Theories of justice are usually divided in aim and sphere of operation between redistributive justice (allocation of goods and resources) and recognition justice (ensuring respect and esteem between members of societies regardless of race, ethnicity, sexuality etc.). Divorcing the two is said to create conceptual clarity, but policy chaos in the treatment of complex injustices. Contrary to the received view, my thesis argues recognition and redistribution can only provide an adequate conceptual framework for questions of justice if they operate together and show this in relation to socially excluded and discriminated against groups, with a particular focus on the case of the Roma minority. The first chapter criticises existing theoretical approaches to the connection between recognition and redistribution, most notably Fraser's ‘different logics’ argument. The following chapters establish that neither recognition nor redistribution are theoretically sufficient for capturing the meaning of injustice in certain cases: Chapter 2 argues recognition faces a ‘symmetry problem’ between just and unjust struggles, requiring appeals to redistribution as a demarcation criterion. Chapter 3 argues redistributive attempts to define disability fail to capture the recognition-based concerns of the social model of disability and extrapolates the argument from the 'special' case of disability to the (unfortunately) common case of ethnic discrimination, focusing on the Roma minority. Chapters 4 and 5 define and defend a view of discrimination as a specific pattern of interaction between recognition and redistribution, similar to Sunstein's anti-caste principle but allowing for relevant markers to be socially (rather than physiologically) defined. Chapter 6 argues social exclusion is also, contrary to most current approaches, a matter of recognition and not only redistribution, showing how the two dimensions interact in the case of the Roma minority. I conclude by pointing out that discrimination and social exclusion, while often regarded as separate social issues, are structurally similar with regards to the underlying dynamic between the redistributive and recognition dimensions.

This thesis consists of three papers that are related to transportation economics, housing economics, and the economics of discrimination. The first paper examines how much people are willing to pay (WTP), on average, to avoid road traffic near their residence using the housing market. The notion is that traffic confers substantial negative externalities such as congestion delays, air and noise pollution, and traffic accidents. Estimating these hedonic functions are, however, extremely challenging with omitted variable bias and sorting of households. Hence, to circumvent these challenges, I rely on the sharp variation in traffic conditions induced by the London Congestion Charge to recover the capitalization of road traffic on housing values. The second paper examines whether installing speed cameras reduces traffic accidents and saves lives. Speeding is one of the major reasons why accidents occur, and the velocity of the vehicles affects the gravity of collisions. This paper sheds insights on how the government could intervene and nudge drivers from risky behaviours that could have serious consequences. The third paper investigates whether facial attractiveness affects sentencing outcomes in courtrooms. I rely on a novel facial recognition system that locates various features from inmate mugshots to compute facial symmetry as a measure of attractiveness. This study is motivated by the burgeoning literature indicating that judges allow extraneous factors, such as race and gender of defendants, emotions and media attention, to influuence their decisions, and the widespread discrimination of appearance in multiple contexts.

This thesis explores a heterogeneous migrant labour force, particularly Kurdish workers from the south-east of Turkey, working in a private steel mill outside Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The wider context is one of war, population displacement, political disintegration, and economic fluctuation. The dissertation builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of 16 months between November 2014 and February 2016 in the south-west of Erbil, ten miles away from the town of Gwer, the ISIS–Iraqi Kurdistan war front. It demonstrates how political and economic fragmentation created a zone for the appropriation and super-exploitation of cheap material and human resources and facilitated an expansion of unregulated capitalism. In this process, capitalist production became freed from the cost and constraint of a moral economy of labour, as political disintegration and Kurdish nationalism created consent and coercion for the corporate control of local resources. Industrial production constituted a field of experimentation in labour relations for both management and labourers, in a manner exemplary of contemporary capitalism. The dissertation opens with a discussion of relational and holistic approaches to the expansion of capitalism and inequality; it then moves to examine the Hiwa neighbourhood as a frontier landscape between the relative stability and security of Iraqi Kurdistan and the insecurity and uncertainty of the war zones of Iraq, Syria and Eastern Turkey. Chapters 1 and 2 describe how production and destruction, formal and informal economies, and deregulation and criminalization are interconnected and integral to the recycling of war scrap on which the expansion of the steel mill depends. Chapters 3 and 4 turn from the environment to labour, and examine the heterogeneous work force composed of migrant men from India, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and the rest of Iraq. Their labour has been made cheap through distinct formal and informal work practices within the wider dynamics of war, displacement, and informalization in the region. Complementary to this structural analysis, Chapters 5 and 6 turn to individual life stories of migrant labourers, focusing on how they experience incertitude, from gruelling everyday uncertainties concerning unstable work to life-threatening disease. In so doing, the thesis aims to document the moral and material consequences of contemporary capitalism in Iraqi Kurdistan for migrant labour at a more intimate level.

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.

Au-delà de la littérature édifiante ou critique des XVIème, XVIIème et XVIIIème siècles, l’image mentale des religieuses bénédictines et cisterciennes passe aussi par la production et la diffusion de représentations iconographiques via de nombreux supports. L’étude menée sur ce media visuel a permis de rassembler un corpus de 1160 références regroupées en une base de données exploitable. Son analyse se développe autour de l’affirmation de l’importance du témoignage historique et documentaire de l’iconographie pour la connaissance des modes de vie et de pensées de ces moniales. Le traitement typologique du contexte de production, des commanditaires et destinataires des œuvres définit les enjeux et objectifs de ces représentations. L’iconographie présente toutes les caractéristiques spirituelles et temporelles de la vie monastique féminine avec les différentes problématiques qui font l’actualité du monde régulier post-tridentin. L’étude se penche aussi sur la représentation des grandes figures fondatrices du monachisme féminin, comme sainte Scholastique, les saintes fondatrices d’abbayes médiévales et les fondatrices modernes de congrégations nouvelles. L’iconographie donne à voir un monde monastique féminin puissant et émancipé avec l’évocation de la sainteté féminine et de son lien privilégié à Dieu. Les portraits de supérieures et de religieuses sont des témoins directs d’un pouvoir temporel et spirituel similaire à celui de leurs confrères moines. L’image de la bénédictine et de la cistercienne à l’époque moderne se révèle orientée et biaisée, utilisée à des fins de propagande, mais les religieuses en tirent toujours le meilleur parti pour conforter leur légitimité. / Beyond uplifting or critical literature of 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the mental image of the Cistercian and Benedictine nuns also involves the production and dissemination of iconographic representations via a variety of media. The study on the visual media brought together a corpus of 1160 references grouped into a usable database. His analysis develops around the affirmation of the importance of the historical and documentary witness of the iconography for the knowledge of the modes of life and thoughts of these nuns. The typological treatment of the context of production, sponsors and recipients of art works defines the stakes and objectives of these representations. Iconography features all the spiritual and temporal of feminine monastic life with the various problems which make the topicality of the post-Tridentine regular world. The study also focuses on the representation of the great founding figures of female monasticism as Saint Scholastica, the Holy founders of medieval abbeys and the modern founders of new congregations. The iconography shows a powerful and emancipated female monastic world with the evocation of feminine Holiness and his relationship to God. Superior and religious portraits are direct witnesses of their temporal and spiritual power similar to that of their fellow monks. The image of the Cistercian and benedictine in modern times turns oriented and biased, used for purposes of propaganda, but the nuns always get the best of that to reinforce their legitimacy.