I provide evidence on the classical political economy hypothesis that private initiates for welfare transfers can substitute for public systems. In the decades following the first Industrial Revolution, as such political economy took on increasing influence, the Lancashire Cotton `Famine' marked a total disruption of Britain's largest industry. I make use of heterogeneous friendly society activity within the cotton industry to compare how recourse to the Poor Law as a last resort differed between manufacturing communities with varying extents of `self-help'. Estimates from a triple difference-in-differences framework suggest that these mutual worker insurance groups played a counter-intuitive role: places with above average society density had markedly greater demand for short-term outdoor relief.

We investigate the impact of cooperative creamery establishments in Ireland between 1901-1911 on a variety of socio-economic outcomes, testing the hypothesis that the development of local industry can lead to improved health and human capital outcomes.

What were the differential impacts of being endowed with local microfinance institutions on local populations around 1841? We compare census outcomes across local parishes in Ireland, where a stark West-East split in the reform and withdrawl of savings banks enables a natural experiment on the impacts of local financial institutions on outcomes such as health, literacy, and occupational composition.

How does the market for securitization function? Who are the major players and what are their action spaces? Who has which incentives? In an effort to answer such questions, we write a model of the UK securitization market. This project occupies its own website, where interested parties are able to play with assumptions and see how different players are impacted by efficiency and profitability implications.

I leverage recently digitised data on friendly societies in Britain between 1851 and 1861 in order to test the hypothesis that local mutual insurance schemes can lead to improved developmental outcomes at the local level. I do this by exploiting the variation timing of friendly society establishments as a continuous and staggered treatment in a difference-in-differences framework.

I leverage long-run estimates of emissions and industrial policy implpementations in order to study the regional trade-offs between income and air quality. This is motivated by a desire to test the political economy of climate change related policy: in a post-industrial economy such as the UK, how far is industrial decline good for national air quality accounting, but bad for those regions which have made inter-generational sacrifices?

In a world where one's attention seems increasingly hard to manage, its scaracity might imply an inherent economic value. This short paper provides a primer to a wider body of research I wish to conduct on how we can measure attention as a fundamental factor in production. I argue that whilst land, labour, and capital capture traditional embodied value in an intuitive and useful way, entreprise falls short of fully reflecting the non-tangiable pre-requisites of productive action: all of the entreprenaurial capacity in the world cannot substitute for a shortened attention span. I suggest that the UK, and perhaps most nations, face a crisis of attention which underlies further declines in a well documented and longer term stagnation in productivity.