Yugoslavia provides a fascinating historical setting to analyse the consequences of socialism – the greatest socio-economic experiment of the 20th century. Yugoslavia was one of fastest growing countries in the world until the late 1970s. During this period, it followed a different institutional trajectory compared to other socialist economies. But, during the 1980s, economic growth came to a standstill, and the country eventually descended into civil war. This doctoral dissertation is motivated by the aforementioned observations. It seeks to analyse them. The core of the thesis is composed of three closely related, but self-standing, papers. The unifying theme of the three papers is economic development in socialist Yugoslavia. The first paper revisits aggregate economic growth in Yugoslavia. I find that distorted labour incentives caused the slowdown of the Yugoslav economy. I argue that labour-managed firms hindered the ability of Yugoslavs to work. Since Yugoslavia was extremely heterogeneous, the second paper moves below the aggregate level in order to reconstruct the regional development trajectories. I find that regional income divergence was caused by the failure of the poorer regions to converge towards the employment rates and efficiency levels of the richer regions. I argue that this failure was caused by labour-managed firms as well, whereby they had a spatially uneven economic impact. In Yugoslavia, regional economic tensions were reinforcing, and were reinforced by, ethnic tensions. In the third paper, I explore ethnic relations by analysing the formation of Yugoslav national sentiment and its economic effects. I find that ethnically diverse municipalities were conducive towards the formation of Yugoslav sentiment because they stimulated ethnic intermarriage. In addition, I find that municipalities that contained a larger amount of self-declared Yugoslavs experienced a lower population fraction of deaths during the Bosnian War of 1992-1995.

This thesis consists of three independent chapters on development economics and Japanese economic history. The first chapter analyzes the effect of railroad construction in the Meiji period (1868–1912) on technology adoption and modern economic development. By digitizing a novel data set that measures the use of steam engines at the factory level and determining the cost-minimizing path between destinations as an identification strategy, I find that railroad access led to the increased adoption of steam power by factories, which in turn induced structural change and urbanization. My results support the view that railroad network construction was key to modern economic growth in pre-First World War Japan. The second chapter analyzes the effect of time horizon on local public investment in the Edo period (1615–1868). I use a unique event in Japanese history during this period to identify the effect. In 1651, the sudden death of the executive leader of the Tokyo government reduced the transfer risk of local lords, especially for insiders, who supported the Tokyo government during the war of 1600. Using a newly digitized data set and a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that after 1651, regions owned by insiders increased the number of public projects more than regions owned by the other lords. I discuss other possible channels to interpret the effect of tenure risk, but I find no strong support for these alternative channels and conclude that the results support a longer time horizon effect. The third chapter provides more general background and a complete description of the data availability in Japan in the 17th–20th centuries, to discuss future research directions. It would aid reexamination of the history of Japan and other East Asian countries, which have experienced different economic and political paths.

South African insurance companies have made substantial in-roads into the low-income segments of the insurance market. The strength of microinsurance—insurance products designed specifically for low-income individuals—has been fueled almost exclusively by the sale of funeral insurance products, an unsurprising trend considering the immense cultural value that many South Africans place on funerals. Insurance companies have managed to achieve scale by tapping into community-based infrastructures, which serve as low-cost distribution channels for these products. The incursion of “insurance culture” into this space has thus resulted in a market ecosystem in which formal and informal institutions are in fluid states of tension and cooperation. Building on institutional theory and adopting ethnography as its primary methodological approach, this thesis examines the institutional dynamics underpinning South African microinsurance markets. Based on fieldwork I conducted from June 2015-April 2016 (based primarily in Cape Town and the neighboring township of Khayelitsha), my thesis will highlight the ways in which formal and informal institutions interact to produce regulatory outcomes that enable and/or constrain individual actors. While these institutional structures shape individual decision-making with regard to risk management, I also consider the ways in which individuals exercise agency to navigate shifting institutional landscapes and effect change in underlying structures. Thus, this thesis contributes to the debates on microinsurance, as well as on financial inclusion more broadly, reframing them within this complex interplay between institutions and actors.

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This dissertation is composed by three papers whose unifying themes are the origin and impact of fiscal institutions. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it highlights the usefulness of the concept of fiscal capacity for the macroeconomics and international finance literatures by demonstrating its impact on sovereign default and fiscal dynamics during the Great Depression. Limits to the ability to tax have clear implications for macro-financial research, but are neglected by much of the literature. Second, my work contributes to the fiscal and state capacity literature by focusing on municipal level fiscal institutions in Brazil. Although research in this field is burgeoning, our understanding of the origin and impact of fiscal institutions in many parts of the world, including Latin America, is still very limited, particularly at the sub-national level. In terms of structure, the dissertation is a backwards journey from the impact of fiscal institutions to their origin. The first paper studies one of the ultimate outcomes of fiscal dynamics – sovereign default – by analyzing the debt crisis of the 1930s. The second paper takes the collapse in public revenues during the Great Depression as a starting point and demonstrates that fiscal institutions were a fundamental factor in the dynamics of fiscal aggregates. By shifting the focus to a single country and a different time period – the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries – the third paper demonstrates that slavery was deeply detrimental to the development of local governments’ ability to tax and provide fundamental growth and welfare-enhancing public goods in Brazil.

In this thesis, I re-investigate the 1931 financial crisis in Austria and Hungary with the help of new data compiled from primary sources. Our knowledge about the causes of these calamities is much less extensive than about the German crisis. The aim of my research is to provide for a better understanding of the Central European crises of 1931. Chapter 1 examines the role of international and domestic forces behind the crisis in Austria. Two newly constructed micro-level datasets demonstrate that a domestic factor, exposure to weakly performing industrial enterprises, was essential in accounting for the insolvency and possibly also for the illiquidity of the four universal banks that came under distress between 1925 and 1931. In Chapter 2, the focus shifts to Hungary, where both the national historiography and the international literature documented a currency crisis. A new database on the financial system and macroeconomic indicators reveal that the banking system played a critical role in the calamities and the country experienced a twin crisis in 1931. Chapter 3 zooms in on a particular aspect of the crisis: the political factors behind the weakness of the two countries’ banking systems. Facing social demands but their hands tied by the macroeconomic trilemma, the authorities of both countries had to resort to (ab)using the banking system to provide clandestine economic stimulus. Political interventions into banking encouraged imprudent lending and contributed to the vulnerability of the two banking systems and thereby to the crisis of 1931. Together these findings underscore the economic importance and the political risk of the banking system. They further emphasize the dramatic, and seemingly insurmountable challenges of nation building that Austria and Hungary faced in the interwar years.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the industrial district of the North Staffordshire Potteries dominated the British earthenware industry, producing local goods that sold in global markets. Over this time the region experienced consistent growth in output, an extreme spatial concentration of physical and human capital, and became home to some of the most famous Master Potters in the world. The Potteries was also characterised by a growing body of useful and practical knowledge about the materials, processes and skills required to produce world-leading earthenware. This thesis exploits this striking example of a highly concentrated and highly skilled craft-based industry during a period of sustained growth and development which offers a rich opportunity to contribute to several strands of economic and business history. This thesis presents and analyses new empirical evidence based on trade directories to examine the organisational evolution of the district. It reconstructs the district at the firm level, showing that the region’s growth was incredibly dynamic. The spatial concentration of producers and the importance of social and business networks are also explored through a new map of the region in 1802 and social network analysis. As a study of a craft-based, highly skilled industry without a legacy of formal institutions such as guilds to govern and protect access to knowledge, this thesis also offers substantial empirical and historiographical contributions to the study of knowledge and innovation during the period of the Industrial Revolution. It presents a new database of pottery patents alongside a variety of qualitative evidence such as trade literature, exhibition catalogues, advertisements and sales catalogues. Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals the low propensity to patent in the North Staffordshire pottery industry, and provides a new typology of knowledge used in the industry. It argues that the types of knowledge being created and disseminated influenced the behaviour of producers substantially, and this typology of knowledge is far more complex than those established tacit/explicit divisions favoured in historical study and the social sciences more broadly. The findings of this thesis allow us to answer numerous outstanding questions concerning the development of the North Staffordshire Potteries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When brought together in such a way, the complementary strands of research and findings presented offer a coherent narrative of an extremely complex and dynamic cluster of production that both challenges and confirms traditional historiographical tradition concerning industrial districts.

This thesis examines the practice of confiscation in the Ottoman Empire during the long-eighteenth century. It investigates what enabled, guided and motivated the sovereign to confiscate the property of elites, and how and to what extent this occurred. The contribution of this thesis is twofold. First, it provides the first systematic analysis of the practice of confiscation in the Ottoman Empire, highlighting the basis of selectivity in its application. Second, it contributes to a broader line of literature by analysing the drivers, informal constraints and persistence of historical state predation. One of the strengths of the thesis is its combination of theory and a rich variety of archival evidence, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The thesis finds that müsadere was a selective institution targeting mainly office-holders and private tax contractors. However, some were less likely to face or more capable of avoiding confiscation than others mainly due to factors related to time and location of confiscation, the bargaining position of the wealth-holder and the attributes of their wealth. Although confiscation was costly and time-consuming to enforce, the sultans were continuously interested in it because of its political and redistributive functions such as monitoring the behaviour of their agents and protecting their share in the fiscal revenue from fiscal intermediaries. They had power to do so primarily because of many disincentives of collective action among the targets of confiscation. Through the study of this practice, this thesis shows how an early modern monarch, who was not formally constrained, could and did confiscate the elite property in a time of crisis.

The thesis contains three chapters. The first chapter reports on the first large-scale randomized field experiment involving legally-recognized minorities to examine the causal effects of providing performance-based financial incentives based on social or income disadvantage on high stakes university test scores. The results are that the average test scores of the whole cohort goes down by .14 standard deviations when financial incentives were provided by income disadvantage while there is no effect on the test scores when financial incentives were provided by social disadvantage or when financial incentives were provided to all students. The chapter provides evidence of academic non-cooperation when financial incentives are offered by income status and no evidence of such peer effects when prize incentives are given by social disadvantage. The second chapter, which is a joint work with Dr. H.F.Tam, studies the impact of matrimonial laws introduced by the British in British provinces in colonial India during 1800s and early 1900s. Exploiting quasi-random variations of districts that were former British Provinces within each post-independent Indian states, we find that females have 5% lower chances of marrying under the current legal age, and 1.6% higher chance of attending school at 10-16 years old in regions that were formerly British Provinces. Furthermore, using historical Census of India 1901-1931 on marriage status of population between 0-15 years at district level, the chapter estimates the impact of Child Marriage abolition Act (1931) on child marriages in colonial India. The third chapter uses a large-scale novel panel dataset (2005-14) on schools from the Indian state of Assam to test for the impact of violent conflict on female student’s enrolment ratios. We find that a doubling of average killings in a districtyear leads to a 13 per cent drop in girl’s enrolment rate with school fixed effects.