This dissertation consists of three essays on public policy related to renewable energy, economic growth and tax policy. Each chapter is implemented with a different econometric method to investigate the policy question of interest. The first chapter studies the effect of renewa…
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Over the years, there has been discord or lack of agreement on the effect that natural resources have on economic growth and development. This study adopts output approach to investigate the effect that natural resources and institutions (Economic Freedom) have on economic growt…
This thesis consists of three chapters. The first two chapters offer game theoretical models for different linkages between political parties and the citizens: programmatic linkage and clientelistic linkage. Empirical implications of these models are discussed using real world d…
Industrial cluster literature has traditionally focused on work-place upgrading, clusters' ability to promote firm productivity, economic growth, and benefits that firm owners can or will give to workers. However, even in growing, productive clusters, such a work-place focus lea…
This dissertation explores governance in Pakistan through a study of the state-run electrical power sector. At both the micro and macro level, the Pakistani power sector provides a lens into the heart of the Pakistani state and its governance institutions. This ethnographic and …
Changing Chapultepec: Construction, Consumption, and Cultural Politics in a Mexico City Forest, 1934-1944 asks to whom does the forest belong? A study about how Chapultepec Forest in Mexico City became an emblematic space filled with didactic institutions, it argues that actors …
As a region, sub-Saharan Africa lags behind the rest of the world in both human development and economic growth. However, a portion of the development literature suggests that institutions may play a role in explaining, and perhaps changing, the outcomes that are observed in the…
Despite the ceaseless flood of publications on the origins of monotheism, and its alleged "refinement" in the exilic period (especially Deutero-Isaiah), attention to the varieties and functions of monotheistic discourse in the Persian/early Hellenistic period literature is scant…
This dissertation is a collection of three chapters all pertaining to institutional economics. In short, the field of institutional economics is an outgrowth of public economics, in the sense that in many cases the key institutions that frame economic decisionmaking are the prod…
Libya is a country in transition. By the official start date of the transition process on October 23, 2011, Libya was essentially devoid of the institutional capacities required to operate a functioning state in the traditional Weberian sense. The weak central state Qadhafi left…
This research focuses on business formation and small business strategy in the informal economy. More specifically, it addresses three essential questions related to unregistered firms: why they are created, how they achieve results, and where they locate. This research uses a v…
The importance of institutions in the management of social conflict is well established within the theoretical literature in political science. In the past decade, institutional explanations of trust and cooperation have focused on ways that rules and procedures may constrain op…
This study is an in-depth analysis of the case of post-civil war planning in Lebanon through the personal accounts of urban planners living and working there. Interviews with these planners engender a deeper understanding of the issues facing public participation on the ground i…
This study provides an agency-centered theoretical framework of institutional change at domestic level. It argues that institutional change should be understood as a conflictual process having two stages: initiation and bargaining. At the first stage, certain internal and extern…
Information problems often limit economic activity in less developed countries and it is well known that under these conditions, contracts and personal networks can facilitate market exchange. This dissertation investigates the role of market institutions and community organizat…
Central Asia is a region of tremendously diverse musical cultures, whose embedding in a complex Islamic-influenced, post-Soviet environment requires a broad and innovative scholarly approach. The case of Uzbekistan demands special attention to state-run institutions, because the…
Who prevails when American political leaders and military officers disagree? This study develops and tests two explanations drawn from prominent streams of civil-military relations thought. Revised Structural (RS) theory argues that changes in political, military, and societal a…
The first essay of the dissertation assesses the relationship between foreign financial aid and recipients' aggregate investment. Plagued by a difficult endogeneity problem, the literature has grappled with identifying instrumental variables that are uncorrelated with economic a…
This dissertation is about Uzbek national culture during the Soviet period through the mid-1990s. Based on 12 months of fieldwork, I conclude that Soviet understandings of culture remain hegemonic among Tashkent's cultural elites. This conclusion is puzzling, given that many Uzb…