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Publication Essays on Stock Market Liberalization, Banking Stocks Volatility, and Sovereign Wealth Fund(2024-09) Almutair, KhwlahThis dissertation explores the interrelated dynamics of stock market liberalization, banking sector volatility, and the strategic utilization of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in oil-rich countries. Comprising three essays, the study provides a comprehensive analysis of the implications of economic and financial policies on market stability and performance in an emerging market environment dominated by oil revenues. The first essay examines the impact of the 2015 liberalization of the Saudi stock market, known as Tadawul. Utilizing a natural experiment design, it assesses how the selective inclusion and exclusion of firms from market liberalization, based on their location in religiously significant areas, affected stock returns and volatility. The findings suggest that liberalization has increased stock returns and price volatility. The second essay shifts focus to the volatility of the banking sector during periods of financial crises, comparing the sector's performance to the broader market index (TASI). The research identifies resilience patterns within the banking sector using a Multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH)-in-mean model. It discusses the implications of these patterns for financial stability and regulatory policy. The third essay explores a more advanced oil-rich economy. Specifically, how has Norway managed to use its sovereign wealth fund, Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), to shield itself from further oil price volatility? The study uses a Dynamic Conditional Correlation-Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (DCC-GARCH) model to evaluate the effectiveness of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) as financial buffers against economic shocks caused by fluctuations in oil prices. These essays contribute to the understanding of financial liberalization, crisis management in banking, and the strategic use of SWFs in stabilizing economies dependent on volatile resources. The dissertation highlights the necessity of tailored regulatory structures and strategic policy interventions to augment economic stability and growth in developing economies. The findings hold significant implications for policymakers, particularly in resource-rich economies striving to balance market liberalization with financial stability and economic diversification.Publication Development and Dispossession: Class and Gender Perspectives from Neoliberal Delhi, India(2024-09) Biswas, ArpitaThis dissertation centralizes the role of space in critically exploring the processes of urban development in the global South. It does so by utilizing Soja’s (1980) framework of socio-spatial dialectic to examine the political-economic causes of dispossession and its effects on different classes and women. Using primary and secondary datasets – both quantitative and qualitative – from a developing-world city, Delhi, it develops a grounded understanding of the socio-spatial dialectic. The first essay delineates the nature of urban restructuring process undergone by Delhi in the neoliberal period and asks what the causes and consequences of such restructuring have been. It argues that a congruence of interests among the state, private capital, and urban professionals led to the widespread eviction of slum (henceforth, basti) dwellers. It finds that the poorest section of the working class has been rendered spatially estranged ix and poorer by the process, while the capitalist class has been bestowed with windfall gains through commodification of public land. The second essay aims to understand how displaced women’s market work decisions transformed as Delhi is reconfigured by neoliberal projects. It shows that labor force participation of women relocated to “resettlement colonies” (RCs) is significantly lower than that of women in bastis. Analyzing the reasons for this, the paper finds that these include fewer paid work opportunities that can be combined with household work, more daunting safety concerns outside the home, and a relative lack of community bonding and support networks in RCs as compared to bastis. Based on these findings, it makes a case for understanding bastis and RCs as differently gendered spaces. In recognizing social reproduction as a central axis of the study of dispossession, the third essay explores the impacts of displacement on women’s burden and capacities for social reproduction in Delhi. It shows that women displaced to RCs find it onerous to reproduce labor power and maintain familial and community relations. Through these, the essay visibilizes the strenuousness and vulnerabilities of displaced populace’s everyday lives and adds to our understanding of dispossession’s effects on life-making processes and how that in turn bolster capitalist system’s instabilities.Publication Networks of Value and Power: Corporate Behavior, Diversity, and Elite Ties in the United States, 2016-2021(2024-09) Quesada Velazco, JorgeThe dissertation consists of three essays that use social network analysis to examine the effects of elite connections on three specific outcomes of interest. The first essay, "Elite Diversity and Capitalist Class Hegemony," examines whether U.S. corporate elites have adopted an ethos of racial and gender diversity within their ranks. The paper reviews and empirically evaluates three approaches and argues that a major limitation of the existing scholarship is the lack of an empirical method to understand why some prominent corporate actors might transcend the narrow interests of individual firms and industries to adopt a class-wide rationality. It then observes how changes in the class positionality of corporate elites are associated with changes in corporate diversity outcomes. The second essay, “The Effects of Political Connection on Firm Value”, co-authored with Kevin Young, examines how firms' ties to the government affect their value. We used new data on corporate ties to the US government and various models to answer this question. Our analysis focused on the actions of the Trump administration, including hiring, firing, and policy decisions during the Covid-19 emergency. We found that network connections to the Trump administration were a good predictor of firms' stock market performance, showing that corporate ties to the government play a significant role in investor valuations. However, the impact of political connections depends on historical and institutional contexts in which these policy shocks occur. The third essay, "Black Lives Matter and the Diffusion of Corporate Racial Justice Pledges", investigates how corporate America responded to the Black Lives Matter movement. It analyzes racial justice pledges made by the U.S. Fortune 500 companies after George Floyd's death in 2020. The findings highlight the role of networks, firm characteristics, organizational attributes, and sectoral dynamics in shaping corporate responses to the movement.Publication Critical Minerals and the Green Transition(2024-09) Das, DebamanyuOne major issue in the global green transition—i.e. in advancing a viable global climate stabilization path—is the massive increase in demand for electric vehicles (EVs). The growing demand for EVs in turn, generates a commensurate demand increase for the minerals needed to operate the batteries that power EVs. These minerals critical for the operation of EV batteries include lithium, cobalt, and nickel. This dissertation examines a range of questions resulting from the ongoing huge expansion in the global demand for these three critical minerals. The first chapter builds from the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) framework to estimate the requirements for lithium, cobalt, and nickel used in electric vehicle batteries in the IEA’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 scenario. According to my analysis, demand for these minerals will far outstrip the estimates of supply under current industry conditions, thereby creating a demand-supply gap for these minerals. The chapter reviews alternative approaches to closing this gap. The second chapter explores the factors that have enabled China to dominate at present the global production and supply chain of critical minerals. I argue that the most basic explanation is that China developed effective industrial policies from the 1980s onward to create capacity for supplying the global economy with EVs and the batteries that power them. Among other resources, I draw here on Chinese government documents and data on state funding for innovation. Using mergers and acquisitions data, I also document various ways through which Chinese corporations have secured critical mineral supply chains. The third chapter documents the impact of critical mineral mining on a selected set of mineral-rich economies, in particular, Chile, Indonesia, and Congo. I utilize data on social conflicts that have resulted from mining operations in these economies to understand the impact of mining on conditions for mine workers and communities. I also explore ways through which state ownership and distribution of resources can provide net benefits to local communities. Such benefits do not result when mining operations are controlled by private multinational corporations along with governments that align themselves primarily with the interests of the multinationals.Publication Essays on Social Reproduction, Distribution, and the Political Economy of Paid and Unpaid Work in Selected Latin American Countries(2024-09) Maqueira Linares, AnamaryThis dissertation comprises three essays that contribute to the social reproduction literature by using it as a framework to analyze Global South and “in transition” contexts while inquiring on the role of the state in shaping and directly contributing to social reproduction processes. Chapter 1 uses time-use data to explore the relationship between institutional and non-parental childcare provision on maternal unpaid time use in Ecuador. Results suggest that institutional and kinship childcare presents a complementary relationship for mothers’ active unpaid care time, while female kinship is associated with significant reductions in maternal time regarding supervisory childcare and housework. The size of the effects suggests that out-of-home childcare is associated with greater reductions for mothers with no co-resident adult female kin. Chapter 2, co-authored with Katherine Moos, proposes an accounting framework for understanding the distributional role of household production, employment, remittances, and government social transfers in the social reproduction of the Cuban people, and provide a snapshot for 2016. Our findings demonstrate that households were viii the largest contributors to social reproduction in Cuba. Our empirical exercise reveals how the actual distributional arrangements underlying Cuban social reproduction differ from the official commitments and goals of the Cuban Revolution. The relative contributions in 2016 signal several potentially unsustainable self-reinforcing dynamics that undermine efforts to achieve gender and racial equality on the Island. Chapter 3 asks how the economic and social reform processes of the post-2010s Cuba have redistributed the costs of social reproduction among the State, the market, and the family, particularly regarding the caring of dependents. I examine the transformations in unpaid and paid work, government benefits, and remittances using legal and policy changes and their implementation. Results demonstrate that the reproductive bargain in post-2010s Cuba has explicitly changed, acquiring a transnational dimension. The analysis shows that the reform policies have shifted the responsibilities of social reproduction more onto households and that increasing commodification of social reproduction processes has occurred, with adverse consequences for women. De-statization processes have followed as a combination of direct withdrawal of the government’s role as a social provider and less state presence in other socio-economic affairs.Publication Investigations on Global Elite Education, A Century of Background Traits of the Board Members, and Culturual Promotion at the Banco De La Republica(2024-09) Salas Díaz, Ricardo JoséElite education is both a cause and a consequence of the pivotal function of elites in society today. Studying elite education from different angles allows analysis of the structures of inequality in society since education plays a role in the reproduction, incorporation, and social formation of elites. The translation of worldviews of elite education into policymaking goes through the reproduction and formation of each new generation of the elite and can also positively or negatively impact social inequalities through policymaking on everything from mass education to interest rates. In this dissertation, I investigate elite education from three different perspectives and pay special attention to its relation to central banking. • An overview of the university education of elites worldwide. • A study of the elite education of all the board members in a hundred years since the foundation of the Banco de la República, the Colombian central bank. • An investigation into why central banks assume the public role of culture promotion.Publication Essays on Industrial Policy and Applied Macroeconomics(2024-09) Arora, MohitThis dissertation comprises three independent essays in the domain of macroeconomic development and applied macroeconomics. In the first essay, I study India’s state-led heavy industry drive from the 1950s. Influenced by Soviet industrialization and the post-World War II emphasis on state-led development, India sought to shift production towards capital goods sectors. To what extent did the Nehru-Mahalanobis focus on heavy industries during India’s Second Five-Year Plan (1956–61) foster their growth? To answer this question, I compile a unique dataset tracking large-scale industries from 1951–1965, roughly spanning the first three Five-Year Plans. This dataset harmonizes industrial production, prices, and input-output data from pre-digital data books. Previous studies showed positive effects, but my analysis, which adjusts for an industrial classification change using detailed annual data, does not find a statistically significant impact of the policy on the development of targeted heavy industries. I discuss this episode within the context of development theory from the 1950s and 1960s. I find no learning-by-doing effects emanating from this heavy industry push to targeted industries, highlighting the importance of the quality of state intervention. Weak production linkages between targeted and non-targeted sectors restricted spillover opportunities for broader industrial development. In the second essay, I explore the challenges of using linear estimation for endogenous business cycles when the underlying data generating process is nonlinear. Recent literature highlights that in a univariate context, linear models, due to omitted variable bias, fail to identify the local instability present in a correctly specified nonlinear model. This study extends these findings to a multivariate setting. Although linear models fail to track instability, they have been found to be effective in detecting cyclical mechanisms. Adding simple nonlinearities to a macroeconomic model in the multiplier-accelerator tradition, this study demonstrates that a linear model can predict locally stable, cyclical behavior when the underlying data generating process is unstable and does not exhibit any local oscillatory dynamics. In the third essay, co-authored with Deepankar Basu, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for diagonalizability of any singular matrix using its rank and eigenvalues. Recent developments in the theory of production networks offer interesting applications and revival of input-output analysis. Some recent papers have studied the propagation of a temporary, negative shock through an input-output network. Such analyses of shock propagation rely on the eigendecomposition of relevant input-output matrices. Only diagonalizable matrices can be eigendecomposed. We apply our results to 5 historical (Germany, India, and Japan) and 670 contemporary IO matrices (15 annual IO matrices for 43 countries from the 2016 release of the World Input Output Database and 25 annual IO matrices for the U.S. economy) and find that some IO matrices are not diagonalizable.Publication Full Fathom Five: Industrial Fishing, Carbon, and the Economics of Extinction(2024-09) Kline, CaitlinThis dissertation examines industrial fisheries as major contributors to climate change and socio-ecological injustice. It comprises three connected chapters that assess the ecological, economic, and techno-political impacts of the sector. I adapt conventional tools of climate economic analysis - carbon accounting, food security dynamics, and a techno-engineered climate mitigation policy horizon - to analyze the industrial fishing sector, its contribution to the climate crisis, and the limitations of traditional analytical frameworks when applied to ocean-based economic activity. The first chapter makes a conceptual and methodological proposal for a comprehensive carbon footprint of industrial fisheries that accounts for the sector’s interference in the oceanic carbon cycle and degradation of the ocean’s capacity to act as a carbon sink. The analysis suggests that industrial fishing produces climate impacts on a scale comparable to the largest terrestrial emitters, including deforestation. The second chapter explores the quantitative and qualitative impacts of industrial fishing, with a focus on fisheries employment and contributions to global food security. The analysis indicates that the industrial sector (as distinct from the small-scale/artisanal fishing activity that comprises the vast majority of the world’s fishing vessels and fisheries workers) contributes vanishingly small amounts to total food supply, and likely has negative impacts on food security. Small-scale fisheries would benefit unambiguously from a reduction in the industrial fishing pressure with which they compete. Furthermore, the results suggest that ending industrial fishing would yield overall fisheries job quality gains, as the most serious fisheries labor abuses, including modern slavery, are concentrated in the industrial sector. The third chapter proposes a policy of ending industrial fishing as a Carbon Dioxide Removal method. I employ a comparative analysis with the suite of proposed ocean-based carbon removal technologies evaluated at the international level to show that ending industrial fishing would yield greater mitigation benefits than the technological methods under consideration, at a lower cost, with few disbenefits and extensive co-benefits. Ending industrial overfishing would outperform all carbon removal technologies in every metric (ex. scale, duration, cost, readiness, risks, benefits).Publication Essays in Labor and Development Economics(2024-09) BUDLENDER, JOSHUAThis dissertation investigates topics in Labor and Development Economics, with a focus on empirical investigation in South Africa using causal inference methods. My first chapter, "Rent sharing, wage floors and development" (co-authored with Ihsaan Bassier), investigates the conditions under which firms share rents with their workers. Firms benefiting from favorable demand conditions tend to raise wages. However, we show that firms with labor market power facing binding wage floors will absorb these positive shocks as excess profits ("rents") instead of increasing wages or employment. This prediction comes from a novel theoretical insight under a standard framework of monopsonistic competition, and we empirically test the prediction in South Africa using administrative data. We first show how the predicted wage, employment and profit patterns are evident in the cross-section of firms. We then replicate and extend a leading method of identifying rent-sharing elasticities, and show that the same pattern is evident when looking at firm responses to shocks. My second chapter, "Surviving in the dark: the mortality effects of reducing rolling blackouts", uses the introduction of a unique rolling blackout ("load shedding") reduction policy in parts of South Africa’s second-largest city, Cape Town, to investigate the mortality effects of load shedding and its mitigation. South Africa frequently experiences load shedding due to shortfalls in electricity generation. I find that the mitigation policy significantly reduces mortality in Cape Town relative to other parts of South Africa experiencing unmitigated load shedding. The incomplete geographic coverage of the mitigation policy exacerbates existing inequalities in the city. My third chapter, "Estimating employment responses to South Africa’s Employment Tax Incentive" (co-authored with Amina Ebrahim), presents new evidence on the effects of South Africa’s Employment Tax Incentive (ETI), an employment tax credit aimed at reducing youth unemployment. We show that attempts to estimate firm-level treatment effects are likely to fail when comparing ETI to matched non-ETI firms. We show that this is likely due to mean reversion, which has not been recognized in the prior literature. Our results prompt a re-evaluation of the existing literature on the employment effects of the ETI.Publication THREE ESSAYS ON GENDER AND SEXUALITY: HETERONORMATIVITY, FEMININITY, AND INTERSECTIONALITY(2024-05) Nguyen, Duc HienThis dissertation is a study of the political and economic significance of gender and sexual identities. It demonstrates that sex and gender are material relations integrally connected to labor, production, consumption, and the accumulation and circulation of capital. The establishment and naturalization of binary cisgender and compulsive heterosexuality continue to generate inequality, undermine social justice, and reinforce existing hierarchies delineated by races, class, and citizenship. In the first chapter, titled “The Political Economy of Heteronormativity,” I argue that heteronormativity provides an ongoing condition of possibility for capitalist accumulation, and non-normative forms of sexuality threaten the stability of accumulation. Applying to our current moment, I suggest that many LGBT subjects have been assimilated into the neoliberal mainstream. This points to a broader need to re-examine the meaning of “progress” from the perspective of subjects who are marked as unproductive, nonreproductive, and unprofitable by the neoliberal regime. In the second chapter, titled “Femininity and Care Work,” is investigation of the association between femininity and care work. The dominant theories of care often feature a particular version of femininity that also contains traces of racial ideology and class hierarchy, which leads to the alienation of men and masculine-gendered people from doing care, while also masking the coercion of racialized and poor women to care for the white, high-income elite. Using data from the AddHealth survey, my empirical analyses show that the care economy itself is stratified and there is no simplistic link between femininity and working in care occupations. In the third chapter, titled “Gender-Based Discrimination in Care Service Occupations,” I conduct an online experiment to investigate discrimination based on gender expression in hiring for care service occupations. The results show that gender expression leads to economically meaningful disparities in hiring outcomes, but the effects are mediated by racial identities and occupation-specific gender norms. Even after controlling for workers’ characteristics including human capital, Asian masculine workers and Black feminine workers still receive 10-20 percentage point higher interview rates than White feminine workers for two entry-level care service jobs. I also find suggestive evidence of heterogeneity due to participants’ gender, race, and sociopolitical values.Publication THREE ESSAYS on INNOVATION POLICY and INEQUALITY(2024-05) Burrage, AprilIn this dissertation, I examine how state and national policies impact the participation of underrepresented groups in commercialization and entrepreneurial activities. I use empirical methods, experiments, and large datasets to investigate how institutions exacerbate or alleviate existing disparities within the innovation economy. Chapter 1 investigates the impact of state R&D tax credits on the engagement of small high-tech firms with Federal funding opportunities. Combining data on state business registrations and firm enrollment in the Federal System for Award Management (SAM), I examine the effects of state-level policies on firms’ interest in pursuing Federal grants and contracts. A staggered difference-in-difference analysis of state policy adoption shows that state R&D tax credits reduce SAM enrollment for women- and minority-owned high-tech firms (by 6% and 1%) and have no effect on SAM enrollment for non-minority high-tech firms. These findings underscore the need for more effective policy interventions to foster interest among small firms in Federal innovation initiatives and the importance of targeted support for women- and minority-owned firms. In Chapter 2, co-authored with Ina Ganguli and Nilanjana Dasgupta, we examine gender differences in the social impact and commercial motives for academic entrepreneurship using the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (NSF I- Corps) program. Analysis of survey data and 1,267 NSF-funded I-Corps project abstracts, alongside a field experiment manipulating recruitment emails, shows women’s pronounced preference for social impact over commercial motive compared to men. This suggests that low-cost interventions that emphasize the social impact value of entrepreneurial opportunities may increase gender diversity in participation in entrepreneurship activities. In Chapter 3, I investigate the impact of the Small Business Technology Development Center (SBTDC) on new-firm formation in North Carolina’s rural and economically depressed Cleveland County using difference-in-difference and synthetic control methods. I find null effects with difference-in-differences and positive effects with the synthetic controls for Cleveland County for new firm creation. The findings underscore the significance of tailored government policies in catalyzing quality entrepreneurship and resource allocation, particularly in areas lacking robust entrepreneurial frameworks. This investigation contributes to the broader discourse on the strategic deployment of public resources to uplift economically depressed regions.Publication Three Essays on International Cooperation, Central Bank Swap Lines, and Benchmark Interest Rates(2024-05) Medlin, Aaron MThis dissertation comprises three chapters that contribute to a deeper understanding of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the Federal Reserve’s international response, and the U.S. government’s campaign for benchmark interest rate reform, shedding light on the implications for effective monetary policy transmission and the evolving landscape of the international financial system. The first chapter analyzes the role of currency swap lines by the Federal Reserve during the GFC, the European debt crisis, and the Covid-19 crisis. It argues that LIBOR’s integration into the U.S. domestic financial system prompted the revival of swap lines to address eurodollar interbank market dysfunction and influence LIBOR. Empirical analysis reveals that a USD LIBOR panel bank in a foreign central bank’s jurisdiction significantly predicts a dollar swap line extension from the Fed. The essay also argues that LIBOR explains why only certain central banks were granted unlimited drawing access to Fed swap lines and eventually converted into standing arrangements. In the second chapter, an instrumental variable regression is employed to address whether Fed swap line drawings by foreign central banks are responsive to dislocations in the foreign exchange market as proxied by covered interest parity (CIP) deviations versus dislocations in the eurodollar interbank market as proxied by LIBOR. The results indicate little empirical support that swap line drawings significantly respond to CIP deviations but do respond to LIBOR deviations from the Fed funds rate consistent with the narrative of the first essay. The third chapter explores the political economy of international benchmark interest rate reform. The GFC and the LIBOR scandal emphasized the need for reform and new regulatory standards, particularly in monetary transmission mechanisms. U.S. agencies spearheading the reform efforts exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction in prosecuting foreign banks for LIBOR manipulation, effectively discouraging their participation. The reform replaced LIBOR with central bank-administered benchmark reference rates, strengthening monetary control and financial stability. The chapter examines the power dynamics and welfare redistribution resulting from this transition, with the United States benefiting from increased influence over global dollar credit conditions through the widespread adoption of its replacement rate, the secured overnight funding rate (SOFR).Publication ESSAYS ON WORKER PREFERENCES AND BAYESIAN ECONOMETRICS(2024-05) Lewis, Gabriel DurbinTwo aims link the chapters of my dissertation. First, I seek to understand how much workers may value workplace institutions which give them greater safety, autonomy, or influence in decision-making; and how such preferences may be affected by ongoing technological changes such as the rise of digital surveillance and remote work. To this end, I conduct novel survey experiments that form the basis of Chapter 1 and Chapter 3. A crucial aspect of these experiments is that workers’ values vary in the population, and such variances themselves are not constant, and may contain correlations. This motivates my second aim: I seek to reconcile and improve upon existing regression models to account for the non-constant variances (heteroskedastic or clustered covariances) that occur in most economic data. In Chapter 2, I show how non-constant variances often cause existing Bayesian models to be biased and overconfident; then I repurpose a population sampling model for regression, and prove that it converges to an ordinary least squares model with a robust covariance matrix correctly determined by the way in which the population is sampled, thereby solving the outstanding problem of clustered covariances in Bayesian regression. This novel regression method is applicable to an extremely wide range of data analysis problems, and provides a bridge between standard frequentist regression methods and Bayesian machine learning methods. Accounting for non-constant variances in my experimental data, I find that on average, workers are willing to sacrifice considerable shares of their wages to gain unions, employee engagement programs, safety, remote work, and freedom from digital surveillance, among other aspects of their jobs. There is considerable variance around the average preference; for example, women, people of color, or people under 40 tended to prefer unions and employee engagement programs more strongly than did men, whites, or people over 40. Considered as a whole, my work can help to inform policies that meet the needs of working people, paying particular attention to the fact that different people may have different needs.Publication A Knife Hidden in Roses: Development and Gender Violence in the Dominican Republic(2013-09) Bueno, Cruz CaridadOn September 30, 2012, Jonathan Torres stabbed his wife, Miguelina Martinez, fifty-two times in a beauty salon in Santiago, Dominican Republic. Ms. Martinez, 33 years-old, went to the district attorney's office eighteen times in the two weeks prior to her murder to report that because of her husband's violent threats she left her home. He killed her because she no longer wanted to be with him; the knife he used was hidden in a bouquet of roses. This three-essay style dissertation interrogates the state of development and gender violence in the Dominican Republic. The first chapter examines the implications of racial, gender, and class stratification on the economic and social opportunities of low-income women, predominantly of African descent, working in the export processing zones and as domestic workers. The second chapter explores the correlation between women's economic, political, and social characteristics and the incidence domestic violence using data from the Demographic and Health Survey. Further, I test which model--the household bargaining model (HBM) or the male backlash model (MBM)--best explains gender violence. I find that the HBM better predicts physical violence, while the MBM better predicts sexual violence. However, when I disaggregate asset-poor women and asset-rich women, I find that the HBM is more adept at explaining gender violence for asset-rich women and the MBM for asset-poor women. The third chapter explores the role of women's and men's endogenous preferences on the justifications of gender violence. In both the female and male specifications, there is a positive correlation between men making more decisions and the justification of gender violence. Women that support gender equity are less likely to justify gender violence; while husbands that are less gender progressive are more likely to justify gender violence. Based on my findings, I conclude that the Dominican government's economic policies of the last thirty years are the knife hidden in the government's roses or rhetoric of human development and women's rights. To promote human development and foster women's rights, the Dominican government must embark on a new trajectory focused on human capital formation and a more equitable distribution of income, wealth, and power.Publication The Political Economy of Cultural Production: Essays on Music and Class(2013-09) Seda Irizarry, Ian J.Overview As an activity that produces wealth, musical production and its effects have largely been neglected by the economics profession. This dissertation seeks contribute to a small but growing literature on the subject by analyzing musical production through a particular class analytical lens of political economy. A first problem that has encountered many within political economy, specifically within its radical variant of Marxism, is how to understand music in relation to the social totality. In the first essay of this work I provide a critical review of the literature that approaches music through the "base-superstructure metaphor", a tool of analysis well known within the Marxian theoretical tradition. In it I show how assigning elements to either one or the other of these spheres and understanding the forces of production in terms of its technical dimension (i.e. technology) limits the analytical possibilities provided by Marx's original insights. In the second part of this essay I review the ways the concept of class has been ued to analyze topics related to music within the Marxian tradition. I highlight how the essentialist moments of those particular class concepts lead to analyzes that obscure and sometimes contradict one of the main purposes Marx's original intent: to show the various guises that exploitation might take in a capitalist society. In the second essay of the dissertation I theorize musical production with the aid of a class qua surplus analysis that highlights the process of the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor in relation to the production and dissemination of meaning associated with music as a cultural process. I identify various musical scenes and show the dialectic of aesthetics and musical labor. In the third and final essay, I compare and contrast two discourses of theft: those of exploitation and of piracy. I focus my attention on the music recording industry and show how the adoption of a discourse of exploitation by musicians that are not exploited and their support in anti-piracy campaigns hamper, marginalize, and contribute to eliminating none-exploitative class structures. This result is important to the literature that explores how intellectual property poses constraints to economic growth and development in the so-called Third world where most of the pirate production takes place.Publication The Economics of Same-Sex Couple Households: Essays on Work, Wages, and Poverty(2013-09) Schneebaum, AlyssaSince Badgett's (1995a) landmark study on the wage effects of sexual orientation, interest in and production of scholarly work addressing the economics of sexual orientation has grown tremendously. Curious puzzles have emerged in the literature on the economics of same-sex couple households, three of which are addressed in detail in this dissertation. Most studies of the wages of women in same-sex couples versus different-sex couples find that the former earn more, even controlling for differences in present labor market supply, education, experience, area of residence, and occupation. However, most previous studies of the sexual orientation wage gap omit the role of motherhood in the lesbian-straight women wage gap, and most take the sample of lesbians to be a homogenous group compared to straight women. Chapter 1 uses American Community Survey data from 2010 to study the wage gap between lesbians and straight women, putting motherhood in intra-household differences at the center of the analysis. The analysis shows that in terms of earnings, lesbian couples are quite heterogeneous; one partner has a large wage premium over straight women, and the other faces a large wage penalty. These findings are enhanced when a child is present in the lesbians' home, possibly suggesting a household division of labor in lesbian homes. Chapter 2 considers the possibility that same-sex couples, like many different-sex couples, have one person who specializes in paid work while the other specializes in unpaid work for the household, such as housework and childcare. Chapter 2 presents a study which uses American Time Use Survey Data pooled from 2003-2011 to analyze the time spent in household, care, and paid work for members of different couple types and finds that in same-sex as well as different-sex couple households, some personal characteristics, such as being the lower earner in the household, are correlated with spending more time in household and care work. Chapter 3 offers a study of poverty in same-sex versus different-sex couple households, exploring which characteristics are correlated with poverty for same-sex and different-sex couple households. When controlling for a couple's education level, area of residence, race and ethnicity, age, and household composition, same-sex couples are more likely to be in poverty than their different-sex counterparts.Publication Essays on the Rising Demand for Convenience in Meal Provisioning in the United States(2013-05) Ohler, TamaraHousehold food budgets offer a window on consumers' demand for convenience. During the 1980s and 1990s, three shifts likely promoted an increase in the share of the food budget devoted to convenient meal options, namely meals out and prepared foods: the growing number of hours that women spent in paid work, the growing opportunity cost of women's time spent doing housework, and the drop in the price of food relative to all other goods. I test whether the impact of these economic trends (on food budget allocation) was mediated by a change in the impact of children on household meal allocation. I find support for this hypothesis in a model of food away expenditures, which likely reflects two unmeasured shifts. First, (own) child care and household production of meals apparently became substitutes rather than complements. Second, a range of both prepared foods and family-friendly restaurants became available. The growing demand for time-saving meal options, including frozen food and meals out, has important implications for a core determinant of living standards: the ability to harness scale economies from home production of meals. I test whether greater reliance on convenient meals reduced household-level economies of scale. Other factors could mediate against, or even offset such a loss, including technological advances in the production and distribution of food. Using Engel curve analyses, I find that scale economies fell from 1980 to 2000, thereby reducing living standards; my lower- and upper-bound estimates of the drop are 44 percent and 110 percent respectively. Economies of scale are not simply a function of household size and composition, as standard equivalence scaling techniques suggest; they are affected by the ways that households trade non-market work and market substitutes. This dissertation contributes to the small literature that challenges the validity of fixed-parameter equivalence scales, such as the per capita scale, which ignore household production. I first attach plausible values to scale parameters and then compare equivalent-income trajectories of parents and non-parents across (standard) fixed parameter and (non-standard) time-varying equivalence scales. I present plausible lower- and upper-bound estimates of the rise in income inequality between parents and non-parents.Publication Social Emulation, the Evolution of Gender Norms, and Intergenerational Transfers: Three Essays on the Economics of Social Interactions(2013-05) Oh, Seung-YunIn this dissertation, I develop theoretical models and an empirical study of the role of social interactions, the evolution of social norms, and their impact on individual behavior. Although my models are consistent with individual utility maximization, they generally emphasize social factors that channel individual decisions and/or shape individuals' preferences. I apply this approach to three different issues: labor supply, fertility decisions, and intergenerational transfers, generating predictions that are more consistent with observed empirical patterns of behavior than standard neoclassical approaches that assume independent preferences, perfect information, and efficient markets. In the first essay, I explain the long-run evolution of working hours during the 20th century in developed countries: the substantial decline for the first three quarters of the 20th century and the deceleration or even reversal of the fall in working hours in the last quarter. I develop a model of the determination of working hours and how this process is affected by both the conflict between employers and employees and the employees' desire to emulate the consumption standards of the rich reference group. The model also explores the effects of direct and indirect policies to limit hours advocated by political representations of workers such as trade unions or leftist parties. In the second essay, I study the coevolution of gender norms and fertility regimes. Since the 1990s, a new pattern of positive correlation between fertility rates and female labor force participation emerged in developed countries. This recent trend seems inconsistent with conventional economic approaches that explain fertility decline as a result of the increasing opportunity costs of childrearing, predicting a negative correlation between fertility and women's labor force participation. To address this puzzle, I develop a model of the evolution of gender norms and fertility in various economic environments influenced by the level of women's wages. Randomly matched spouses make choices related to fertility - labor supply and the division of household labor - based on their preferences shaped by gender norms. In the model, norm updating is influenced by both within-family payoffs and conformism payoffs from social interactions among the same sex. The model shows how changes in economic environments and the degree of conformism toward norms can alter fertility outcomes. The results suggest that the asymmetric evolution of gender norms between men and women could contribute to very low fertility, explaining the positive correlation between fertility and women's labor force participation. Finally, I estimate the effect of exogenously introduced public pensions for the elderly on the amount of private transfers they receive. There has been a long debate whether public transfers crowd out private transfers. Previous empirical studies on this issue suffer from the endogeneity of income that contaminates estimates. I use an exogenously introduced public transfer, the Basic Old Age Pension in Korea, to test the crowding out hypothesis. A considerable proportion of the elderly population, especially women living without a spouse, do not experience the crowding out effect and moreover, among those who do, the size of the effect is relatively small. The results support the redistribution effect of the Basic Old Age Pension targeting the poor elderly in Korea.Publication Money, Reality, and Value: Non-Commodity Money in Marxian Political Economy(2012-09) Rebello, Joseph ThomasMy dissertation offers an advancement of the Marxian theory of money, motivated by a methodological critique of monetary theory in general. As such, my dissertation is located within the philosophy and methodology of economics and the history of monetary thought, in addition to Marxian political economy. This intermingling of fields reflects both my research interests and my argument with respect to the current state of scholarship on Marx and money. Despite increasing acceptance of the compatibility of non-commodity money and Marxian political economy, a dualist social ontology has stunted attempts to theorize the relationship between money, value, and class. I base my development of a Marxian theory of money in a rejection of this dualism. In other words, I contribute a theoretical analysis of the relationship between money, value, and class informed by a critique of these dualist notions of economic reality. Accepting criticism, leveled by Keynesians among others, of the tendency to reduce money to the status of a mere veil, I further argue that the ontological privileging of a real economy over its monetary moments is prevalent across time and paradigms. This dichotomy between real economy and less-real money, which I call the \emph{realist dualism}, is thus more general than the classical dichotomy. As such, even fervent opponents of the classical dichotomy may reproduce their own ontological dualism between the real and merely monetary. After outlining the basic features and theoretical consequences of the realist dualism, I present examples of how this philosophical tendency shapes monetary theory and debate, both ancient and modern. Within the Marxian tradition, dependence on such a dualism has impeded attempts to theorize money in its relation to both (1) the economy in general and (2) its own manifold forms and functions. The distinction between real and less-real on a macroeconomic scale is repeated within the conceptualization of money itself, privileging real commodity money over symbolic and imaginary forms. I provide an alternative to this tendency, based on an overdeterminist understanding of the relationships between so-called imaginary, symbolic, and real/material aspects of money. This alternative ontology informs a critical and deconstructive reading of money within the Marxian tradition and a reframing of the problem of non-commodity money. In lieu of deriving a theory of non-commodity money from a logically and historically privileged notion of real commodity money, my general Marxian theory of money takes as its object the interaction between (1) the imaginary, symbolic, and real/material dimensions inherent to money in general and (2) class processes of value production, appropriation, and distribution. This project accepts that a specifically Marxian theory of money is not produced from the logic of supposedly real commodity money, but through the entry point of class.Publication Economic Reforms in East African Countries: The Impact on Government Revenue and Public Investment(2009-05) Mwakalobo, Adam Beni SwebeIn the empirical literature on the revenue consequences of trade liberalization, most studies have focused on cross-country analysis. Because these studies are static in nature, they have not addressed the short-run and long-run dynamic public revenue and public investment consequences of economic reforms in developing countries. This dissertation contributes to the literature employing a dynamic time series analysis of the three East African countries-Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. The dissertation uses a co-integration and error-correction framework to distinguish between short-run and long-run relationships. The results indicate that trade reforms in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda had varying impacts on government revenue, tax performance and public investment spending in these three countries. It is demonstrated that trade reforms had adverse impact on government revenue in Uganda, but not in Tanzania and Kenya. The results also show that Tanzania has had the weakest overall tax revenue and public investment. Poor tax performance and erratic revenue generation have been problems in all three countries, contributing to adverse impacts on public investment spending.