This thesis titled “Essays in Labour Economics” is comprised of three essays investigating various determinants of earnings inequality. Chapter 1 provides a novel explanation for labor market polarization—the rise in employment shares of high and low skill jobs at the expense of middle skill jobs, and the fall in middle-skill wages. We argue that recent and historical episodes of polarization resulted from increased automation. In our theoretical model, firms deciding whether to employ machines or workers in a given task weigh the cost of using machines, which is increasing in the complexity (in an engineering sense) of the task, against the cost of employing workers, which is increasing in training time required by the task. Some tasks do not require training regardless of complexity, while in other tasks training is required and increases in complexity. In equilibrium, firms are more likely to automate a task that requires training, holding complexity constant. We assume that more-skilled workers learn faster, and thus it is middle skill workers who have a comparative advantage in tasks that are most likely to be automated when machine design costs fall. In addition to explaining job polarization, our model makes sense of observed patterns of automation and accounts for a set of novel stylized facts about occupational training requirements. Chapter 2 establishes a novel source of wage differences among observationally similar high skill workers. We show that degree class — a coarse measure of performance in university degrees — causally affects graduates’ earnings. We employ a regression discontinuity design comparing graduates who differ only by a few marks in an individual exam, and whose degree class is thus assigned randomly. A First Class is worth roughly three percent in starting wages which translates into £1,000 per annum. An Upper Second is worth more on the margin—seven percent in starting wages (£2,040). In addition to identifying a novel source of luck in the determination of earnings, our findings also show the importance of simple heuristics for hiring decisions. Chapter 3 asks whether public policy affects the degree of intergenerational transmission of education. The chapter investigates this question in the context of secondary school transitions in Germany. During the last three decades, several German states changed the rules for admission to secondary school tracks. Combining a new data set on transition rules with micro data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP), I find that allowing free track choice raises the probability of attending the most advanced track by five percentage points. However, the effect is twice as large for children of less educated parents. The results suggest that the correlation between parents’ and children’s educational attainment may be reduced by more than one third when no formal restrictions to choosing a secondary school track exist.