Death or taxes? The political economy of sanitation expenditure in nineteenth-century Britain

<p>This thesis consists of three papers studying the relationship between democratic reform, expenditure on sanitation public goods and mortality in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period decisions over spending on critical public goods such as water supply and sewer systems were made by locally elected town councils, leading to extensive variation in the level of spending across the country. This dissertation uses new historical data to examine the political factors determining that variation, and the consequences for mortality rates.</p> <p>The first substantive chapter describes the spread of government sanitation expenditure, and analyzes the factors that determined towns' willingness to invest. The results show the importance of towns' financial constraints, both in terms of the available tax base and access to borrowing, in limiting the level of expenditure. This suggests that greater involvement by Westminster could have been very effective in expediting sanitary investment. There is little evidence, however, that democratic reform was an important driver of greater expenditure. </p> <p>Chapter 3 analyzes the effect of extending voting rights to the poor on government public goods spending. A simple model predicts that the rich and the poor will desire lower levels of public goods expenditure than the middle class, and so extensions of the right to vote to the poor will be associated with lower spending. This prediction is tested using plausibly exogenous variation in the extent of the franchise. The results strongly support the theoretical prediction: expenditure increased following relatively small extensions of the franchise, but fell once more than approximately 50% of the adult male population held the right to vote.</p> <p>Chapter 4 tests whether the sanitary expenditure was effective in combating the high mortality rates following the Industrial Revolution. The results show that increases in urban expenditure on sanitation-water supply, sewer systems and streets-was extremely effective in reducing mortality from cholera and diarrhea.</p>

Smooth sets for borel equivalence relations and the covering property for ��-ideals of compact sets

<p>This thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter we study the smooth sets with respect to a Borel equivalence realtion E on a Polish space X. The collection of smooth sets forms ��-ideal. We think of smooth sets as analogs of countable sets and we show that an analog of the perfect set theorem for ��¹₁ sets holds in the context of smooth sets. We also show that the collection of ��¹₁ smooth sets is ���¹₁ on the codes. The analogs of thin sets are called sparse sets. We prove that there is a largest ���¹₁ sparse set and we give a characterization of it. We show that in L there is a ���¹₁ sparse set which is not smooth. These results are analogs of the results known for the ideal of countable sets, but it remains open to determine if large cardinal axioms imply that ���¹₁ sparse sets are smooth. Some more specific results are proved for the case of a countable Borel equivalence relation. We also study I(E), the ��-ideal of closed E-smooth sets. Among other things we prove that E is smooth iff I(E) is Borel.</p> <p>In chapter 2 we study ��-ideals of compact sets. We are interested in the relationship between some descriptive set theoretic properties like thinness, strong calibration and the covering property. We also study products of ��-ideals from the same point of view. In chapter 3 we show that if a ��-ideal I has the covering property (which is an abstract version of the perfect set theorem for ��¹₁ sets), then there is a largest ���¹₁ set in I^int (i.e., every closed subset of it is in I). For ��-ideals on 2^�� we present a characterization of this set in a similar way as for C₁, the largest thin ���¹₁ set. As a corollary we get that if there are only countable many reals in L, then the covering property holds for ��¹₂ sets.</p>