Beyond birth outcomes: the impacts of perinatal conditions on child development

This thesis investigates the impacts of perinatal conditions on children's health and development, focusing on two exposures in utero: ambient heat exposure and a temporary reduction in means-tested benefits. Existing research demonstrates that perinatal conditions can influence health at birth, as well as health, education, and employment in adulthood. However, less is known about how these processes manifest, if at all, in childhood. My thesis analyses the impacts of prenatal exposures on outcomes at birth and in childhood, through four empirical chapters. I use linked administrative data from the Northern Territory of Australia, which allows for longitudinal analysis. Chapter 2 investigates what drives seasonality in birth outcomes, identifying heat exposure as the primary driver. Chapter 3 examines which specific aspects of heat exposure matter most for health at birth. I find that prenatal exposure to both moderate and extreme heat affects newborns’ health. In Chapter 4, I find that prenatal exposure to extreme heat increases the risk of hospital admissions in early childhood and lowers test scores at ages 8, 10 and 12. In contrast to my findings in Chapter 3 on birth outcomes, I see little impact in childhood of moderate heat exposure. Chapter 5 analyses the impact of a reduction in means-tested benefits in pregnancy, finding that this led to increased hospital admissions in childhood. In contrast to the more general increase in admissions from heat exposure, the impact of the reduction in family income was driven by admissions for infections. Together, my analysis reveals that while the effects of various prenatal exposures may look similar at birth, their impacts in childhood are different. Furthermore, the effects I measure on health at birth do very little to explain or predict effects in childhood

Descriptive assumptions and normative justifications in social choice theory: ambiguity, strategic voting and measurement

Social choice theory provides fundamental tools for many sciences. Moreover, its models are applied and implemented in a remarkable range of diverse contexts to guide collective decision procedures. Understanding these models of collective decision-making and their normative verdicts poses an important challenge to philosophers of science, epistemologists, political philosophers, and philosophers of technology. This thesis is a collection of four papers that question the assumptions in social choice theory models at the intersection of individual decision-making and the design of collective decision mechanisms. The chapters, in particular, target the normative verdicts of these models by drawing on perspectives from the philosophy of science, political philosophy, and psychology. The central claims defended in the thesis are twofold. Firstly, the core claim is that abstracting away from individual decision-making does not always lead to greater generality but often makes the verdicts of social choice models inapplicable to the intended target systems. This observation draws on the fact that most target systems of social choice models involve individuals. Individuals are significant both in how they interact within a collective decision mechanism and as the object of normative consideration. Particular assumptions about individual decision-making, although often absent in a given social choice theory model itself, are needed for the model’s normative verdict to transfer to many target systems. Secondly, many models developed by social choice theory not only require scrutiny of their descriptive assumptions but also need an explication of the normative commitments underpinning them. Normative assumptions in social choice theory typically take the form of axioms or desiderata that are prima facie difficult to reject. However, the values underlying the acceptance of a given axiom can vary greatly, which, in turn, can significantly affect whether the model’s normative verdict successfully transfers to the intended target system

Directional high frequency trading in the Kyle-Back model

In traditional Kyle-Back models, the only source of information is a static or dynamic signal about the price of a risky asset received by the insider. We consider a more realistic version of the Kyle-Back model with a private and a public signal. The insider builds a linear combination of the public and private signals to make their valuation about the risky asset. The market maker uses the public signal and the total demand to set a linear pricing rule that is a martingale on their filtration. We show that any optimal strategy in equilibrium is such that the mispricing, the difference between the price process and the insider’s valuation, converges to zero almost surely in the insider’s probability measure. We introduce a particular linear admissible trading strategy to show the existence of equilibrium in the economy. Moreover, we use numerical analysis to show that the insider’s ex-ante expected profit relies on the public signal and how this setting is able to explain a high-frequency trading pattern at the end of the trading period

Rags to rags, riches to riches: essays on occupational mobility in England, 1851-1911

This thesis uses census-linked datasets, created from digitised full-count decennial censuses of England and Wales between 1851 and 1911, to estimate occupational mobility in Victorian and Edwardian England. The thesis is divided into three papers. Existing research in social mobility predominantly focus on the intergenerational aspect while largely ignoring another important channel for mobility — mobility over the life course. Using a linked sample of over 400,000 men, the first paper estimates the levels of life-course (intragenerational) mobility in England between 1851–1881 and 1881–1911. By regressing current occupational ranks on initial occupational ranks, this paper finds an intragenerational rank-rank correlation of between 0.61 to 0.68 over a 10-year period, and between 0.50 to 0.57 over a 30-year period. Low occupational mobility was mostly driven by the primary and secondary sectors, but new occupations in services and professions also appear to be relatively secure. Life-course mobility was limited for the Victorians and experienced by only a small minority working in tertiary sectors. England during this period appears to be far from an open society. The second paper uses a different and likewise newly constructed linked sample of between 67,000 and 160,000 father-son pairs in 1851–1911 to provide revised estimates of intergenerational occupational mobility in England. After correcting for classical measurement error using instrumental variables, I find that conventional estimates of intergenerational elasticities could severely underestimate the extent of father-son association in socioeconomic status. Instrumenting one measure of the father’s outcome with a second measure of the father’s outcome raises the intergenerational elasticities of occupational status from 0.4 to 0.6-0.7. Victorian England was therefore a society of limited social mobility. The implications of my results for long-run evolution and international comparisons of social mobility in England are discussed. The third paper explores spatial variations in intergenerational mobility in England at the end of the nineteenth century, using a census-linked dataset of between 160,000 to 600,000 father-son pairs observed between 1881 and 1911. The results show that there is already a north-south divide in terms of intergenerational mobility in late-Victorian England, using rank-based measures of relative mobility and absolute mobility. In addition, mobility patterns exhibit clear differences depending on migration history and origins. Migrants from the North are much more mobile than those that remained in the North and experience significant gains in occupational ranks from migration, while the same pattern is not observed for Southern migrants and non-migrants. The advantages of north-south migration hold even after accounting for selective migration using household fixed effects. Finally, there is also evidence that there was a ‘Great Gatsby curve’ in late-Victorian England, as places of higher occupational inequality were also places of lower social mobility

Social media and democratic deliberation

The internet continues to have a profound influence upon political communication. Have social media changed the language we use to talk about politics, made particular voices more prominent in online discussions, or even led people to turn away from democratic deliberation entirely? In three distinct papers, this thesis explores each of these questions in turn, making the following theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions. First, using a novel dataset of 4 million tweets, paper 1 shows how political elites in the United Kingdom have used increasingly emotive rhetoric over time on Twitter. I argue this changing rhetorical behaviour has been influenced by, and rewarded with, greater engagement. Paper 2 also employs new data, linking a nationally-representative survey of the UK population with Twitter accounts, to show that people who discuss politics on Twitter are more ideologically and affectively extreme than those who do not. These findings have important implications for understanding who we are most likely to hear in online political discussion, and for increasingly-polarised online political debate. Finally, in a pre-registered lab-in-the-field experiment on Facebook, I argue that people disengage from discussing contentious political issues in groups of people with contrasting opinions and beliefs. In conducting a real-world experiment which attempts to causally identify why people turn away from political discussion, this study represents a methodological advance on existing survey-based research, and understanding the key drivers of online self-censorship may help mitigate some of its most negative consequences. Overall, these findings contribute to our understanding of how social media is influencing the scope and tone of democratic debate

Optimisation for prophet inequalities

Prophet inequalities have been extensively studied within optimal stopping theory, in part for their applicability to many online decision-making processes. In this thesis, we explore the benefits of viewing prophet inequalities as optimisation problems. We present three main results. First, we study the classic single-choice prophet inequality problem through a resource augmentation lens. In this setting, the algorithm faces an additional number of online independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) bidders compared to the prophet. The optimal algorithm has a simple description as it sets carefully chosen thresholds T(j) for each incoming bidder j and accept a given value from the distribution if and only if it surpasses T(j). Our goal is to analyse the competition complexity, which relates to the number of extra resources required in order to approximate the benchmark by a given factor. Next, we generalise to arbitrary, independent distributions. Now, the metric asks for the smallest k such that the expected value of the online algorithm on k copies of the original instance is at least a (1−ε)-approximation to the expected offline optimum on a single copy. We show that block threshold algorithms, which set one threshold per copy, are optimal and give a tight bound of k = Θ(log(log1/ε)). This shows that block threshold algorithms approach the offline optimum doubly-exponentially fast. For single threshold algorithms, which set the same threshold throughout, we give a tight bound of k = Θ(log(1/ε)) establishing an exponential gap between block and single threshold algorithms. Finally, we move on to the i.i.d. k-selection prophet inequality problem, which is a different extension of the single choice setting in the case of i.i.d. distributions. At each time step, a decision is made to accept or reject the value, under the constraint of accepting at most k in total. Our work proposes an infinite-dimensional linear programming formulation that fully characterises the worst-case tight approximation ratio of the k-selection prophet inequality problem, complementing the recent semiinfinite linear programming general approach by Jiang et al. [EC 2023]. Notably, we introduce a nonlinear system of differential equations that generalises Hill and Kertz’s equation. For small k, we observe that this approach yields the best approximation ratios to date

Pharmaceutical patent examination in developing countries: lessons from Brazil

Since the enactment of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), almost every country in the world has introduced patent protection for pharmaceutical inventions. However, there is considerable variation in the implementation of policies that address developmental and public health challenges. There is a wide agreement that developing countries should implement preventive (ex ante) measures to strengthen patent examination and promote balance in the public and private incentives in the patent system instead of relying on corrective (ex post) measures to address the negative consequences of lax examination. This thesis draws lessons about flexibilities in patent policy from the Brazilian experience of implementing pharmaceutical patenting since conforming to TRIPS in the late 1990s. In 2018, Brazil started basing the examination in Brazil on reports published by other offices for applications covering the same invention, in a wide movement that seeks to simplify examination to expedite prosecution and reduce the backlog of pending applications. Chapter 2 shows that this has significantly increased the grant rate, and examiners tend to make fewer objections before issuing a grant. Combining these results with a comparison of grant rates with 14 other offices, the analysis concludes this approach has reduced the standard for granting patents in Brazil and produced more negative side effects than its intended goals. Brazil also abolished the dual examination system where the patent office and the health regulator both had to examine pharmaceutical applications from 2001 to 2021, with the changing arrangements. Analysing the many arrangements for this system over two decades, Chapter 3 shows how the entities converged to high patenting standards and raised the scrutiny of all patentability criteria, especially invention description, despite the intense conflict over each entity's jurisdiction. Therefore, the regulator’s non-binding opposition to strategic applications contributed significantly to examination in an almost symbiotic relationship. Lastly, Chapter 4 investigates the Brazilian government’s history of Hepatitis C drug procurement to assess the repercussions of these policies outside the patent office. Based on an understanding that the recommended treatments were equally effective and therefore great substitutes, the government shifted procurement to centralised tenders and induced competition by having originators of different drugs compete, regardless of each drug’s patent exclusivity status. Given the high patenting standard and originator’s commercial strategies, generic manufacturers could join those tenders, significantly boosting the government’s bargaining power. However, and tying together the three chapters, pressuring examiners to decide faster based on other patent offices’ reports and removing the dual examination system has led newer drugs to obtain patents more often, threatening the potential future benefits for the government of using this strategy of induced competition. This thesis shows that Brazil has successfully explored policy flexibilities to strengthen examination but should be wary of policies that simplify examination to expedite prosecution, given the importance of promoting the balanced stimuli in patenting that generate positive externalities for public health strategies

Governing competition in electricity markets by independent regulatory agency and government: a comparative analysis on Britain and Türkiye

This thesis examines the immediate relationships between independent regulatory agencies (IRAs), and governments in the British and Turkish electricity sectors in the post-delegation regulatory process. It analyses the impact of these relationships on the capacity of the IRAs to promote competition, which is their primary regulatory objective, and the core reason for their establishment. Both IRAs implemented three main regulatory policies to promote competition: inducing new entry, reducing the market share of the incumbents, and revising the trading arrangements in the electricity market. While various studies have explored institutional and formal/informal factors influencing IRAs' formal/informal independence and regulatory capacity, this thesis focuses on the role of government. It investigates how government influence affects the IRAs' capacity to achieve their regulatory objectives and whether the presence or absence of government support plays a determining role. This research adopts a comparative case study method, analysing 12 (twelve) cases across Britain and Türkiye. It analyses four sets of three cases based on the three main regulatory policies followed by the IRAs in pairs, comparing them in terms of the presence and absence of the government support. The comparison is grounded in similarities between sectoral policies, regulatory objectives, institutional endowments, and initial bargains between IRAs and governments. The thesis’s findings indicate that IRAs’ capacity to achieve their regulatory objectives depends on government support after delegation. While the IRAs struggle to maintain their independence and capacity through institutional endowments and strategic adjustments through various conflictual/collaborative relationships with the governments, the governments continue to determine regulatory decision-making, and the IRAs’ capacity through formal/informal mechanisms, even without changing/breaking the initial formal/institutional designs and bargains established at delegation. The research highlights that regulation remains inherently political, and delegation to IRAs does not ensure political certainty/stability, predictability, reliability, or credible commitment. Political will continues to shape the post-delegation regulatory process

Institutional change and the International Wheat Agreement. The establishment of a collusive equilibrium in the international wheat market

This doctoral thesis describes an institutional change in the international wheat market in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It follows the progression from an early attempt to rectify an over supplied market through an international commodity-control agreement, the 1933 International Wheat Agreement, to its final incarnation as the 1949 International Wheat Agreement, with the stated objective, “to assure supplies of wheat to importing countries and to assure markets to exporting countries at stable prices”. This was both the first and one of the most longstanding, international commodity agreements to be negotiated after WWII. This thesis asks the questions: who determines “the rules of the game” and how are they decided? The drafting and negotiation of this agreement was the endeavour of many hands: the governments of both wheat exporters and importers, international and domestic politicians and civil servants, international organisations and agencies, trade bodies, committees, councils and their secretariats, and a wide range of other experts. These negotiations took place over the course of 16 years, principally by conference or special sessions of the coordinating bodies. This thesis finds that it was the exogenous shock of the 1946 International Food Crisis, that followed World War II, when the market went from being plentifully supplied to scarcity, that was instrumental in affecting an institutional change or arrangemental innovation. The latter was designed by the economist, James Meade, as a multilateral sales and purchase agreement in which exporters guaranteed they would sell a fixed quantity of wheat at a ceiling price and importers guaranteed they would purchase a fixed quantity of wheat at a floor price. Whilst there was an elegant simplicity to Meade’s commitment mechanism, the coordinating body, the International Wheat Council, needed to work through many other details to be able to coordinate, operate and enforce the agreement

Framing it right? Normative representational standards for decision theory

Decision problems are non-exhaustive and selective representations that raise a number of philosophical issues. Framing effects are a case in point: Differentways of framing or representing a particular decision situation may lead to different choices, in violation of the Extensionality principle. Extensionality stipulates that different descriptions of the same outcome or option should lead to identical evaluations and choices. This dissertation examines what constitutes a correct representation of a decision situation for bounded agents. Taking a Moderate Humean perspective on rationality, I argue that the literature does not offer satisfactory standards of representation and fails to address a series of selection problems such as the ones raised by framing effects. Instead, I offer an instrumental account whereby agents represent decision situations in a way to achieve the ends they care about. I examine two interpretations of irrational framing effects — as Extensionality violation and as unstable evaluation. I assess both principles and reject these two interpretations. Instead, I introduce the notion of evaluatively equivalent decision situations, and argue that illegitimate framing effects are inconsistent choices across evaluatively equivalent decision situations. The phenomenon illustrates one of the problems of selection that arise from assessing the rationality of decision-theoretic representations. I offer an alternative instrumental account of representation based on differences that the agent cares about, acknowledging that decision problems are partial, constructed, and value-driven representations