UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Essays on Political Economy of Development in Latin America(2024) Angulo Santacruz, Juan Carlos; Battistin, Erich; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is composed of three applied economics essays in the intersection of development economics and political economy. The first provides an economic explanation to the increase in the intensity of conflict. The second focuses on the effects of presence of illegal activities on educational outcomes. The third analyzes the effect of mass migration on voting behavior and political preferences. Chapter 1 studies how crime may be an unintended consequence of local development. The surge in global demand for Mexican avocados, particularly from the United States, has led to increased production and revenue in avocado-producing municipalities of Mexico. I show that these external changes in avocado global consumption patterns have influenced conflict levels in Mexico. Combining geographical variations in avocado cultivation suitability and fluctuations in avocado demand over time, I find a notable rise in homicides among agricultural workers in municipalities that are well-suited for avocado production. I demonstrate that this rise in homicides is not explained by the increased presence of drug cartels but rather heightened competition between cartels for resources in municipalities where avocados are produced. These findings suggest that cartels vie for territorial control, diversifying their income sources, including the avocado industry, in response to their relatively limited influence over drug markets and routes. In Chapter 2, I turn my attention to the production of illegal crops and how it affects schooling decisions. I focus on the case of Colombian coca leaves, the main input to produce cocaine. The country's main strategy to eradicate coca crops was the fumigation of herbicide until 2015, when the practice was banned. I exploit a plausible exogenous variation in the probability of being sprayed and the temporal effects of the fumigation campaigns as an instrument for the presence of coca fields. This temporal variation along with the cross-sectional variation of the spraying campaigns lead to an instrumental variable difference-in-differences. I use data on coca presence, eradication missions, and school outcomes at the municipal level from 2012 to 2018 to test whether a change in the presence of coca crops has an effect on schooling decisions. I show that my setting does not meet all the assumptions of the traditional difference-in-differences strategy but it fits those of Fuzzy Difference-in-Differences. My empirical findings suggest that an increase in the area cultivated with coca crops increases the high-school dropout rate and it has no effect on the enrollment rate. I rule out the possibility that coca presence crowds out other legal crops. Taken together, these results suggest that high school-age individuals are leaving school to work on coca related activities. In Chapter 3, I revisit the question on whether political preferences of voters are molded by the presence of migrants. I exploit the unanticipated inflow to Colombia of Venezuelans fleeing their home country's political crisis in 2016 and the onset of economic collapse. I compare the results of the 2018 presidential campaign in Colombia across municipalities with similar trends in electoral outcomes between 2002 and 2014 but different presence of Venezuelan migrants on the verge of the 2018 campaign. To address the spatial sorting of migrants across these municipalities, I construct an instrumental variable based on the distance from the closest ports of entry. I find that an increase in the presence of migrants in the municipality yielded a polarized voting behavior. I show that these effects are explained by an increase in the electoral turnout, and that the fondness of voters for Colombia's 2016 Peace Agreement Plebiscite was an important determinant of their behavior, which has been overlooked in past empirical work.Item THE CONTRASTING EFFECTS OF SOCIAL CAPITAL ON NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE: EVIDENCE FROM PERU(2020) CORONADO-CASTELLANOS, PAVEL; Birnir, Johanna; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation develops a model to understand the joint role of social capital and nonviolent resistance campaigns to obtain concessions and changes in public goods provision in new democracies and in democracies with weak party systems. The factors that explain variation in effectiveness among nonviolent campaigns have been understudied. By adding social capital to the analysis, this dissertation contributes to filling this theoretical and empirical void. I use data from Perú to provide empirical support to my theory. In Chapter 2, a micro-level theory of nonviolent campaigns is developed. This theory argues that by making cooperation easier, social capital increases the levels of participation in nonviolent campaigns, thereby making concessions more likely. A novel result of this theory is that it shows that social capital is a key feature of social life that can help to generate disruptive collective actions but also to prevent the use of such disruptive means. Thus, under some circumstances, social capital can help to reduce the observed disruptive actions. Chapters 3 and 4 test the theoretical propositions derived in Chapter 2 using Peruvian data. Chapter 3 finds that social capital has a negative statistically significant effect on some types of nonviolent campaigns but positive effects on other types of nonviolent campaigns. Chapter 3 also provides evidence that peasant communities’ organizations in the first half of the 20th century were product of persistence effects of early colonial extractive institutions (i.e. the mining mita) with colonial revolts as important channels of persistence. Chapter 4 shows that nonviolent campaigns and social capital form a positive interactive relationship to affect the provision of public goods at the local level. Social capital makes more likely nonviolent campaign’s success. Chapter 5 summarizes the main conclusions of this dissertation.Item Raising Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Youth, Education, and Peacebuilding in the Post-war State(2018) Schneider, Mary Kate; Soltan, Karol; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1995, the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) ended the Bosnian War, a conflict fought along ethnic lines that claimed nearly 100,000 lives. The DPA created a new Bosnian government based on a power-sharing model that allocates political power according to the ethnic composition of the population. Although this arrangement has preserved an uneasy peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), it has also produced a political system in which ethnic politics prevail and social divisions are institutionally reinforced, particularly at the local level. Since 1995, institutions such as education have trended toward ‘separate but equal’ models. I argue that this poses a threat to the reconciliation process in BiH. Therefore, the question that this dissertation seeks to address is: what is the effect of ethnically divided education on the post-war generation of Bosnians? To answer this question, the dissertation traces the relationship between the extreme consociationalism first articulated at Dayton and the Bosnian education system, in which 14 education ministries—appointed through an entrenched local tradition of (ethnic) party patronage—have created the competing and often contradictory policies that currently govern Bosnian education. These policies include ethnically separating students into “two schools under one roof,” and adopting curricula and textbooks that favor one ethnic group over another. Because education is integral to identity formation, it stands to reason that education can therefore shape national identity as well as civic and social attitudes. Drawing from original survey data, focus groups, and interviews, I measure the attitudes of third- and fourth-year Bosnian high school students toward other ethnic groups, exploring whether or not there exists a pattern of intolerance that can be traced to school type. Although students across BiH reported largely tolerant attitudes toward other ethnic groups, patterns in the data also suggest that the notion of a codified Bosnian civic national identity is lacking. This lack of civic national identity is problematic because it means that not only is the post-war Bosnian state built upon a foundation of separateness rather than unity, but that little progress on national unity has been made in the twenty-two years since the DPA ended the war.Item The Ethnic Community: Urban Form, Peace, Conflict, and Violence in Urban India(2017) Adrianvala, Zubin; Baum, Howell S; Urban Studies and Planning; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What causes some cities to have higher levels of ethnic violence than others do? This research explores whether the urban form affects the level of ethnic violence in a city. Here, the term urban form refers to identifiable physical characteristics of a city: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. Contemporary understanding of the physical city, as a determinant of outcomes or even as a target in ethnic violence is very limited. Although ethnic conflict is a prominent global phenomenon, ethnic violence occurs in some narrow streets and crowded neighborhoods, but not others. In addition, social scientists have focused on the ethnicization of urban spaces, but its effect on levels of ethnic violence is largely unstudied. The central hypothesis is that cities where the urban form is “ethnicized” are more likely to experience violent ethnic conflict than cities where the urban form is largely shared, secular, or multi-ethnic. India is a rapidly urbanizing globalized country with much ethnic diversity, features typical of many post-colonial nations in the global Southeast. The study involved a simultaneous ethnographic, geographic, and spatial comparison of two Indian cities, Surat and Ahmedabad, and the Hindu-Muslim ethnic relations in those cities. Ahmedabad has experienced the most Hindu-Muslim violence of any Indian city (using number of violence-related deaths as a measure). In contrast, Surat has been peaceful. This disparity is especially interesting since Surat and Ahmedabad are part of the same Indian state with similar linguistic, political, and demographic features. These questions are addressed through an analysis of semi-structured interviews and cognitive mapping exercises. The study includes 66 respondents: 36 in Surat and 30 in Ahmedabad. The research concludes that the urban form is an important factor in ethnic conflict. This finding has several research and policy implications which include a shift in the way various practitioners operate in the urban context.Item ESSAYS ON PHARMACEUTICAL ADVERTISING(2015) DAI, WEJIA (DAISY); JIN, GINGER Z; SWEETING, ANDREW; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation focuses on two distinctive issues in pharmaceutical advertising. One on the matching choices between advertisers and advertising agencies, and the other on the effect of paid-link advertising on consumer search for online pharmacies. The goal of this dissertation is to empirically uncover the underlying economic mechanisms. Moreover, the analysis of matching problem provides new insights on the formation of vertical relationships between clients and professional service agencies and has implications for professional service market consolidations. And the examination of consumer searches for pharmaceuticals online sheds lights on consumers' concerns over quality and affordability of prescription drugs and draws attention on advertising regulation. In the first two chapters, I focus on two essential features of the market for professional services. One is the necessary mutual agreement in forming relationships, and the other is that a client perceives conflict when hiring the same service agency as his product market competitor. To incorporate these two features, I construct and estimate a two-sided matching model and allow agents' choices to depend on conflict. The results show that conflict does indeed reduce match surplus, and the reduction is greater for a pair of agents who have matched with each other in the previous period. Also, preserving previously formed matches yields much higher surplus than forming new matches. Based on these estimates, I conduct a counterfactual exercise to illustrate the effect of conflict on allocation of matches and another counterfactual exercise to illustrate the effect of a merger between advertising agencies on market equilibrium. In the third chapter, coauthored with Matthew Chesnes and Ginger Jin, we examine how government's sudden ban of foreign online pharmacies from paid search on Google and other search engines changes consumer searches for the banned websites. Using click-through data from comScore, we find that non-NABP-certified pharmacies receive fewer clicks after the ban, and this effect is heterogenous. In particular, pharmacies not certified by the NABP but certified by other sources, referred to as tier-B sites, experience a reduction in total clicks, and some of their lost paid clicks are replaced by organic clicks. These results have implications for the change in consumer search cost and health concern.Item THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR: A NEW INSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION OF THE SOCIAL ORDER AND MILITARY FACTIONS DURING THE SECOND REPUBLIC (1931-1939)(2014) La Parra Perez, Alvaro; Wallis, John J; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents a new view that emphasizes the role of intra-elite fights in understanding the failure to consolidate democracy during the Second Spanish Republic. The two traditional explanations have emphasized the action of "blocks" and often reflect the ideological tensions behind the interpretation of the Second Republic. Rather than seeing elites as blocks or focusing on ideological divisions, my view focuses on the heterogeneity of interests within elites and how the redistribution of political and economic rents during the Republic relates to the support or animosity of elite factions vis-à-vis the republican government. I apply my view to one specific Spanish elite -the Army- showing that, contrary to traditional interpretations, the military was a non-monolithic organization that was divided into different factions with conflicting interests. I explore the impact that factional military interests had on officers' chosen side (rebel or loyal) during the Spanish Civil War that ended the Republic. The econometric analysis uses a new data set that identifies officers' sides and uses information from military yearbooks to follow officers' individual histories between 1910 and 1936. The results confirm that the Army was a non-monolithic organization where factions behaved differently and responded to the impact from republican military reforms. Officers in favored corps and those that enjoyed greater promotions between 1931 and 1936 were more likely to support the republican regime. I also explore the effect of hierarchy on officers' choice. Results show that subordinates tended to follow the side chosen by their senior officers.Item Comparing Members of Interracial and Same-Race Clinical Couples: Conflict and Steps Toward Leaving the Relationship(2014) Young, Jennnifer Louise; Epstein, Norman B; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Past research on marital divorce rates indicates that interracial couples are more likely to divorce than same-race couples. There has been speculation that this higher rate of relationship dissolution stems from larger differences in partners' backgrounds, values, and culture. These differences may contribute to higher levels of conflict in interracial relationships. The present study compared conflict levels reported by members of interracial and same-race couples in a clinical sample, using secondary data from couples receiving treatment at the Center for Healthy Families, a clinic at the University of Maryland, College Park. Members of interracial couples reported higher overall conflict, and higher conflict in specific areas, as well as more steps taken toward leaving their relationships than those in same-race couples. Higher conflict mediated group differences in steps taken to leave the relationship. Constructive couple communication did not moderate the association between couple type and level of conflict.Item Essays on the impact of conflict and regulations on the private sector in developing countries(2013) Tran, Trang Thu; Alberini, Anna; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation explores the effect of ethnic conflict, or regulations meant to avoid ethnic strife, on firm employment and productivity in developing countries. The first chapter investigates the impact of the conflict in Cote d'Ivoire that began in 2000, using a census of all registered firms for the years 1998-2003. We use structural estimates of the production function and exploit spatial variations in conflict intensity to derive the cost of conflict on firms in terms of productivity loss. The results indicate that the conflict led to an average 16-23% drop in firm total factor productivity and the decline is 5-10 percentage point larger for foreign firms. These results are consistent with anecdotal evidence of attacks on and looting of foreigners and their businesses during the conflict. We also find evidence to support the hypothesis that firms responded by hiring less foreign workers. The second chapter studies affirmative action policies in Malaysia, focusing on a specific policy in the private sector. In particular, I examine the impact of a regulatory change which no longer requires foreign-owned manufacturers above a certain size to reserve 30% equity for (ethnic) Malay shareholders. I set up a theoretical model to show that the original policy results in a range of firms to stay inefficiently small. Removing this equity requirement for foreign firms leads to two effects: (i) foreign firms become less likely to be sized constrained, and (ii) their average size increases relatively to other firms. These predictions are supported by empirical evidence from difference-in-difference estimations, based on firm-level data from the Malaysia Productivity and Investment Climate Survey in 2002 and 2007. Finally, chapter three examines the relationship between labor standards and market power in imports in a cross-country context. The hypothesis is that since labor standard policies can act as a substitute for import tariffs, all else equal, bigger importers would have lower labor standards. IV estimation with geography-based instruments finds evidence consistent with theory. In general, countries with higher market shares in labor intensive imports tend to have weaker Free Association and Collective Bargaining rights. Moreover, the effect is stronger among GATT members.Item Cultural Contingencies of Mediation: Effectiveness of Mediation Styles in Intercultural Disputes(2012) Salmon, Elizabeth; Gelfand, Michele J.; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The difficulties of intercultural negotiations are well established, yet few studies have examined the factors that facilitate the successful resolution of these disputes. This research took a dynamic approach and examined the types of mediation tactics that are most effective in intercultural disputes given specific disputant characteristics. One-hundred and ten participants from the United States and Turkey negotiated a community-based dispute using a newly developed virtual lab. Dyads were randomly assigned to negotiate with a formulative computer mediator, a manipulative computer mediator, or in an unmediated control condition. As predicted, the results showed a significant interaction between manipulative mediation and dispute difficulty; manipulative mediation produced better objective and subjective outcomes in dyads that reported difficult disputing conditions than in dyads with favorable conditions. The results support the contingency approach using two new indicators of difficult conditions (generalized trust and cultural intelligence).Item The Role of Cultural Models of Self-Worth in Vicarious Experiences of Wrongdoing(2012) Lyons, Sarah Louise; Gelfand, Michele J; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research sought to understand why people from different cultures respond in fundamentally different ways to their own ingroup transgressions. We predicted that in face cultures, where self-worth is defined by one's reputation, ingroup transgressions would elicit vicarious shame and withdrawal tendencies, especially in public; in dignity cultures, however, where self-worth does not depend on reputation and justice is a focal concern, ingroup transgressions would elicit vicarious guilt and reparative behavior. In Study 1, participants responded to hypothetical ingroup transgressions. In Study 2, sorority and fraternity members recalled a time when a group member committed a wrongdoing. In Study 3, we simulated a real ingroup offense in the lab. We found partial support for our hypotheses in Study 1; face predicted distancing behavior, mediated by image-threat appraisals and shame, but only in public. The results in Studies 2 and 3 were less clear, and suggest evidence for motivated distortion.