No description available.

No description available.

This thesis aims to examine some aspects of Algerian state capitalism and to situate it within a theoretical context derived from similar experiences in the Third World. The main emphasis has been placed on the state's policies towards agriculture, the most socially, economically, and politically important sector in Algerian society. The thesis looks at state capitalism in general as a transitional phase which, although involving approaches identified by some writers as 'socialist', leads ultimately to the development of 'conventional' capitalism. Algeria is viewed as a country which, despite having had the opportunity to erase much of its past and to reconstruct its economy on entirely new lines, has ended up developing according to capitalist laws. This development is traced to the nature of the socio-political forces that took over the leadership of the anti-colonial struggle and subsequently of the Algerian state. The analysis extends to include various aspects of the National Liberation Movement under colonialism and its development after independence. The thesis then describes the main characteristics of the economy immediately before and after independence and the major steps taken towards social and economic reconstruction. The state's agrarian policies are considered in the context of the social and political objectives of the ruling strata. These include attitudes to the self-management movement as a whole and in agriculture in particular, and the various measures of agrarian reform applied in the private sector. The reform is viewed as an essential precondition of the full incorporation of the agricultural sector into the state capitalist economy.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 54-55). / Using survey data from the third World Values Survey and democracy scores from Freedom House, I outline and test a supply and demand model of democratic change and stability. While "support for democracy" is a common concept in political science, the only empirical studies of the relationship between these regime preferences and democracy (Inglehart, 2003; Inglehart & Welzel, 2003; Welzel, Inglehart and Klingemann 2003) do not control for reciprocal causation and use poorly conceptualised and measured variables. They claim that deeply-rooted cultural orientations called "self-expression values" are a better measure of implicit support for democracy than overt expressions of regime preference. However, I find that once I control for the possibility that democracy is exogenous, there is little difference between the explanatory power of cultural values versus overtly expressed preferences. Furthermore, I argue that popular regime preferences (or demand) affect the change in the level of democracy, but do so only in relation to its current supply. "Net demand" is the driver of system change rather than absolute levels of popular support for democracy.

No description available.

Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States. During the Age of Mass Migration, 30 million Europeans immigrated to the United States. We study the long-term political effects of this large-scale migration episode on origin communities using detailed historical data from Sweden. To instrument for emigration, we exploit severe local frost shocks that sparked an initial wave of emigration, interacted with within-country travel costs. Because Swedish emigration was highly path dependent, the initial shocks strongly predict total emigration over 50 years. Our estimates show that emigration substantially increased membership in local labor organizations, the strongest political opposition groups at the time. Furthermore, emigration caused greater strike participation, and mobilized voter turnout and support for left-wing parties in national elections. Emigration also had formal political effects, as measured by welfare expenditures and adoption of inclusive political institutions. Together, our findings indicate that large-scale emigration can achieve long-lasting effects on the political equilibrium in origin communities. Mass Migration and Technological Innovation at the Origin. This essay studies the effects of migration on technological innovations in origin communities. Using historical data from Sweden, we find that large-scale emigration caused a long-run increase in patent innovations in origin municipalities. Our IV estimate shows that a ten percent increase in emigration entails a 7 percent increase in a muncipality’s number of patents. Weighting patents by a measure of their economic value, the positive effects are further increased. Discussing possible mechanisms, we suggest that low skilled labor scarcity may be an explanation for these results.  Richer (and Holier) Than Thou? The Impact of Relative Income Improvements on Demand for Redistribution. We use a tailor-made survey on a Swedish sample to investigate how individuals' relative income affects their demand for redistribution. We first document that a majority misperceive their position in the income distribution and believe that they are poorer, relative to others, than they actually are. We then inform a subsample about their true relative income, and find that individuals who are richer than they initially thought demand less redistribution. This result is driven by individuals with prior right-of-center political preferences who view taxes as distortive and believe that effort, rather than luck, drives individual economic success. Wealth, home ownership and mobility. Rent controls on housing have long been thought to reduce labor mobility and allocative efficiency. We study a policy that allowed renters to purchase their rent-controlled apartments at below market prices, and examine the effects of home ownership and wealth on mobility. Treated individuals have a substantially higher likelihood of moving to a new home in a given year. The effect corresponds to a 30 percent increase from the control group mean. The size of the wealth shock predicts lower mobility, while the positive average effect can be explained by tenants switching from the previous rent-controlled system to market-priced condominiums. By contrast, we do not find that the increase in residential mobility leads to a greater probability of moving to a new place of work.

This thesis contains four essays. The first paper, "Real or Evasion Responses to the Wealth Tax? Theory and Evidence from Sweden", addresses the behavioral effects of an annual wealth tax. I use Swedish tax records over the period 1999-2006 and two sources of variation in the tax rate to estimate the elasticity of taxable net wealth at about 0.3. I decompose the effects into reporting and savings responses and find that an increase in the tax is likely to stimulate evasion. Using military enlistment records on cognitive ability, I find that high-skilled individuals respond more to the tax. The second paper, "Job Displacement and Labor Market Outcomes by Skill Level", uses previously unexplored administrative data on all displaced workers in Sweden 2002-2004 to estimate how the incidence and effects of job loss depend on cognitive and noncognitive skills. I find that workers with low ability are significantly more likely to be displaced but the recovery rates upon job loss show no significant differences across skill groups. The third paper, "Complementary Roles of Connections and Performance in Political Selection in China", analyzes who becomes a top politician in China. It focuses on the promotions of provincial leaders and estimates how performance - measured by provincial economic growth – and connections with top politicians – measured by having worked together in the past – influence promotions. Using data for the period 1993-2009, we find a positive correlation between promotion and growth that is stronger for connected leaders. The fourth paper, "Does the Demand for Redistribution Rise or Fall with Cognitive Ability?", uses data from enlistment and a tailor-made survey that elicits redistributional preferences. On a scale of 0 to 100 percent redistribution, a one standard deviation increase in cognitive ability lowers demand by 6 percentage points, also when controlling for past, current and future expected income.

The first chapter addresses a common presumption in organisational design that employees should not be given discretion about performance measures when offered performance pay. The concern is that they would make a self-serving choice, for example, one that allows them to boost their apparent performance by working on tasks which they find easy but bring little benefit to the company. I investigate this problem in a model in which the principal decides whether to delegate the choice of performance measure to an agent who is privately informed about the degree of substitutability of his effort on different tasks. I show that when the principal is using menus of contracts as a screening device, allowing the agent to choose his performance measure privately - and possibly in a self-serving way - can alleviate the problem of hidden information. Consequently, delegating the choice of performance measure can be complementary to provision of incentives and may increase the principal's payoff. The second chapter analyses the incentives of authoritarian regimes to manipulate information by adding noise to the citizens' information, which is a tactic that is increasingly common in the real world. I consider a global games model in which a regime controls the amount of noise in the citizens' private information and is overthrown if enough citizens attack it. The analysis sheds light on recent findings in political science which show that the Chinese regime uses censorship to prevent collective action rather than criticism of the state per se, and that it employs social media commentators to distract the citizens rather than to persuade them. I show that the better the citizens are informed about the regime, the more its incentives to add noise are driven by the criticism of the state rather than by the need to minimise the size of collective attacks. Furthermore, the incentives to add noise may become stronger if citizens' better coordination comes at the cost of impeded information aggregation. The third chapter, which is co-authored with Bartosz Redlicki (University of Cambridge), studies a game between a biased sender (an interest group) and a decision maker (a policy maker) where the former can falsify scientific evidence at a cost. The sender observes scientific evidence and knows that it will also be observed by the decision maker unless he falsifies it. If he falsifies, then there is a chance that the decision maker observes the falsified evidence rather than the true scientific evidence. First, we investigate the decision maker's incentives to privately acquire independent evidence, which not only provides additional information to her but can also strengthen or weaken the sender's falsification effort. We characterise the circumstances under which the benefit from the additional information is boosted, unaffected, dampened, and fully offset by the adjustment in the sender's falsification strategy. Second, we analyse the decision maker's incentives to acquire information from the sender. We show that she may be better off by committing to pay less than full attention to the sender as this can discourage falsification.

This research project examines variations in inequality in individual earned incomes across U.S. metropolitan areas. The main analysis includes thirteen explanatory variables from three major perspectives - the political economy perspective, the demand-side perspective and the labor force supply-side perspective. In addition, I applied path models to explain causalities between some independent variables and used the decomposition of the Theil index to show the between-group effects. The results indicate that most demand-side and supply-side factors significantly contribute to variances in metropolitan income inequalities, while the impact of political economic factors are very limited. The paper is organized in the following manner: Chapter I is the introduction; Chapter II reviews literature focusing on the level of earning inequality and its predictors; Chapter III describes data and measures of variables; Chapter IV introduces statistical methods (including OLS regression model, path analysis, and decomposition of the Theil index); Chapter V presents the results of OLS regression model and its explanations; Chapter VI explains path analysis and decomposition analysis and their results; and finally, Chapter VII discusses the current research project and its implications for future studies.

Chapter 1. In the 1970s, competition policy in the United States banking sector changed from exempting competition to liberalization and deregulation. Competition not only plays an important role in allocational efficiency but it is also essential for long-term economic growth. This chapter develops a model of banking contributions to evaluate to what extent banks affect the level of competition in the banking sector, and tests the model's predictions using a novel detailed dataset which includes all contributions made by banks from 1993 to 2010 in the United States. Controlling for banks' characteristics, the results are consistent with the model's predictions and show show that a higher level of contributions increases the Lerner index (as a measure of competition) or in the other words, decreases the level of competition. Chapter 2. This chapter provides the first empirical evidence that market structure affects the electoral power of firms as special interest groups. Firms not only affect the election outcomes by making contributions to their preferred candidates, they also enforce social norms among their members by encouraging them to vote for the candidate with the most closely-aligned interests. This chapter uses a linear probability model to analyze 574 open-seat races for the House of Representatives in the United States between 1990 and 2014. The results show that, even when controlling for the total value of contributions made to a candidate, political donations made by firms with high market power have a positive effect on the candidates' probability of winning. The findings are consistent with the idea from collective action theory that concentrated industries are more likely to behave as an organized interest group to advance their interests. Chapter 3. Ethnic heterogeneity is an important factor in the formation of human sexual network and the prevalence of STDs. Racial and ethnic ties create closed social networks with rigid in-group boundaries and hampers the intra-group dissemination of information. Slow information flow among groups facilitates the spread of STDs by encouraging individuals to ethnically diversify their sexual partners in order to lower the chance of getting caught cheating. Analyzing a cross-province sample of 39,830 sexually active adults driven from the 2013-2014 Canadian Community Health Survey, we find that individuals who live in a highly ethnically diversified neighbourhood are more susceptible to STDs compared to ones who live in a ethnically homogenous neighbourhood. Evidence from several robustness checks suggests that the relationship is causal.