An embodied approach to informational interventions: using conceptual metaphors to promote sustainable healthy diets

Poor diet quality and environmental degradation are two major challenges of our times. Unhealthy and unsustainable dietary practices, such as the overconsumption of meat and consumer food waste behaviour, contribute greatly to both issues. Across seventeen online and field experiments, in two different cultures (US and China), this thesis investigates if the embodied cognition approach, and more specifically, research on conceptual metaphors, can be used to develop interventions to promote sustainable healthy diets. Interventions relying on conceptual metaphors have been shown to stimulate attitudinal and behavioural changes in other fields (e.g., marketing and political communications), but are rarely adopted to encourage sustainable healthy diets. To fill in this gap in the literature, I conducted five sets of experimental studies examining the effects of different metaphors on specific sustainable healthy dietary practices, each of which forms an independent empirical paper (Chapters 2-6 of the thesis). After introducing the current perspectives on embodied cognition and conceptual metaphors in the context of this research (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 looks into the conceptual metaphor “Healthy is Up”, demonstrating that US people implicitly associate healthiness with verticality, and offering recommendations for healthy eating guidelines. Chapter 3 extends this research to Chinese samples and partially replicates the results. Chapter 4 shows that the anthropomorphic metaphor “Animals are Friends” discourages meat consumption by inducing anticipatory guilt among US omnivores, whereas Chapter 5 reveals that Chinese omnivores are more responsive to another anthropomorphic metaphor, namely, “Animals are Family”. Bringing lab insights 6 to the real world, Chapter 6 demonstrates with a longitudinal field experiment that anthropomorphic metaphors together with environmental feedback result in a higher reduction in food waste as compared to other feedback interventions. The strengths, limitations and implications of those empirical papers are discussed in the conclusive part of the thesis

Shareholder activism: the interactions between firm meetings and asset markets

My thesis aims to investigate how different financial markets (equity lending, option, and stock) could work together to separate cash flow rights and voting rights, how different agents (large shareholders, activist investors, and managers) choose their optimal action with the existence of such markets, and the consequences of their actions. In Chapter I, I document the empirical relevance between equity lending and call-and-put option trading markets for the separation of voting rights and cash flow rights. I explore the cross-sectional and time series variation of the voting price and lending/option-trading volume in the two markets around the firm meeting voting record date, the time when voting shares holding is registered for the firm meeting. Price-wise, voting rights are in general higher measured by option trading than in the equity lending market, however lower during director elections. Volume-wise, there exists an observable increase in options trading volume before firm meetings, especially for non-regular filings. These facts reveal that shareholder activism generally exists before controversial meetings and voting rights are in high demand in one market or another before firm meetings. In Chapter II, I investigate the price and quantities associated with firm voting rights in two markets that facilitate voting rights trading around the firm's meeting voting record date. I show there exists a cross-substitution between the two markets regarding voting rights trading. With a lower supply of shares in the equity lending market, I found increasing institutional investors' abnormal buy in the shares trading market, and simultaneously, lower price of voting rights. I introduce exogenous variation of equity lending supply through total passive institutional holding. Such evidence supports the prevalence of empty voting practice before firm meetings. In Chapter III, I examine the impact of shareholder activism on firm valuation and managerial behavior through a particular channel: management proposals. I study the theoretical implication of the management rent-seeking motives if we consider the manager’s project searching monitored by a large share-holder and hence, causing the manipulation of management proposal voting at firm meetings. With such an understanding, I explore the impact of shareholder rejecting management proposals. As analysed by the theory, the higher private benefit, the higher management proposal manipulation at the firm voting, and hence, causing empirical endogeneity problem. Thus I introduce a novel souce of exogenous variation, pre-meeting call option trading volume, which is shown to cause more management proposal failures. With this instrument, I find diverging effects of shareholder activism and managerial initiative. Private benefit leads to managerial value creation in total, and is associated with lower non-CEO executive turnover; on the contrary, activism leads to large 7 days cumulative abnormal returns and is associated with higher non-CEO executive turnover, showing that activism does have a counter-effect on management rent-seeking at a cost. In this chapter, I measure managerial private benefit through reversing the option-constructed voting premium and find that this helps with identifying the effect of managerial voting manipulation. To conclude, I find that empty voting is a widely existing practice and is shown, both theoretically and empirically, to be associated with firm outcomes. Both firm management and activists employ them in different fashion and different markets. Highlighting the role of such practice helps with introducing additional empirical evidence relating to the analysis of corporate governance in general

Throwing therapy at the problem mental health and humanitarian intervention in Palabek refugee settlement, northern Uganda

This thesis examines the social, moral, and political lives of humanitarian mental health interventions in a refugee settlement in Uganda. It is written at the junction of two increasingly significant trends: the search for durable solutions for mass displacement, and the establishment of the field of global mental health as a key actor in the management of psychological suffering across the Global South. Through a scalar structure, it interrogates the intersections of psychological programmes with socio-economic conditions of chronic poverty and food insecurity, from policy discourses to refugees’ phenomenological experiences of suffering. In so doing, it critically examines the political significance and therapeutic potential of mental health interventions in extremely resource-poor contexts. Global mental health scholars and practitioners have developed approaches to refugee mental health based on three assumptions: that refugees’ emotional distress should be tackled by purely psychological interventions; that these programmes are clinically significant and politically neutral; and that the ‘contextual’ factors that should be considered in their implementation mostly concern ‘local’ interpretations of mental health and illness which diverge from Western biomedical frameworks. By ethnographically exploring experiences of psychological suffering among South Sudanese – and particularly Acholi – refugees in the settlement of Palabek, northern Uganda, this thesis disputes these contentions. Based on fourteen months of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis puts forward a critique of global mental health and humanitarian interventions that takes seriously the role of poverty and power in shaping refugees’ afflictions. This thesis shows that forms of suffering experienced by refugees in Uganda are closely linked to the structural constraints of life in displacement. It shows how these interventions intersect with refugees’ phenomenological experiences of temporality and moral personhood. In so doing it argues that, when divorced from direct engagement with forms of structural injustice, current global mental health approaches actively ‘do harm’ by contributing to refugees’ psychological afflictions. Finally, this thesis proposes new directions for refugee and global mental health; it argues for a ‘temporal turn’ in refugee mental health which foregrounds refugees’ moral agency, and for the central role of livelihood interventions in generating therapeutic outcomes

The rise and fall of online immortality services and the mediation of mortality in the digital age

This thesis considers how digital communication mediates mortality in contemporary western societies by examining online services geared towards dealing with one’s future death. The study’s point of departure is society’s fundamental role in mediating mortality, understood as humans’ awareness of their own inevitable future death. I consider the mediation of mortality as a negotiation of an annihilation-continuity dialectic and establish a conceptual and practical link between media practices and practices of symbolic transcendence. Specifically, the thesis examines the following questions: (1) What practices of leaving traces do online immortality services construct and facilitate? (2) What posthumous relationships between the future-dead and future-survivors are constructed and facilitated by online immortality services? (3) What digital media myths and social imaginaries are evoked by and underlie the practices constructed and facilitated by online immortality services? To address these questions, the thesis employs a multimodal analysis of forty-six online immortality services and analyses twenty in-depth interviews with the founders of these websites. The analysis shows that online immortality services promise their users extensive control over their symbolic posthumous endurance. Yet the thesis argues that online immortality services ironically fail to ‘live up’ to their promise in the face of the very same technological, social, and commercial conditions and imaginaries that led to their emergence. As online immortality services are themselves dying (i.e. failing commercially and going offline), this project becomes one of preservation and conservation of unsuccessful contemporary attempts to thwart death through media. Thus, it highlights the significance of studying failed technologies and vernacular media histories

Generalised latent variable models for location, scale, and shape parameters

Latent Variable Models (LVM) are widely used in social, behavioural, and educational sciences to uncover underlying associations in multivariate data using a smaller number of latent variables. However, the classical LVM framework has certain assumptions that can be restrictive in empirical applications. In particular, the distribution of the observed variables being from the exponential family and the latent variables influencing only the conditional mean of the observed variables. This thesis addresses these limitations and contributes to the current literature in two ways. First, we propose a novel class of models called Generalised Latent Variable Models for Location, Scale, and Shape parameters (GLVM-LSS). These models use linear functions of latent factors to model location, scale, and shape parameters of the items’ conditional distributions. By doing so, we model higher order moments such as variance, skewness, and kurtosis in terms of the latent variables, providing a more flexible framework compared to classical factor models. The model parameters are estimated using maximum likelihood estimation. Second, we address the challenge of interpreting the GLVM-LSS, which can be complex due to its increased number of parameters. We propose a penalised maximum likelihood estimation approach with automatic selection of tuning parameters. This extends previous work on penalised estimation in the LVM literature to cases without closed-form solutions. Our findings suggest that modelling the entire distribution of items, not just the conditional mean, leads to improved model fit and deeper insights into how the items reflect the latent constructs they are intended to measure. To assess the performance of the proposed methods, we conduct extensive simulation studies and apply it to real-world data from educational testing and public opinion research. The results highlight the efficacy of the GLVM-LSS framework in capturing complex relationships between observed variables and latent factors, providing valuable insights for researchers in various fields

Essays on the allocation, coordination, and selection of workers

This thesis studies the determinants and consequences of workers’ allocation, coordination, and selection within organizations in countries at different levels of economic development. The first chapter provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records on 200k employees over ten years of a multinational firm. Leveraging exogenous variation induced by the rotation of managers across teams, I find that successful managers cause workers to reallocate within the firm through lateral and vertical transfers. This leads to large and persistent gains in workers’ career progression and productivity. The results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers’ specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers’ time at the firm. The second chapter continues the study of leadership in a very different context: Myanmar’s labor movement. We conduct multiple field experiments by collaborating with a confederation of labor unions as it mobilizes garment workers in the run-up to a national minimum wage negotiation. First, we document that union leaders differ from the other workers along several traits that psychologists and sociologists have associated with the ability to influence collective outcomes. Second, by randomly embedding leaders in group discussions, we find that they help coordinate workers’ views to build consensus around the unions’ preferred minimum wage levels. Third, by conducting a mobilization experiment that features collective action problems, we show that leaders play a coordinating role also for workers’ actions. The third chapter starts with the fact that women’s labor force participation varies widely across countries at every level of development. We ask how this affects gender diversity among employees, gender gaps, and firm productivity using five years of personnel records on over 100K employees of a multinational firm combined with the female to male labor force participation rate in the 101 countries where the firm operates. Structural estimates show that in a counterfactual world with no gender-specific barriers to labor force participation, firm productivity would be 32% higher for the same level of employment and the same wage bill. The findings suggest that selection is a powerful lens to understand the link between diversity and productivity

Fire sales and policy interventions in financial networks

In this thesis, we model the impact of fire sales and the mitigation of systemic losses from policy interventions using tools from the theory of financial networks and complex systems. A fire sales event occurs when banks sell a large quantity of assets at discounted prices. There is a mark-to-market adjustment on assets sold, leading to a depreciation in the asset value and fuelling further fire sales. This channel of systemic risk can be a large contributor to losses, as observed in systemic events like the Great Financial Crisis. The impact of these events spurred a range of policy interventions to enhance financial stability. We use network models to analyse fire sales and policy interventions in interconnected systems. Our first main result shows that under a partial information setting, policy interventions for mitigating fire sales losses using matrix reconstruction methods outperform policy interventions that do not account for institutions overlapping portfolios. We focus on optimising policy interventions when only the partial information is known, and how this compares with the fully observed data. Using matrix reconstruction methods, we find policy interventions under partial information can be similar to policy interventions under fully observed data. The similarity in performance under partial information highly depends on the chosen matrix reconstruction method. The second main result is developing a new reverse stress test approach for a multi-stage fire sales event. Under this new approach, we find losses under these derived scenarios are larger than benchmark scenarios used in other stress tests. A reverse stress testing approach is taken, as the scenario reflects the largest losses of banks from the input data and given fire sales mechanism. We find the losses from these derived scenarios are large and have not been observed in previous studies. Our third main result develops a clearing model for banks that post collateral as part of their financial obligations, where we account for two distinctive channels of fire sales. In this clearing situation, we consider the counterparty losses between banks, fire sales losses from assets used as collateral and fire sales losses from externally held assets. In this new collateral model, the inclusion of external asset holdings towards fire sales losses in a clearing situation can result in larger losses, compared to banks holding no external assets. We find the total losses depend on the overlap between both fire sale channels, and the network topology of the interbank network

On linear, fractional, and submodular optimization

In this thesis, we study four fundamental problems in the theory of optimization. 1. In fractional optimization, we are interested in minimizing a ratio of two functions over some domain. A well-known technique for solving this problem is the Newton– Dinkelbach method. We propose an accelerated version of this classical method and give a new analysis using the Bregman divergence. We show how it leads to improved or simplified results in three application areas. 2. The diameter of a polyhedron is the maximum length of a shortest path between any two vertices. The circuit diameter is a relaxation of this notion, whereby shortest paths are not restricted to edges of the polyhedron. For a polyhedron in standard equality form with constraint matrix A, we prove an upper bound on the circuit diameter that is quadratic in the rank of A and logarithmic in the circuit imbalance measure of A. We also give circuit augmentation algorithms for linear programming with similar iteration complexity. 3. The correlation gap of a set function is the ratio between its multilinear and concave extensions. We present improved lower bounds on the correlation gap of a matroid rank function, parametrized by the rank and girth of the matroid. We also prove that for a weighted matroid rank function, the worst correlation gap is achieved with uniform weights. Such improved lower bounds have direct applications in submodular maximization and mechanism design. 4. The last part of this thesis concerns parity games, a problem intimately related to linear programming. A parity game is an infinite-duration game between two players on a graph. The problem of deciding the winner lies in NP and co-NP, with no known polynomial algorithm to date. Many of the fastest (quasi-polynomial) algorithms have been unified via the concept of a universal tree. We propose a strategy iteration framework which can be applied on any universal tree

Essays in behavioural public policy

This thesis explores the impact of novel interventions in the environmental and health domains, and specifically investigates conditions to increase their effectiveness. In my first chapter I present evidence from a field experiment leveraging place attachment and football preferences to reduce the use of carrier bags in supermarkets. I find that the treatment reduces the use by 8-12% and that the effect persists even after the end of the treatment period. I propose ways in which a regulator can scale up this intervention at virtually no cost. In my second chapter I present the results of two online experiments studying whether the choice of colours in the visuals included in the IPCC Report affects the support for policies aimed at mitigating global warming. The results show that some colour schemes can affect understanding of climate visuals and participants’ support for a carbon tax. In the next two chapters I study the role of framing in shaping support for policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. In chapter 3, I show that when the number of Covid-19 related deaths is reported on a logarithmic scale people have a less accurate understanding of how the pandemic has developed, make less accurate predictions on its evolution, and have different policy preferences than those who are exposed to the same data on a linear scale. In my fourth chapter I study preferences for Covid-19 immunity passports for international travel and whether two nudges, used in isolation or together, foster support for their adoption. I find that both nudges increase the support for the passport and that their impact is stronger when they are used together. In my experiments I find that the level of worry about an issue influences behaviours and policy preferences, so I devote my fifth chapter to study how different concerns interact in people’s minds. I show that theories that were previously perceived to be mutually exclusive can coexist. I find that the relationship between the concern for the environment and the economy is often asymmetric: concerns for the economy typically reduce concerns for the environment, while concerns for the environment foster concerns about the economy. In the final chapter I present a theory model that builds on the findings of the previous papers. I introduce a two-period model of reference-dependent preferences where (behavioural) interventions are a signal agents receive between the periods. The signal causes a biased Bayesian updating that leads to different choices in the second period. I show that this can explain heterogeneity in treatment effects and hence that a single model of preferences can explain polarisation and convergence of opinions

Assessing the implementation progress of adaptation to climate change

2023 is set to be the warmest year on record. Extreme weather events are getting more severe and more frequent, making adaptation to climate change ever more important. Literature on climate adaptation has strongly increased in quantitative output, but only a fraction of it focuses on actual implementation and its effects. Little empirical evidence is available on whether we are adapting. This knowledge gap has been referred to as a ‘grand challenge’ of adaptation research (Berrang-Ford et al., 2019). To improve our understanding of global progress on adaptation, this thesis includes novel empirical accounts of the United Nations (UN) climate change negotiations through multi-year participant observation, examining the rule-setting process for disclosure of adaptation information and the decisions taken on climate adaptation since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015. This thesis also examines whether countries are tracking the implementation of their National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) and to what extent adaptation projects are implemented by the multilateral funds under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), namely the Adaptation Fund, the Global Environment Facility, and the Green Climate Fund. These evidence-based accounts are contrasted to assessments based on countries’ stated intentions which are shown to overestimate progress by up to a factor of four. This thesis also includes contributions to two global environmental assessments, the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Adaptation Gap Report of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). Its findings are highly policy relevant including in the context of the Global Goal on Adaptation and its framework. This thesis produced novel findings and generated two new datasets including an inventory of over 100 policy documents in more than ten languages. It makes significant contributions to the ’grand challenge' of better understanding global progress on adaptation