Cerkez, Nicolas;
(2024)
Essays on Economic Development.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis consists of three chapters on political and economic attitudes in developing countries. Chapter 1 establishes a causal relationship between individuals' beliefs for what type of political system should govern their country and extreme weather events, such as droughts, in sub-Saharan Africa. The main finding is that exposure to a drought reduces the support for democracy. The chapter then explores the extent to which this weakening of democratic norms relates to exposure to non-democratic systems of governance, finding that the impact of droughts on the support for democracy only exists for individuals exposed to non-democratic systems of governance. Chapters 2 and 3 evaluate a partial population experiment tracking 15,000 households in Pakistan, where villages are randomly assigned to receive an intervention in the form of an unconditional cash or asset transfer. Chapter 2 goes beyond the evaluation of economic impacts to study whether households perceive economic changes and whether these changes shift redistributive attitudes. The chapter documents that impacts on perceptions are much more muted than the economic impacts of the intervention. The wedge between economic reality and perceptions then also means that redistributive attitudes remain inelastic to exposure to these interventions. Chapter 3 analyzes the aggregate impacts of the intervention in two ways. First, it studies how the transfers affect the supply of providers of various services at the village-level. Second, it analyzes how the transfers shape pro-market beliefs. At the village-level, it documents limited effects on the supply of providers. At the individual-level, it shows that both transfers alike positively impact the pro-market beliefs of beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries two years post intervention. These effects, however, fade out four years post intervention.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Essays on Economic Development |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Economics |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10195631 |
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