This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 develops a model that studies the interaction of two forces in the formation of social groups: the preference for high quality peers and the desire for status among one’s peers. I present a characterization of fundamental properties of equilibrium group structures in a perfect information, simultaneous move game when group membership is priced uniformly and cannot directly depend on type. While equilibrium groups generally exhibit some form of assortative matching between individual type and peer quality, the presence of status concern reduces the potential degree of sorting and acts as a force for greater homogeneity across groups. Chapter 2 expands on this framework and analyses the effect of status concern for the provision of groups under different market structures. I particularly focus on the implications for segregation and social exclusion. I find that status concern reduces the potential for and benefit from segregation - both for a social planner and a monopolist - but the interaction of preference for rank and status can make the exclusion of some agents a second-best outcome. Social exclusion might occur even if the market is served by competitive firms. Chapter 3 studies how two fundamental mistakes in information processing affect the welfare ranking of information experiments. In the spirit of Blackwell (1951), the binary ranking of informative action profiles is analysed under different classes of perception distortions. By themselves, an agent’s tendency to misinterpret signals and the degree to which the prior deviates from the truth reduce expected utility in a model where payoff relevant actions also generate informative signals. However, experiments can be affected to different degrees. Necessary and sufficient conditions for when any binary ranking of action profiles can be reversed are provided. As a consequence, different types of mistakes can interact in non-obvious ways such that an agent might be better off suffering from both rather than just one. The chapter concludes with a characterization when such positive interaction is possible and illustrates the implications in an investment setting with costly information acquisition.

Economists and policymakers have long believed that access to electricity is essential for industrial development, and ultimately growth. Despite this consensus, there is limited evidence of this relationship. In this thesis, I ask whether electrification causes industrial development. I study the effect of the extensive margin of electrification (grid expansion) on the extensive margin of industrial development (firm entry and exit). I combine newly digitized data from the Indonesian state electricity company with rich manufacturing census data. To deal with endogenous grid placement, I build a hypothetical transmission grid based on colonial incumbent infrastructure and geography. The main instrumental variable is the distance to this hypothetical grid. I examine the effect of electrification on local industrial development. To understand when and how electrification can cause industrial development, I shed light on an important economic mechanism - firm turnover. I find that electrification causes industrial development, represented by an increase in the number of manufacturing firms, manufacturing workers, and output. Electrification increases firm entry rates, but also exit rates. Overall, electrification creates new industrial activity, as opposed to reorganizing it across space. I then evaluate the impact of electrification on firm-level performance. I find that connected firms are larger, more likely to exit, and younger. This is consistent with higher turnover at the market level. I look at the implications of the previous results on industry productivity. Higher turnover rates lead to higher average productivity and induce reallocation towards more productive firms. This is consistent with electrification lowering entry costs, increasing competition and forcing unproductive firms to exit more often. Without the possibility of entry or competitive effects of entry, the effects of electrification are likely to be smaller. I use detailed product-level production data to structurally estimate a quantity-based production function, which when combined with price data, allows me to estimate marginal cost. Electrification substantially reduces the cost of production of existing products and their prices. While mark-ups don’t change for incumbent firm-product pairs, the average markup increases in the market. This is due to a selection effect where products produced post access have higher mark-ups. These products are "new" and are more likely to be differentiated.

The social model of disability, which provides the ideological basis for the recent UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, emphasizes the need for society to change, in order to remove all forms of disability discrimination and allow for full participation. However, literature debates have raised questions over the relevance of this ideology to the majority world context. This thesis aims to explore this dilemma, by examining the influence of the social model on a range of current approaches to promoting economic empowerment within Kenya and India - two countries that have signed and ratified the Convention. The methodology is based on a comparative analysis of 26 case studies, conducted between June 2010 and February 2011, which were focused mainly on three particular routes to economic empowerment: vocational training, formal sector employment and self-directed employment. The study concludes that, while inclusive strategies that were firmly based on social model principles tended to be among the most successful, a total reliance on this ideology would run the risk of excluding a large section of the disability population altogether. In particular, some of the segregated services were found to be continuing to play an important role in disability service provision.

This thesis explores how the Russian migration regime is reflected in migrants' experiences and identities. The conceptual framework developed in the thesis is informed by the theory of structuration. On the basis of this theory and the analysis of primary empirical data, the thesis seeks to refine the understanding of the concepts of 'migration regime', 'social exclusion' and 'territorialisation' of identity. The empirical research conducted for the thesis focuses on the period 2002-2009 and on the experiences and identities of a particular group of migrants, namely, former Soviet citizens from former republics of the USSR, who are currently living in post-Soviet Russia without Russian citizenship. The thesis explores and analyses, on the one hand, the structures which constitute the Russian migration regime and, on the other, the stories told by interviewed migrants about their lives in Russia. The thesis argues that the current migration regime of the Russian Federation represents 'a differentiated system of othering' and shows that this system is informed by two processes - nation-building and racialisation. It also argues that differentiations institutionalised in the Russian migration regime affect the social exclusion of migrants and through this the 'territorialisation' of their identities.

Solidarity was important in the creation and maintenance of the English NHS, which was the product of class compromise. Its founding principles were that it was to be free (at the point of access), universal, comprehensive and primarily funded from general taxation. In recent decades, successive governments have renewed the neo-liberal project. This has involved new governance mechanisms (quasi-markets and targets) being emplaced in the NHS and private healthcare companies (which have influenced government policy) being afforded increasing opportunities to deliver NHS services. Such privatisation is antagonistic to patient needs. I undertake an ideology critique of the NHS reforms of the New Labour governments and of governments since 2010. I examine the influences on, justifications for, resistance to, and potential reifying effects of, such reforms. Misrepresentations and mystification may legitimate and obscure legal changes. I identify the ideological modes and strategies that governments have employed to justify their reforms. I also analyse several modes of reification (identity thinking, instrumental rationality, depoliticisation and the legitimation effect of law) to assess whether the reforms produced estrangement, which is the opposite of solidarity. Many of the justifications for successive reforms were contested. Although such reforms have rendered healthcare more opaque, solidarity endures. Neo-liberal norms compete with residual norms (including the NHS’ founding principles) and emergent norms (which developed due to the problems of welfare states, such as their failure to empower recipients and the persistence of health inequalities). As validity has been given to residual and emergent norms, which have been superficially articulated within government discourse, but which are undermined by neo-liberal policies, a legitimation crisis may arise as public experience increasingly diverges from them. I advocate amending legislation which has undermined residual norms, democratising the NHS to empower patients and the public and increased intervention in capitalism to address health inequalities.

This thesis identifies the multiple ways austerity and welfare reform were experienced by staff and service users of a homelessness and resettlement service from 2011 to 2014. The research employs an ethnographic narrative and participatory methodology drawing on a critical feminist research paradigm. It draws on equality theory in research and community development theory in social action to offer a model of participatory equality studies as a way of working for social justice (Bourdieu, 1997; Baker et al., 2004; Ledwith, 2005). Experiences and change in the lives of vulnerable people is examined through a Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (May, Brown, Cooper and Brill, 2009) and co-researcher processes (Maguire, 1987; Baker et al., 2004). The research offers ethnographies of austerity at local level that document individual and organisational experiences, as workers and service-users negotiate significant change, within a broader neo-liberal context (Bourdieu, 1977; Okely, 2012). Qualitative data were collected at key points over four years. Twenty-eight interviews were conducted; ten with senior management and policy staff, eight with front line services staff, and ten with service-users. Two ex-service users acted as co-researchers for a phase of the research focused on the lived experiences of service users. Team meetings were observed that provided reflective accounts of collective and organisational responses to a rapidly changing context. Two external and one internal public engagement events provided a space for the research findings to be contributed to a wider public debate on austerity. Findings are contextualized in a review of emerging critical literature on the impacts of austerity measures in Britain. This thesis makes a contribution, as a critical ethnographic study of multiple and complex new realities for staff and services users as they contend with and understand changes in welfare and endeavour to negotiate changing discourses on the role and relationships between local authorities, individuals and charities. It reveals significant contributions and resilience in the day to day lives of service users, but also intense pressures on people as they ‘come up for review’ and the personal impact of negative community, media and officials attitudes to vulnerability by revealing the lived experiences of austerity. Finally, seven key themes are identified that could be offered as a wider contribution to a commentary of austerity from a local level and are suggestive of an emerging common story in the caring services.

The past three decades have seen a substantial growth of interest in children's play in scholarly and popular writing, the mass media and government policymaking. Implicit and explicit in this growing interest is the idea that children's play, or more specifically, a decline or lack of children's outdoor play, represents a serious problem in the UK and other western societies and that it therefore requires the intervention of a range of professional and political powers. The rapid and widespread affirmation that claims about children's play have received deserves critical examination. This study examines the construction of children's play as a social problem in four major UK newspapers. Focusing on the period from 1985 to 2016, it draws on theoretical and conceptual tools from the constructionist study of social problems and methodological tools from Qualitative Media Analysis to examine the roles played by various claimsmakers in the construction of the problem and the rhetoric used in support of their cause. It hence offers important insights into the prominent position children's play holds on the public agenda and identifies some of the underlying cultural currents from which claims about children's play draw.

This thesis contributes to existing knowledge on NGOs in the global South through examining the case study of RDO, an NGO in Pakistan, investigating the influence of historically structured formal and informal institutions and the politico-economic factors shaping its efforts for democratic and empowerment-oriented change in rural communities. It analyses RDO’s philosophy and practice regarding the formation of community organisations, which are intended to work democratically for their own development and to access government and other NGOs’ services. It does this by analysing 63 qualitative interviews, 20 Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), organisational documents and observational data from 8-months fieldwork. It is argued that, rather than democratising and empowering community members, whose relationships with each other and with the state agencies have been historically patronage-based (Gough et al., 2004) and marked by inequalities based on ethnicity, gender, and class, RDO tends to deal with the communities in a patronage-based manner. This is due to its inability to allocate adequate time to communities to institutionalise democratic values in place of path dependent structures (Pierson, 2000) of inequality and practices of patron-clientelism. This, in turn, emanates from its shift away from the empowerment agenda and subscription to neoliberal mode of interventions. Additionally, the interventions by national and international NGOs, most of which have burgeoned in the wake of post-2000 political and natural disasters, have also socialised the rural communities to perceive NGOs as providers of welfare goods. This has made it harder for RDO to work according to its goals. Hence, instead of changing path dependent structures (Pierson, 2000) of inequality and patron-clientelism (Gough et al., 2004), RDO, like most NGOs in the global South, has largely become an agent of its perpetuation.

People across the globe are on the move due to environmental disruption and degradation, causing them to travel and find their future in new locations. Climate change will increase the number of people seeking to escape environmental pressures. What should be the appropriate response to this increase of migrating people, driven away from their homes as a result of climate change effects? From the perspective of normative political philosophy, it is more precise to ask two interrelated questions: what are the obligations in the context of climate change migration and to who should assign them. Previous research in normative political philosophy has focused on the high-profile case of small island states that can be submerged by the rising levels of the oceans, overlooking the wider ways in which human mobility will be induced by climate change effects. The thesis, then, fills this gap in the literature and provides a nuanced account that combines insights from political philosophy and writing on climate change and immigration. My dissertation answers the two above-mentioned questions, dedicating the first part to the ‘who’ question and taking up the ‘what’ question in the second part. The overall argument shows that states creating hazardous climate change incur obligations towards those adversely affected by it, including those relocating across international borders. And these states ought to amend or supplement their immigration policy in a way that advances the capacity of vulnerable individuals to cope with climate change. In the first part of the thesis, I establish state responsibility for the adverse effects of climate change, primarily focusing on its relation with duties towards climate change adaptation. I work with a backward-looking principle of responsibility, responsibility for causing bad outcomes, and explore its application to the case of climate change in the face of some conceptual and empirical challenges. I further develop a notion of responsibility for creating risk that can capture the collective adverse outcome states bring about by emitting greenhouse gases. I explicate the moral significance of imposing risks on others and the obligations that it gives rise to. Building on this theoretical groundwork, the second part of the thesis dives into the complex nexus of climate change and human mobility. I focus on a particular pattern of immigrationinternational movement due to gradual environmental changes associated with climate change that significantly restrict people’s life prospects. I defend a view that perceives such migratory scenarios as a way to cope with climate change, a form of adaptation. I argue that the obligations of states include providing admission to climate immigrants. However, they are part of a wider set of actions and policies to advance the adaptation capacity of all individuals vulnerable to climate change hazards: immigrants themselves, but also the immobile. This part of thesis shows that the adaptation duty of states is a complex balancing act between providing admission and supporting local adaptation. The last chapter elaborates on this challenge. Drawing on the research on climate immigration, I highlight the aspects of this movement that must be considered in a morally informed immigration policy. In addition, I put forward the possibility that states can allocate among themselves their obligations so some will do more in terms of admitting immigrants and some will do more in terms of supporting local adaptation.

This thesis provides empirical evidence on the relationship between demographic events and job satisfaction. Existing conceptualisations of job satisfaction are not fruitful for theorising the relationship between family context and job satisfaction. I develop a framework whereby job satisfaction is maximised when there are no mismatches between desired and obtained employment characteristics, while desired employment characteristics are in turn affected by family context. On one hand, family events may create negative spill-overs into well-being at work; on the other hand, work may be a buffer against negative family events. As family context I consider motherhood, length of paid leave after birth of a child for women and marital dissolution for men. I use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), a longitudinal survey representative of German households that spans the period 1984–2013. This dataset is ideal for my research question because it is the longest panel survey of job satisfaction. Although I chose the SOEP due to its high suitability, I also exploit features of German society and policy. I show that family events bring about variations in job satisfaction in unexpected ways. Becoming a mother does not matter for trajectories of job satisfaction. However, factors such as availability of suitable employment and norms may be more important in explaining why childless women have lower job satisfaction than mothers in Eastern Germany, but not in Western Germany. A shorter paid leave brings about a lower level of job satisfaction at the return to work but only for women of a lower socio-economic standing. Men who divorce experience a temporary increase in job satisfaction that lasts for up to three years after marital dissolution.