This study rejects the conventional wisdom that the Chinese commune was an economic failure remedied by decollectivization. Instead, it argues that over time improvements in the institution's remuneration and agricultural research and extension systems began a rural development process that substantially increased agricultural output over a sustained period. It uses national and provincial level data and applies basic insights from both the classical and neoclassical economic traditions to show how changes made to the commune beginning in 1970 contributed to increased rural economic development and improved agricultural output.

The commune's coercive extraction of household resources financed agricultural capital accumulation and the development of technological innovations, which increased output, thus generating the agricultural surpluses needed to kick-start a long-run cycle of productive investment and sustained output growth. Although the commune system kept rural households living in austere - often subsistence-level - conditions, it succeeded in increasing rural development and the rate of technical innovation in agriculture, and, in turn, agricultural productivity per unit land and per unit labor. Simply put, it was under the commune that for the first time in history hundreds of millions of rural Chinese acquired the basic skills and capital necessary to get their foot on the first rung of the development ladder.

China's new leadership abandoned the commune for distinctly political reasons. An alliance of rightists and liberal reformers led by Deng Xiaoping destroyed the system to consolidate their newfound political power. The campaign to abandon the commune gained momentum throughout the late 1970s culminating with the system's gradual elimination between 1979 and 1983. Unified by anti-leftism and a desire to solidify their tenuous grip on power, Deng's coalition set out to boost rural household incomes, end Maoism, and modernize the military. Each of these three interrelated policy goals removed one "leg" of the commune's tripartite economic, political and military support structure: its mandate to extract household savings for capital investment, its cohesive collectivist ideology, and military political backing, respectively. Without these supports the system collapsed.

This dissertation asks: how do global value chains influence currency conflict? I argue that global value chain integration shifts the traditional exchange rate preferences of exporting firms away from a desire for a competitive, underval- ued exchange rate—the cornerstone of a currency war—, towards a more stable, equilibrium-level exchange rate. As firms increasingly rely on the cross-border exchange of intermediate inputs, they will tend to prefer exchange rate stability over competitiveness, thus alleviating currency conflict.

In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, a revolution in information technology drastically lowered communication costs within and across borders. Concurrent innovations in shipping and containerization and a surge in regional trade agree ments considerably lowered trade costs between countries. Reduced trade and communication costs led many firms in advanced economies to outsource parts of their production process to lower-wage countries with whom they had a trade agreement. This fragmentation of the production process into global value chains reshaped international trade, and with it, currency politics.

In a globalized economy where firms import many of the inputs that comprise a final exported good, an undervalued exchange rate no longer gives a boost to exports due to the increased cost of the imported inputs. Currency undervaluation is a costly venture by policymakers, which requires a trove of foreign exchange reserves, a high savings rate, and, in most cases, controls on international capital mobility. Global value chain (GVC) integration decreases the benefits of an undervalued currency beyond its cost, thus constraining governments from manipulating their currencies for competitive gain. Additionally, as countries move up the value chain and specialize in complex intermediate inputs—e.g., airplane parts—, concern over exchange rate stability exceeds interest in exchange rate competitiveness due to exchange-rate pass-through—the effect of an exchange rate movement on the price of a good. All else equal, further GVC integration will tend to increase firm preferences for exchange rate stability and weaken preferences for an undervalued exchange rate.

These arguments are tested with cross-sectional time-series data that cover 62 countries—accounting for over 80% of global trade—between 1995 and 2011. I exploit the richness of the trade data by measuring annual GVC participation at the country, country-partner, and country-sector levels of observation. In the first empirical chapters, I test the argument that GVC integration puts upward pressure on undervalued exchange rates towards their equilibrium level. Utilizing two distinct measures of currency misalignment, I show that the more integrated a country becomes in GVCs—specifically, the more foreign inputs as a share of gross exports—the weaker its commitment to an undervalued currency. Moreover, as a country moves up the value chain, producing highly-specialized inputs, there is a similar revaluation of the exchange rate. All else equal, GVC integration constrains governments from utilizing competitive exchange rate policies.

The third empirical chapter evaluates the policy implications of the argument and recommends inclusive trade measures to promote value chain integration. Fol- lowing the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution of the late 1980s, firms could transmit data and communicate across borders quicker than in previous decades. The missing elements to take advantage of the low-cost labor were lowered trade barriers and protections for foreign firms. The regional trade agreements between North and South that ballooned in the 1990s provided this critical component for GVC integration. I test this argument using annual GVC data at the country-partner level regressed on the presence of a regional trade agreement between partners, as well as the standard gravity model covariates that predict trade between countries—distance, economy size, and shared history. My empirical strategy includes a marginal structural model with inverse probability weights, ensuring that there is balance in the time-varying covariates across different treatment histories, and allowing me to make causal claims (albeit with strong assumptions) about the treatment effect of regional trade agreements. Indeed, I find that regional trade agreements are a highly significant predictor of GVC integration, increasing GVCs between countries by 17% and 57% as a share of gross exports. The ICT revolution was a necessary condition for the emergence of GVCs, but not sufficient. Policymakers should consider using regional trade agreements, which increases general welfare in all countries involved, as an inclusive measure to combat currency conflict.

In sum, my dissertation shows that global value chain integration alleviates currency conflict. As firms rely increasingly on the cross-border exchange of in- termediate inputs, and, as these firms move up the value chain to produce highly- specialized goods or services, their exchange rate preference will tend to move away from an undervalued exchange rate. A main determinant of GVC integration is the presence of a regional trade agreement between partner countries. The deep provisions found in these agreements protect firms investing in foreign markets and the removal of trade barriers allows for freer movement of inputs across borders. Together, I have shown an inclusive approach to combating currency conflict.

The dissertation studies the influence of military mass mobilization on the top income shares in the society, and therefore on inequality levels, in the United States and Europe over the last one hundred years. More precisely, one of the main results in this work shows that when the individual external fighting effort in a conflict with another country is high, thus during military mass mobilization, then the internal fighting efforts for appropriation or rent seeking between rich and the rest of the society decrease, and in turn the inequality levels inside the society are lower. On the contrary, during periods of professional army, thus when the individual external fighting effort is low, then inside the society the internal fighting efforts for appropriation or rent seeking between rich and the rest of the society increase, and in turn the inequality levels increase. These implications are shown using models of inequality and conflict that are based on contest success functions. The dissertation also includes statistical evidence in support of the main hypothesis of this work. Several statistical tests are presented that show that periods of conscription are correlated with low levels of the top 1 and top 10 percent income shares using data over the last one hundred years. The dissertation ends with an analysis of the cases considered from North America and Western Europe. A comparative analysis and difference in difference method is employed to distinguish between different periods and systems.

There is a simple and compelling logic to the thesis that economic interdependence decreases the risk of military conflict between nations. As an unconditional proposition, however, this does not seem to be the case. Countries that are economically integrated do sometimes wage war against each other. Yet, most articulations of the commercial peace theory base the causal mechanism on the economic costs of conflict on the aggregate national welfare. This is particularly problematic if one believes, as most international relations scholars do, that foreign policies are an elite-driven process rather than based on popular opinion.

My dissertation addresses the need for a clear and testable causal mechanism by which commercial exchanges have a pacific effect on bilateral relations. In order to do so, it focuses on those who gain the most from interstate economic exchanges. I argue that business must have an influential effect on the formulation of policy for economic interdependence to reduce interstate militarized disputes. Moreover, this condition must exist on both sides of a dyadic relationship in order to build the necessary trust that their shared economic prosperity will be prioritized when conflicts do occur. This argument is encapsulated in a two-level theory of the commercial peace that incorporates domestic politics into the interstate bargaining process.

I test this theory through a mixed method approach — (1) quantitatively examining the interaction of private sector size and bilateral trade on the likelihood of violent militarized disputes, and (2) two qualitative case studies tracing the process by which business exerts influence on security policy-making for the rival dyads of Colombia-Venezuela and China-Japan. The results establish the importance of economic elites in formulating foreign policy in conditioning the success of economic interdependence to reduce militarized conflicts.

The classic Stigler-Peltzman model, if extended to consider the effects of electoral systems, suggests (a) that majoritarian electoral systems should advantage consumers over producers and (b) that this effect will manifest itself in lower real prices. In an earlier paper, Rogowski and Kayser (AJPS, July 2002) demonstrated that, controlling for all other factors standardly adduced in the extensive “Law of One Price” literature, and for country size, the strongest form of majoritarianism, single member districts (SMD), predicted a ten percent drop in the real 1990 prices of the average OECD country. This cross-national effect survived a plethora of robustness checks and was not driven by any single case, including the United States.

We now extend that empirical analysis to panel data for twenty-three OECD countries over the period 1970-2000, taking advantage also of the numerous changes in electoral systems during that period (France, Italy, Japan, New Zealand). In a country fixed-effects specification (sustained by a joint test of significance on the country dummies), and particularly when missing data are addressed by multiple imputation, the electoral-system price effect is again confirmed as statistically and substantively significant. We suggest (a) that real price differences can serve as an important indicator of policy effects of various institutions and (b) that, given these results, any change in a country’s electoral system will have strong and predictable effects on the balance of consumer-producer power.

This three-paper dissertation is about the relationship between remittances and political institutions in developing countries and how institutions shape emigration flows. I build on the political economy, democratization, and international migration literatures to theorize the political consequences from remittances. Drawing on underutilized surveys and extant cross-national databases, I show that remittance inflows alter citizen preferences on redistribution as well as government spending patterns on health and educational outcomes. In addition, I find that institutional quality in migrant-sending countries shapes emigration lows in times of economic crisis. My findings add to established theories of government redistribution, which are largely based on wealthier, industrialized countries, and the nascent field on the political economy of remittances.

The first paper analyzes how remittance recipients view the role of the state and how citizen attitudes change due to fluctuations in remittance income. I use survey data from the most remittance-dependent countries in Latin America to see how preferences for redistribution changed during the course of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009. With the United States as the main source of remittances, the recession had ripple effects in Latin America. I find remittance receivers are more likely to favor redistribution policies following the economic crisis than before 2009.

The second paper analyzes the political effects of remittances at the country level. I use country-level data to show that the relationship between remittances and government spending is conditional on regime type. Autocratic regimes show greater changes in spending on educational and public health from rising remittances. On the other hand, democracies show mild relationships between remittances and spending. I find that institutions will influence the ways government spending responds to rising remittances.

The final paper argues that political institutions shape emigration flows conditional on economic performance. Using data from the American Community Surveys to measure Latin American migration into the United States, I find that countries with higher quality institutions will experience a brain drain when economic growth is low. I use the example of Venezuela in 2002-2003 when the country saw its intelligentsia emigrate. While economic performance is a strong factor explaining emigration flows, political institutions have the capacity to mitigate or exacerbate them. Together, these three essays show that remittances and migration flows have profound implications for domestic policy, state expenditures, and the consequences of institutional quality and economic crisis.

This dissertation studies the determinants of political institutions and their impact on economic development in various historical contexts. The first chapter asks: Why did the Catholic Church’s power decline earlier in Northwestern Europe than in the East and South? I argue that differential demand for collective security in the face of the possible invasion by the “infidels” was an important factor in the Church-state relations. Catholic states had to cooperate to achieve military success and, therefore, delegated legal and fiscal authorities to the Church. To measure the Church’s political power, I have assembled a novel dataset on appointments of bishops between 1198 and 1517. I find that in the dioceses located closer to the “infidels,” bishops were differentially more likely to be selected by the pope or cathedral chapters than by secular rulers.

The second chapter examines the economic origins of discrimination against Jewish entrepreneurs in the Russian Empire. Several changes in government policy between 1889 and 1894 freed large amounts of domestic private capital that now had to be reinvested in the equity market. I explore the relationship between anti-Jewish restrictions in the equity market, that began in 1890, and capital intensity of manufacturing industries. Using the RUSCORP database of all manufacturing corporations created in 1891–1902 and novel data on all Russian factories in 1890, I find a positive association between capital intensity and the probability of restrictions.

In the third and final chapter, I study the role of labor mobility restrictions, that existed under serfdom, in shaping economic development. In the Russian Empire, twenty-three million people, who were serfs in 1858 and were not allowed to move to cities, were freed by 1870. I develop a structural model of rural-urban migration incorporating restrictions on mobility, features of the countryside and cities, and the travel costs. I estimate this model using novel detailed data on peasants, cities, and railroads in 1811–1910. The estimated parameters suggest that construction of railroads was the single most important factor explaining rural-urban migration. This is likely because allocation of rural labor was not efficient historically, independently from the impact of serfdom.