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.

This thesis contributes to our understanding of the economics of international migration. It consists of three chapters exploring some of the consequences and implications of human migration. Chapter 1, ‘No Country for Young Men’, studies the effects of international migration on the schooling and labour outcomes of left-behind children. While a large literature on the topic already exists and focuses on Latin America and China, little is known about how migration affects left-behind individuals in other parts of the world; and Central Asia in particular. The study concentrates on Tajikistan, the country with the highest level of remittance inflows relative to the size of the economy. Using panel data tracking the same children over time, I find important and gender-differenced schooling and labour supply responses. In a nutshell, young males are found to benefit from the migration of one of their household members, while young women are not. The second chapter, ‘Invasive Neighbours’, provides new evidence on the effect of immigration on electoral outcomes in developing countries. The Dominican Republic is used as case study as it provides a highly interesting context to analyse this issue. The vast majority of its immigrants come from neighbouring Haiti, and together the two countries share the island of Hispaniola. I find robust evidence that higher immigrant concentration is associated with greater support for the right-wing political coalition that has traditionally been more opposed to immigration. At the same time, the popularity of the centre-left coalition is found to decline in localities experiencing larger inflows of foreigners. Political competition, citizenship and identity considerations seem to be shaping voting behaviour and individual attitudes towards immigrants in the Dominican Republic. The third and last chapter, ‘The Elusive Quest for Social Diversity?’, analyses the effect of social housing supply on ethnic and social diversity in France’s largest metropolitan areas. High income countries generally rely on the provision of affordable housing through various schemes to both facilitate access to decent accommodation and encourage social diversity at the local level. The analysis takes advantage of a national policy reform to shed light on the issue. I find strong evidence of a positive relationship between social housing and ethnic diversity in local labour markets with large immigrant networks and strong labour demand. Social housing provision also affects the distribution of households’ income at the local level. This chapter contributes to the small but growing literature on the impact of social housing developments on the neighbourhoods in which they are built.

This thesis consists of three essays on the political economy of development and focuses on topics related to democratization, redistribution and conflict. It studies one the largest countries in Latin America, Colombia, and examines mostly his history during the 20th century. The first chapter, "Buying off the Revolution: Evidence from the Colombian National Peasant Movement, 1957-1985", studies the relationship between democratization and redistribution during periods of revolutionary threats. Far from causing an increase in broad redistribution (e.g. social spending), I show that the state organization of a social movement that extends the political rights of the threatening group can be used to identify rebel leaders and provide private goods to them, in return for preventing social unrest and demobilizing their supporters. I study the context of the organization by the state of the most important social movement in Colombian history -the National Peasant Movement (ANUC)- during the decades of a threat of Communist revolution (1957-1985), when the government gave ANUC direct political participation in the executive branch and economic support. Using three newly digitized data set of the Colombian municipalities, I find that this reform did not lead to higher broad redistribution towards the peasantry but it led to an increase in targeted redistribution in terms of public jobs and lands. By matching the names of the peasant leaders to the beneficiaries of the land reform, evidence suggests that peasant leaders disproportionally benefited from land reform and that targeted redistribution towards the peasant leaders was a mechanism to restrain the Communist threat. Finally, I find suggestive evidence that buying off the rebel leaders was an effective counter-revolutionary strategy as it led to less revolutionary activities after the support to ANUC was terminated (1972-1985). The second chapter, "Roads or Schools? Political Budget Cycles with different types of voters" also studies one form of democratization: the franchise extension. It uses a new Colombian data set (1830-2000), to analyze how changes in the electoral legislation with regard to the characteristics of voters (in terms of education and income levels) have affected fiscal policy in election years. In line with economic theory, I show that after the male universal suffrage law was reformed in 1936 the composition of the expenditure shifted towards social spending (like education, health, and welfare benefits) but there was a decrease in spending on infrastructure and investment projects (like roads). Consistent with the literature, I also find: 1.The timing and the size of the political budget cycles changed after 1936 and 2. After 1936 there was a shift in the funding mechanisms from indirect tax revenues to more debt. In addition to democratization and redistribution, the third chapter examines the causes of the civil conflict in Colombia. The third chapter "On the agrarian origins of civil conflict in Colombia", co-authored with Fabio Sanchez, investigates the impact of land dispossessions by landlords on the origin of the civil conflict in Colombia. The study exploits variation in floods to identify how peasants’ land dispossessions during the export boom (1914-1946) determine the rise of rural guerrilla movements and the consolidation of their rebel activities. It uses a novel municipal-level dataset on natural disasters and land dispossession, and documents that municipalities experiencing floods during the years 1914-1946 were substantially more likely to have land dispossessions than municipalities where floods was not severe. Floods reduced temporarily the conditions of the land and its value, facilitating the dispossession of the peasants of their lands by large landowners. Using a matching-pair instrumental variable approach, we show that the historical dispossession of lands by landlords that led to the rise of peasant grievances is associated with the presence of the rural guerrilla movement -The Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC)- during the first stage of the Colombian civil conflict. We propose two mechanisms through which previous land dispossessions facilitated the emergence of rebel armed groups and use a mediation analysis to test the indirect effects. On the one hand, exposure to previous civil wars gave military training and access to weapons and military experience to the rural population that likely created incentives for the formation of rebel groups. On the other hand, the ideological politics of rebellion by the Communist party exacerbated the grievances and helped to the emergence of rebel armed groups.