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Chapter 1: Financial frictions amplify the portfolio balance effect of QE. A costly state verification friction increases output growth by between 0.13 - 0.41 percentage points and increases inflation between 6 - 18 basis points more than the model without the friction. I find that overall that the Federal Reserve’s second round of Large-Scale Asset Purchases (LSAPII) boosts output between 0.51% - 1.62%, which is the equivalent of a 83 - 278 basis point cut in the Federal Funds rate. Investors who arbitrage between long term government debt and corporate debt create a Portfolio Balance Channel in that the effects of QE spill over to the overall cost of corporate borrowing. This long term maturity preference of investors increases output growth by between 0.4 and 1.27% points, and inflation between 20 and 64 annualized basis points more than the model without this channel. Chapter 2: From 2000-2006 US house prices and mortgage credit grew substantially. Simultaneously, the relative cost of mortgage credit fell – particularly for privately securitized mortgages – suggesting the importance of credit supply factors. This chapter explores two candidate (credit supply) shocks: an increase in the inflow of global savings into the US, and innovations in the securitization of mortgage credit. I model a two-layered mortgage market. This generates a novel balance sheet effect: changes in aggregate mortgage credit quantity are linked to changes in mortgage spreads via the interaction of financially constrained commercial banks and mortgage securitizers. Innovation in securitization matches mortgage credit market dynamics by directly relaxing the securitizers’ financial constraint. Conversely, the inflow of global savings leads to a counter-factual increase of mortgage spreads through the balance sheet effect. Chapter 3: In this chapter I show that the existence of unregulated financial institutions (“shadow banks”) generates overborrowing (relative to the socially optimal level) in competitive equilibrium. This is because borrowers fail to internalize that an additional unit of borrowing, when the financial sector is well functioning, has adverse effects on the credit conditions they will face if a crisis arises. The social planner therefore has a motive to intervene to reduce borrowing in good times so as to limit the severity of a crisis. The discretionary planner’s optimal allocation can be decentralized either using borrower based instruments or via regulation of financial intermediaries. The optimal regulation of commercial banks is pro-cyclical.

This thesis contains four essays on the economics of organized crime and the empirical analysis of social networks. The first chapter provides a review of the recent economic literature on the impacts of organized crime on elections, and on public policies. Politicians indeed represent a major target for criminal organisations as they shape political decisions and policy implementation. The review discusses two central challenges characterising the literature, namely the measurement of organized crime and its potential endogeneity. The second chapter argues that higher electoral competition may reinforce the position of politically active criminal organizations, which can endorse politicians in exchange for favors. The paper formalizes this intuition and test it on Italian electoral data, using the 1991 electoral reform as an exogenous source of variation in electoral competition in one of the two branches of the Parliament. A series of triple-difference and differencein-differences estimates suggest that, after the reform, mafia-prone areas reported higher vote shares awarded to the party traditionally supported by criminal organizations and a larger dispersion of votes across candidates of the same party. The third chapter applies Network Analysis (NA) to study the interactions between criminal organisations and the wider society by analysing the connections between mafia members and the political, economic and social elites (e.g., politicians, public officials, policemen, entrepreneurs) in Sicily, the homeland of the Sicilian mafia. The analysis is based on a novel network dataset built by encoding information coming from the archive of the Italian Anti-mafia Commission, describing relationships of collusion and exchange of favours. So far, the application of NA has been limited to the relationships within criminal networks. This paper moves a step further as it also considers the interactions between mafia members and individuals belonging to the social, political and economic elites. The study analyses the "topological" role of mafia bosses, and shows that mafia bosses strategically position themselves in the social network as an interface between the criminal and the legitimate world. Finally, the fourth chapter studies peer effects in the consumption of cultural activities by exploiting a unique individual-level longitudinal dataset on daily museum visits made by cardholders in the metropolitan area of Turin, in Northern Italy, between 2012 and 2019. The underlying peers' structure is represented by a network in which cardholders are connected on the basis of information about the exact time and location of their visits.

Fundamental to Economics is an understanding of how individuals make decisions when constrained. Individuals must decide over what to consume and how much of it on a daily basis: from which goods to buy to how much to donate to a charity or how much time should be spent in leisure. At the root of all those decisions is the hypothesised utility function and the underlying preferences it represents. These preferences, their stability and their formation, are the focus of this thesis. The first two chapters take a structural choice-revealed preference approach to analyse social preferences. The third chapter seeks to understand when preferences begin to emerge and affect economic decision-making. Whilst these papers are disparate in their contexts and techniques, they are unified by a primary focus on the underlying role preferences play in economic decision-making. Chapter 1: This chapter examines how preferences depend on context. More specifically, it focuses on whether preferences over donation decisions to a not-for-profit remain stable as the visibility of a donation and the relevance of the not-for-profit changes. This chapter finds that preferences over donations are context-dependent, depending on the degree of anonymity of the not-for-profit. The data come from a laboratory experiment of a dictator game with a 3x2 treatment layout - on the first dimension the degree of visibility of the donation changes, and on the second dimension the relevance of the not-for-profit to the prospective donor changes. In contrast to most experimental papers, the observed data are not directly analysed; instead the data are used to partially-identify the underlying parameters of the participants. The impact of context on donation decisions is directly tested by measuring how the average estimated parameters shift as context changes. Increased donation visibility increases the emphasis agents place on both utility derived from altruism and utility from social image or pressure. This evidence is stronger when agents are assumed to be comparing their choices to their expectations of others' choices, rather than comparing choices to the more common 50-50 social norm. Chapter 2: In contrast to the first chapter, this chapter looks both at underlying preferences and how individuals learn over the preferences of others. Examining a sequence of one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma games, this chapter ultimately reveals individuals to be pessimistic in their beliefs over others and envious in their social preferences. The data in this chapter comes once again from the laboratory, but instead focuses on the finitely-repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. It adopts the same structural revealed-preference approach used in the first chapter to evaluate models of learning - from Bayesian updating to a pessimistic, asymmetric updating rule - and underlying preferences. In fitting with perceptions of Economics as the 'dismal science', it is evident that most individuals are pessimistic in their beliefs over the actions of others: they will negatively update beliefs over the likelihood of facing an agent who cooperates when they observe an agent who defects, but do not update beliefs positively in the face of cooperation. When their own underlying preferences are examined, it is evident that a combined model of inequality aversion and altruism rationalise most behaviour; somewhat counter-intuitively, though, those who cooperate the least are not, on average, the most self-interested but the most inequality-averse, suggesting that envy could be the primary driver of defection in the Prisoner's Dilemma game. Chapter 3: Despite deviating from the previous chapters substantially in context and techniques used, this chapter retains the same focus on underlying preferences. In this instance, however, the focus is on the emergence of underlying preferences and norms as a basis for economic decision-making. This chapter uses a unique dataset on labour choices made by children at KidZania London, which provides a real-world, closed economy for children. Over 130,000 children are observed making fully-incentivised labour decisions from as young as four on school visits to KidZania between 2015 and 2017. Using this data, augmented with data obtained from the Department of Education and the Office of National Statistics, the chapter answers the following research question: what drives economic decision-making during childhood and what patterns likely persist into adulthood? By observing labour market decisions made in a closed economy with all individuals facing an identical choice set, any divergent trends must be due to underlying norms and preferences. As this is the first time the data are being analysed, a series of stylised facts are first established: i) girls earn more than boys, ii) girls earn more by working longer, whereas boys earn more per minute on average, iii) girls opt for female-dominated occupations and boys for male-dominated occupations and iv) gendered patterns of behaviour are both early in onset (from age 4) and persistent in effect (with patterns observed through to age 14). These stylised findings are supported by modelling of occupational demand, suggesting that gendered preferences or norms are internalised from an early age and persistently drive economic decision-making from age four. The effect of socioeconomic status is weaker and less persistent than the effect of gender. Gendered preferences or norms are unique in both the strength of influence and their early onset.

The following document outlines the research projects that I have conducted so far and would like to undertake in the upcoming academic year. The goal is to answer the following overreaching research questions: What information is relevant to voters when it comes to getting information about malfeasance, and do voters update to 'informative' signals? There has been a recent number of studies focusing on the relationship between information and accountability. Most recently, EGAP's Metaketa project has shown that information tends to have little or no effect on party preferences or voting behaviour. Several explanations have been proposed to understand these findings. Furthermore, there is significant discrepancy between survey experiments and field experiments. This research project would seek to contribute to the field by providing empirical evidence on the different stages of the information chain. This thesis is structured as a three-papers work. Paper 1 is a field experiment conducted in cooperation with the Comptroller General Office (CGO) in Chile and the local NGO Chile Transparente during the municipal elections held in May 2021. This paper looks at whether voters update in response to information about malfeasance at their local government. The study was conducted just before the municipal elections in 116 out of 345 communes in Chile. Paper 2 focuses on the importance of informational architecture and how it affects the way citizens assess the reliability and trustworthiness of the information provided. A key component of Bayesian belief updating is that the signals should be informative and provide digestible quantitative information. This paper seeks to explore this premise by using an innovative methodological approach. I conducted an adaptive design experiment, which has rarely been implemented in the field of political science and compare its results with those of a conventional static experiment. Paper 3 is a methodological paper that aims to assess the reliability of a Randomised Item Response Technique (RIRT) to measure the prevalence of corrupt behaviour at the local level. This paper is mainly motivated to explore unobtrusive and relatively new indirect survey techniques to measure the prevalence of corrupt behaviour. The purpose of conducting this technique is to yield both population and individual-level measures of experienced-based corruption. I also provide evidence of bias-corrected estimates due to inattentiveness. For the viva, I report population and individual-level estimates obtained from the RIRT.

This PhD thesis consists of a short introduction followed by three papers. Each paper examines a different topic within the broad area of modern monetary and international macroeconomics. The first paper, Product Quality, Measured Inflation and Monetary Policy, written in collaboration with Alex Rodnyansky and Alejandro van der Ghote, fills a gap in the New Keynesian literature, which has largely ignored product quality adjustments. This paper proposes a tractable model of a New Keynesian (NK) economy where, in addition to the standard price and quantity channels, firms are able to endogenously adjust the quality of their products in response to shocks. This new model, featuring endogenous product quality changes subject to adjustment costs, nests the canonical New Keynesian model, which is frequently used as the starting point for policy analysis by central banks. In this framework, endogenous product quality choices imply a larger slope than the traditional NK Phillips curve as, for a positive productivity shock that lowers marginal costs, quality-adjusted prices decline because firms are simultaneously able to increase the quality of their products. Allowing firms to adjust product quality also amplifies the economy's response to productivity shocks. Following a positive productivity shock the natural real interest rate decreases by more as households look to smooth a larger increase in consumption, which is boosted by a rise in both the quantity and quality of the goods they consume. As a result, monetary policy responds by altering the nominal interest rate by more for a given productivity shock. Model misspecification of imperfectly observable quality adjustments matters more for macroeconomic stabilization than the mismeasurement of those adjustments. With no misperception of product quality by the monetary authority, the principles for optimal monetary policy are, nonetheless, unchanged as the product quality extensions to the canonical NK model preserve divine coincidence. My second PhD paper, The Impact of Large-Scale Asset Purchases on Wealth Inequality examines the relationship between monetary policy and household wealth inequality through changes in the size and composition of the central bank's balance sheet. I focus on the impact on household wealth inequality through the financial portfolio rebalancing channel of monetary policy transmission. I construct a theoretical model that has multiple assets (of differing liquidity), banks and heterogeneous agents, who experience idiosyncratic labor productivity shocks. This model is carefully calibrated to reproduce theoretical levels of wealth inequality which match those observed in the US Survey of Consumer Finances. I use the model to replicate the changes in the Federal Reserve's balance sheet which arose in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 financial crisis. This shows that an expansion of the central bank's balance sheet can materially alter the distribution of wealth, causing inequality to increase, while even extreme changes in the composition of the central bank's balance sheet (for example through maturity extension) have little effect. This arises as central bank purchases of longer term assets cause households to hold additional liquid financial wealth. Liquid financial assets are unevenly distributed in the population, and hence wealth inequality measures increase. When the model is calibrated to match the Federal Reserve's Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAPs) from 2008 until 2014, wealth inequality increases by 3.8%, as measured by the Gini coefficient, suggesting this channel leads to a significant increase in wealth inequality. The final PhD paper, The Rise of Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson, begins by documenting two stylised facts. Firstly, over the past 70 years the positive cross-country relationship between aggregate consumer prices and real output per capita has strengthened (i.e. a rise in the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson effect), as demonstrated using data from the Penn World Tables. Secondly, border frictions have increased over the same time frame, with international borders effectively becoming wider and an increasing failure of the Law of One Price (LOOP). I construct my own dataset of city-level relative prices using national sources across five continents to document the increasing failure of the LOOP. I then use a two-country endowment model with a domestic distribution services sector to construct an equilibrium failure of the LOOP. An increase in the relative size of the distribution services sector can simultaneously explain both stylized facts, while the standard explanation (a higher share of non-traded goods) may only explain the first. Furthermore, I extend the model to include production by monopolistically competitive firms, before solving and calibrating the model to closely replicate the two stylised facts.

This dissertation contributes to the literature on the politics of social assistance in Emerging Market Economies. It builds upon existing theoretical frameworks across several academic fields and offers empirical evidence on the influence of politics in the expansion and distribution of social assistance programs. Paper 1 provides a novel contribution to existing political explanations of social assistance expansion by theorizing and testing how electoral competition and contentious politics mediate each other's effect on social assistance spending on a global scale. The analysis finds this election-contention-nexus to influence social assistance spending in Middle-income countries in particular. Paper 2 offers a longitudinal analysis of the influence of the interaction of protests and electoral competition on social assistance in Turkey to uncover how the election-contention-nexus plays out at the national level. In addition, due to the available micro-data, it assesses the targeting of programs to characterize who receives benefits as a response to political factors. The results suggest that this co-occurrence can lead to higher levels of coverage of social assistance benefits among the poor in Turkey. Paper 3 introduces a framework to examine differences in the distributional logic used by governments across different social assistance types to provide a systematic understanding of political distribution of benefits that goes beyond aggregate spending or single flagship programs. The results suggest that the main benefit types that are used for political purposes in Turkey are meager cash and in-kind benefits that I classify as poverty mitigating social assistance. Further, the type of challenging party is found to have differential effects on the distribution of social assistance programs. Lastly, Paper 4 examines the role of federal politics in India to explain stark differences in unmet demand for the world's largest public works program. It finds that state-level party strategy and party alignment across levels of government are important factors that can explain unmet demand in the program. Further, it highlights that one benefit can be utilized by many political actors across levels of governments for different purposes. Surprisingly, district-level economic or political dynamics are not found to influence rationing rates of the public works program.

This thesis contains three papers studying the behavioural response of firms, households and investors in emerging economies to changes in expectations and uncertainty. The first paper investigates how economic agents change their consumption and investment behaviour to news about unanticipated changes to power sector plans by exploiting a novel dataset for the identification of news shocks in a vector- autoregression. While there is an immediate expectations-driven GDP response to a surprise capacity addition in OECD economies, this positive output effect is absent in developing and emerging countries. Firms and households in developing countries respond to failed power projects by immediately reducing investments and are also subjected to lower economic growth as a result relative to the pre-disappointment period. The second paper examines regulatory uncertainty as a barrier affecting infrastructure service investments and quality in Brazil. Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment for identification, it finds that electric utilities partially shielded from uncertainty significantly increase their irreversible investments in electricity distribution infrastructure. This response is qualitatively consistent with optimal behaviour as prescribed by real options theory. The third paper uses an autoregressive distributed lag model and finds that sovereign and corporate bond yields in emerging economies exhibit a long-run relationship that is not explained by economic conditions, firm fundamentals, bond properties, or external factors affecting emerging countries. The paper identifies perceived transfer risks by investors as the key channel. Investors' perceived transfer risks lead corporate and sovereign bond yields to co-move and generally converge. The introduction and conclusion of the thesis further explain common themes.

This article-based thesis aims to study political economy and governance in developing countries through the lens of crime, policing, and politics. Chapter 2 studies the impact of election timing on crime and the nature of law enforcement in a developing country known for electoral violence. Using administrative crime data from India in the 2008-2019 period, I undertake fixed effects and difference-in-differences analyses, and provide detailed and rigorous causal evidence for change in the nature of crime and the composition of policing effort as elections approach. I show that upcoming elections increase crimes against public order while reducing crimes against individuals, such as those related to bodily offences, property, or women. I suggest that these cycles are driven by changes in police behaviour - as elections approach, the police sharply increase preventive activity and the enforcement of crimes related to public order, and reduce the enforcement of other crimes. These changes are consistent both with the multitasking of bureaucrats as well as political incentives for re-election, and contribute to our understanding of the nature of crime, politics, and policing during elections. One in three elected representatives in the lower house of national and state legislatures in India is criminally accused. Using detailed and granular crime data from India, Chapter 3 estimates the impact of politicians with criminal backgrounds on local crime. On one hand, criminal politicians may be elected not despite of, but because of, their ability to control crime and get things done in an environment with weak rule of law. On the other hand, given their criminal backgrounds and political control over local police, criminal politicians may seek to consolidate their rent-seeking interests during their time in office. I use a close election regression dis- continuity design and find that having a criminal politician in office lowers weekly counts of serious crimes by 23.6%, even though the total number of complaints re- mains unchanged. This reduction in crime seems to be partly driven by reduced recording of crime. Further, this chapter suggests that the specific nature of a politician's criminal background matters for outcomes. Chapter 4 focuses on low participation of women in politics, and explores the impact of gender-specific polling stations on turnout. Using data from Pakistan, which has one of the lowest rates of female voter turnout in the world, we analyse the impact of creating separate-gender polling stations for males and females on voter turnout. The results show that separate gender polling stations reduce turnout for females by 2 percentage points on average, and for males by 1 percentage point on average. The results remain consistent after controlling for the role of resources, norms and mobility-related costs. This paper indicates that the policy of separate- gender polling stations does not alleviate gender-based voting constraints, and may in fact, worsen women's access to voting. Together, these three papers improve our understanding of crime during elections, criminal governance, and the participation of women in the electoral process, and contribute towards the literature in the fields of economics and political science.

This thesis contains three papers studying the consequences of labour and credit market frictions on the efficient allocation of resources and business cycle dynamics. A common theme of the three papers is that they focus on markets, where some market elements can be captured well with search frictions. The first paper estimates the extent to which aggregate job creation is driven by non-fundamental noise rather than fundamental news shocks employing maximum likelihood estimation of a DSGE model with search and matching in the labour market. The paper finds noise to play no role in aggregate job creation. Motivated by survey data on income growth expectations and labour market flow data, the second paper develops a mechanism where the information acquisition about idiosyncratic match quality is pro-cyclical. The mechanism, which is integrated into a directed search dynamic block recursive equilibrium model allows for a parsimonious explanation of observed survey data, labour market transition rates and finds counter-cyclical labour market mismatch. The third paper finds that the share of non-performing bank loans in total bank loans can be viewed as a mirror image of capital misallocation in many developed countries. The model developed from this observation shows that search frictions in used capital markets may drive non-performing, as will forbearance incentives. The paper estimates the extent to which changes in forbearance incentives and in the efficiency of used capital were responsible for variation in the share of non-performing loans. The introduction and conclusion of the thesis explain common themes and point to further applications of the content in the papers.

This thesis consists of four self-contained essays in applied microeconomics. The first exploits China's accession to the WTO to investigate the impact on Indian manufacturing firms of improved access to intermediate inputs, and finds a persistent quality-upgrading effect which ripples out across the production network. The second examines the impact of artificial intelligence on hiring and wages in the Indian service sector, using a novel dataset of 15 million online vacancy posts, and finds evidence of direct negative effects within incumbent firms. The third paper explores the impacts on developing countries of robot adoption at home and abroad, drawing on industry- and firm-level robot data from a wide range of countries, and outlines the groups most likely to benefit - and those most likely to lose out. Finally, the fourth paper investigates the sources of observed heterogeneity in VAT pass-through, using reforms across 14 Eurozone countries between 1999 and 2013, and finds important roles for product market regulation and product quality.

This thesis explores the impact of the renegotiation of trade agreements when there is a threat that trade barriers could increase. The thesis addresses the following questions: 1. What is the impact on firm exporting decisions of the trade policy uncertainty generated by the renegotiation of trade agreements? 2. What is the role of a customer base in export dynamics, and does an exporter customer base respond to the renegotiation of trade agreements? 3. How do industries restructure in response to changing economic competition driven by trade agreements? 4. What is the impact of exchange rate movements (driven by the renegotiation of a trade agreement) on exporter prices and quantities, and are the effects heterogeneous across firms? 5. How important are firms that trade goods internationally for the UK economy and how could these firms respond to the future renegotiation of trade agreements following Brexit? The second chapter (joint with Meredith Crowley and Lu Han) introduces the concept that the renegotiation of a trade agreement introduces uncertainty into the economic environment. In June 2016 the British electorate unexpectedly voted to leave the European Union, introducing a new era in which the UK and EU began to renegotiate the terms of the UK-EU trading relationship. We exploit this natural experiment to estimate the impact of uncertainty associated with trade agreement re-negotiation on the export participation decision of firms in the UK. Starting from a model of exporting under trade policy uncertainty, we derive testable predictions of firm entry into and exit from a foreign market under an uncertain `renegotiation regime'. Empirically, we develop measures of the trade policy uncertainty facing firms exporting from the UK to the EU after June 2016. Using the universe of UK export transactions at the firm and product level and cross-sectional variation in `threat point' tariffs, we estimate that entry in 2016 would have been 5.0% higher and exit 6.1% lower if firms exporting from the UK to the EU had not faced increased trade policy uncertainty after June 2016. In the third chapter (joint with Davide Rigo) we investigate the role of customer base in export market dynamics. First, we provide evidence that exporters grow in a foreign market by accumulating customer base. Second, we show that customer base can explain up to 30% of the growth in a destination market. Third, we explore potential mechanisms and find no evidence that exporters use customer specific price dynamics to attract new customers or expand existing customer relationships. Fourth, we explore how exporters adjust customer base in response to changes in market access by exploiting the trade policy uncertainty associated with the renegotiation of the UK-EU trade relationship and Sterling depreciation following the Brexit referendum. We show that French exporters in 2016-2017 were less likely to enter into exporting to the UK and incumbent exporters acquired a lower number of new buyers in the UK compared with the other European countries. Overall our results indicate that customer base is an important margin for export market growth and provides another margin that firms may adjust in response to changing market conditions. The fourth chapter shows that the rise in import competition from China following China's accession to the World Trade Organization contributed to the decline in UK manufacturing activity post 2000. A significant proportion of this decline in manufacturing activity is driven by firms switching their industrial activity out of manufacturing production and towards services. In particular, firms switch into business services such as research and development and wholesale and retail. This paper also shows that the speed of the transition across industries is fast, with the majority of the employment and turnover effects occurring in the first few years. This is primarily driven by the largest firms, as the switching effect on the number of firms is substantially smaller. The final chapter explores why the value of UK goods exports increased following depreciation of Sterling after the Brexit referendum. This paper shows that most of the response was initially driven by an increase in prices, although export quantities did also increase. The largest exporters were most responsive to the depreciation, increasing both quantities and prices more than smaller exporters. The paper also provides new facts on the importance of firms engaged in international trade in goods for the UK economy. Only 3% of UK firms are engaged in international trade in goods, yet these firms account for over 30% of employment and over 50% of UK turnover. The top 1% of goods exporters are pivotal in shaping UK export patterns as they account for 70% of exports, 5% of employment, and 12% of turnover.

This article-based dissertation uses administrative data to examine questions about inequality, taxation, and election administration that are important topics of study in public economics and political science. The thesis is composed of three original papers that explore different questions, explained below. Chapters 1 and 5 supplement this work by providing a brief introduction and conclusion respectively. In Chapter 2, I develop a new methodology to estimate income inequality for developing countries. The leading existing estimation technique explained in Alvaredo, Atkinson, Piketty, Saez and Zucman (2016) is ill-suited to conduct top income adjustment in low tax compliance countries. The new estimation technique addresses this limitation by matching corresponding income quantiles in survey and tax data to conduct top income adjustment. I implement both these methodologies using a combination of administrative data of all tax returns filed in Pakistan from 2008 to 2016, and nationally representative surveys. The results firstly show the existing technique breaks down in Pakistan's low tax compliance context while the method proposed by this paper produces more robust estimates. It secondly shows that income inequality in Pakistan remained high and stable from 2008 to 2016. In Chapter 3, I analyze the effectiveness of a tax broadening tool used in a low tax compliance, developing country context. The Board of Revenue in Pakistan regularly gave out extensions to the tax filing deadline under the assumption that time is a binding constraint to filing behavior. I conduct the analysis by using administrative data of all tax returns filed in Pakistan from 2007 to 2017 and combine this with data extracted from official government circulars containing details about deadline extensions. The results firstly show that deadline extensions are associated with individuals and unincorporated businesses delaying the filing of their tax returns by 88% and 70% of the extension duration respectively. Secondly, extensions reduce compliance of individuals and unincorporated businesses with the final extended deadline by 4.5 and 1.1 percentage points respectively. Finally, extensions do not encourage tax filing behavior and hence are ineffective in expanding the tax base. Chapter 4 explores the impact of gender-specific polling stations on turnout. Several countries, including Pakistan, have created separate polling stations for males and females with the aim of increasing female voter turnout. The paper uses an administrative dataset of the polling station-level results from Pakistan's recent general election in 2018 to estimate the impact of separate gender polling stations on voter turnout. The results show that separate gender polling stations reduce voter turnout for females by 2 percentage points on average, and for males by 1 percentage point on average. Together, these three articles use administrative data to contribute towards the existing literature in public economics and political science. Chapter 2 contributes towards the literature on income inequality, Chapter 3 towards tax enforcement, and Chapter 4 towards political participation. The thesis also shows how administrative data can be used to answer large policy-relevant questions.

This thesis contains three essays on household finance focusing on household consumption and savings decisions. The first paper studies household demand for flexibility in debt repayment. Based on evidence from a natural experiment, I find that few households apply for flexibility in debt repayment, although all households weakly prefer flexibility in a standard consumption- savings model. The paper studies how self-control problems and a desire for commitment, as well as inattention and inertia can explain observed household behavior. The second paper untangles reasons for the credit card debt puzzle describing the co-holding of high-cost debt and low-yield assets. I test existing theories for co-holding and provide evidence on the contribution to co-holding of intra-household financial pooling and of anchoring to minimum credit card payments. The final paper studies household heterogeneity in insuring against cohort-level earnings shocks using: (i) investment income flows; (ii) the tax-and-transfer-system; and (iii) credit markets. The insurance mechanisms vary by household socio-economic characteristics captured by housing tenure.

This thesis uses information theory to study policy questions in banking, finance, and industrial organization. It consists of four independent papers. The first paper, “Time Inconsistency in Stress Test Design”, shows that central banks face a time inconsistency problem when publishing bank stress test results. Before a stress test, they want to appear tough as the threat of letting banks fail the stress test incentivizes prudent behaviour. After the stress test, they want to act soft by releasing only partial information in order to reassure financial markets about bank health. The paper characterises an institutional design solution to this commitment problem: a social planner sets the framework within which the central bank communicates. We find that a hurdle rate framework, where all banks are judged to pass or fail relative to a common threshold, is optimal in many settings as it generates intermediate levels of both incentives and reassurance. We show that, in such a hurdle rate framework, stress tests become an informational contagion channel. The second paper proposes a model of imperfect competition in markets with selection and investigates whether imperfect competition mitigates the inefficiency which, in these markets, arises under perfect competition. Focusing on markets with advantageous selection, such as consumer credit markets, we find that no degree of competition can restore the first best efficient allocation. We discuss policy alternatives. The third paper shows that, in markets with adverse selection, tying contracts can prevent unravelling and thus have a substantial positive effect on welfare. We illustrate this effect for two insurance markets. When one characteristic (such as life-expectancy) is hidden information and causes agents to have high expected cost for one product (life insurance) but low expected cost for another (pension annuity), then for tying contracts cost differences partially cancel out. This can prevent unravelling. In the fourth paper, which is joined work, we build on a field experiment, find that some agents increase effort when it becomes more costly, and rationalize this in a signalling model. In the field setting, agents also choose whether to truthfully disclose their effort. The data on this form of strategic communication adds further support to the interpretation that effort choices are driven by signalling motives.

This thesis comprises three papers within the field of natural resource economics in developing countries. In broad terms, this thesis investigates the challenges and opportunities surrounding the macroeconomic management of natural resource revenues in developing economies. It is a mix of theoretical and empirical work covering three distinct but related topics. The first paper, titled "Commodity price shocks, growth and structural transformation in low-income countries", is an empirical investigation of the macroeconomic response of resource-rich, low-income countries to movements in commodity prices. A panel-VAR approach is used to estimate both the dynamic and structural macroeconomic response to global commodity price shocks. The results point to small, but positive, growth and investment responses to commodity price booms. I also find evidence of significant transformation of the sectoral value-added shares in these economies following price shocks, and present evidence of a Dutch disease mechanism at work. The second paper, titled "Surfing a wave of economic growth", investigates whether the geographic determinants of growth extend to natural amenities. It combines data on spatial and temporal variation in the quality of over 5,000 surf breaks globally with data on local economic performance, proxied by night-time lights. The findings document a strong association between natural amenity quality and local economic development. Economic activity grows faster near good surf breaks; following the discovery of new breaks, or the technology needed to ride them; and during El Ni˜no events that generate high-quality waves. The effects are concentrated in nearby towns and emerging economies, and population changes are consistent with tourism. The third paper, titled "Pricing sovereign debt in resource-rich economies", investigates the link between commodity price movements and risk premiums in resource-dependent, developing economies. I develop a stochastic general equilibrium model of a resource-rich economy with sovereign debt and endogenous default risk. I show that the bond price is decreasing in the level of indebtedness and negatively correlated with the oil price. The model can explain a large proportion of the business cycle fluctuations in interest rate spreads in resource-dependent, developing economies. Higher risk-aversion, more impatience, larger oil shares and a stronger correlation between domestic output and oil price shocks all help to explain the key macroeconomic co-movements in these settings.

This thesis includes three essays exploring some economic implications of queueing. A preliminary chapter introducing useful results from the literature which help contextualize the original research in the thesis is presented first. This introductory chapter starts by surveying queueing results from probability theory and operations research. Then it covers a few seminal papers on strategic queueing, mostly but not exclusively from the economics literature. These cover issues of individual and social welfare in the context of First Come First Served (FCFS) and Equitable Processor Sharing (EPS) queues, with one or multiple servers, as well as a discussion of strategic interactions surrounding queue cutting. Then an overview of some important papers on the impact of queueing on competitive behaviour, mostly Industrial Organization economists, is presented. The first original chapter presents a model for the endogenous determination of the number of queues in an M/M/2 system. Customers arriving at a system where two customers are being served play a game, choosing between two parallel queues or one single queue. Subgame perfect equilibria are obtained, varying with customer characteristics and game specifications. With risk neutrality and when jockeying is not permitted, a single queue is an equilibrium, as is two queues. With risk neutrality and jockeying allowed, there is a unique two queue equilibrium. With risk aversion and no jockeying, there is a unique single queue equilibrium, and with risk aversion and jockeying, the equilibrium depends on the magnitude of risk aversion. The second chapter analyses the individual decisions taken by consumers when deciding whether to join an M/M/1 queue where a subset of customers who interact repeatedly can both cut the queue and be overtaken once they join, by-passing occasional users. This is shown to be an equilibrium in repeated games for sufficiently patient customers. The expected sojourn time for customers under this discipline is described as a solution of a system of difference equations, and this is then used to obtain a threshold joining strategy for arrivals, which is independent of the number of regular customers in the queue, as regulars form a sub-queue under the LCFS discipline. Numerical methods are then employed to contrast sojourn times and thresholds with the equilibrium for a strict First Come First Served queueing discipline, and with the socially optimal joining rule. Finally, the third chapter describes a duopoly market for healthcare where one of the two providers is publicly owned and charges a price of zero, while the other sets a price so as to maximize its profit. Both providers are subject to congestion in the form of an M/M/1 queue, and they serve patient-customers with randomly distributed unit costs of time. Consumer demand (as market share) for both providers is obtained and described with its full complement of comparative statics. The private provider’s pricing decision is explored, and equilibrium existence is proven. Social welfare functions are described and the welfare maximizing condition obtained. Numerical simulations with uniform and Kumaraswamy distributions are performed for several parameter values, showcasing the pricing provider’s decision and its relationship with social welfare.

This thesis takes three different perspectives, using theoretical and experimental techniques, on time-inconsistent preferences and how the existence of multiple selves can affect both consumer behaviour and policy design. Across domains such as retirement saving, health, and educational achievement, intertemporal choice presents a challenge for both individuals and policymakers. The first paper, 'Choosing When to Nudge: Designing Behavioural Policy around Decision-Making Costs,' considers how behavioural policy, which has proven increasingly popular with policymakers, affects welfare. I find that for present-biased consumers, behavioural policies help some consumers but can inefficiently discourage others from optimizing. Such policies therefore have an ambiguous effect on welfare, and similar to traditional policies, can impose equity-efficiency tradeoffs. Monopolies may increase welfare given their incentive to simplify consumer decisions instead of exploit switching costs. The second paper, 'Virtue and Vice with Endogenous Preferences,' considers behaviour when preferences are affected by consumer decisions. I introduce agents whose temptation to consume in the present is affected by how much they choose to save for the future. I find that differences between agents can trap them in divergent paths of self-improvement -- saving more, they value the future more, making saving optimal -- or binging -- consuming more makes them indifferent to future costs, making consumption optimal. At the extreme, it is frequently an optimum for a consumer to consume their entire wealth. The final paper, 'Bet You Can't Eat Just One: Consumption Complementarity and 'Self'-Control' considers an intrapersonal game between a moderate cold self and a hot self that wants to indulge. In equilibrium, sophisticated selves best respond to each other's behaviour: the cold self over-abstains and the hot self over-indulges to avoid inducing the other state. I test these ideas in the lab, and find that subjects on a diet who were induced to consume a piece of chocolate before the experiment indulge more in chocolate during the experiment, even when the initial indulgence was imposed by the experimenter. Eating a piece of chocolate, this suggests, can induce a period during which chocolate is more appealing.

Chapter 1 - The Agricultural Exodus in the Philippines: Are Wage Differentials Driving the Process? Abstract: Lagging labor reallocations outside agriculture amid sustained low agricultural productivity have been a key feature in the Philippines over the past 15 years. An analysis of the labor adjustments in and out of agriculture shows that a variety of factors have influenced this process. We find that the widening of wage differentials with non-agricultural sectors, improvements in labor market efficiency, and better transport infrastructure are largely associated with growing outflows of labor from agriculture, whilst the lack of post-primary education and the presence of agricultural clusters hinder such outflows. In contrast to the traditional view that agricultural employment outflows are largely driven by productivity differences and wage differentials, our results emphasize the roles of education and transport infrastructure in facilitating labor reallocations from agriculture to non-agriculture. Chapter 2 - A Big Data Approach to Cargo Type Prediction and Its Implications for Oil Trade Estimation Abstract: To estimate global crude oil trade flows, current research either considers only crude oil tankers, or simply applies external information to distinguish between crude and refined product oil cargoes transported by coated product tankers; these limitations often reduce an estimation's accuracy or compromise replicability. Our methodology directly addresses these issues by applying the random forest (RF) ensemble learning technique to Automatic Identification System (AIS) data in order to predict the cargo types of coated product tankers. By leveraging domain knowledge, we construct a set of unique input variables for the RF model, and use its predictions to quantify the global crude oil trade in a more accurate manner. Our estimation shows that coated product tankers were responsible for approximately 8% of global seaborne crude oil trade from 2017-2020. Further, unanticipated variations in the crude oil volume carried by these tankers are consistent with several major historical oil trade disruptions. Our study further extends current applications of AIS data in the domains of operations management and maritime transportation, and facilitates the exploration of the more minute characteristics of oil transportation. The resulting shipping dataset and associated decomposition strategy also enable relevant stakeholders to quickly identify emerging trade flow risks and adapt more effectively. Chapter 3 - The Congestion Effect of Oil Transportation and Its Trade Implications Abstract: This paper uses a unique dataset, encompassing the entire product tanker fleet from 2017-2020, to study congestion in oil transportation markets. From this we establish three novel facts: (1) congestion significantly reduces tankers' contracting probability; (2) tankers switch frequently between markets; and, (3) oil trade shocks propagate in the economy through a transportation network. We develop a novel search and matching model by incorporating these facts with the interactions between oil exporters, tankers, and a final good producer. We show that shipping market congestion attenuates over one third of the volatility in oil trade and final good production, while increasing price fluctuations by more than tenfold. We also show that the endogenous adjustment of the oil transportation network and the resulting congestion effect are almost irrelevant for aggregate fluctuations; it is the exogenous oil trade shocks that generate large fluctuations.

The primary focus of this thesis is to investigate the impacts of tax reform, energy consumption and financial development on the growth and efficiency of the Thai economy. There are three main objectives, which are (i) to evaluate the impacts of reforms in value added tax (VAT) and corporate income tax (CIT) on the welfare and reallocation of resources across production sectors, (ii) to assess the impacts of personal income tax (PIT) reform on growth of production sectors and redistribution of income across households, and (iii) to measure impacts of financial development on growth and energy consumption and to re-examine the relationship between energy consumption, financial development and growth. These three chapters aim to contribute to our understanding of the Thai economy. The analysis is divided into three main parts to meet the objectives. A static computable general equilibrium is used to study the impact of VAT and CIT in Thailand in first part. The analysis focuses on the change of VAT and CIT rates because these taxes are the first two biggest source of government revenue. In addition, there is no systematic study on such impacts in Thai context before. Interestingly, the changes in tax rates reveal contrasting results in term of the net welfare to households. While an increase in the VAT rate from the current level, 7 percent, generates higher net welfare to society, a reduction of the CIT rate from 30 percent to the lower end of the international range, 20 percent, is a more preferable policy on the basis of economy-wide welfare analysis. For the efficiency in reallocation of scarce resources, we study the impacts of these tax reforms on employment, capital, output, supply and price for each sector of the economy. Most positive impacts from reductions in VAT and CIT rates occur in the agriculture sector, textile sector and mining and quarrying sector as these reduce cost of inputs to producers. On the other hand, the paper industries and printing sector and trade and services sector show a negative impact that might have been protected due to higher taxes in the base scenario. In examining the second objective, the dynamic computable general equilibrium approach is applied in order to evaluate the impacts of changes in personal income tax (PIT) rates on growth and redistribution for 25 periods of the Thai economy starting in 2011 using the latest Input-Output Table for the micro-consistent dataset. This study emphasises the impact of a reduction of PIT rate because this is the latest tax change in Thailand and any change in this tax rate will have a different distribution affect for households in each income threshold. The results show that a reduction in PIT rate is helpful in decreasing disparity in the distribution of income and consumption in both the short and long-terms in Thailand. In particular, this tax policy benefited the poorest households throughout the study period, while the levels of income and consumption of the richest households declined, although the magnitude of changes are smaller from time to time. In addition, this PIT reform increases output, employment and capital stock in every sector, which results in a rise in all macroeconomic variables, especially the levels of investment and GDP. Under balanced budget assumption, the findings report that the drop in PIT revenue can be fully compensated by an increase in revenue from other taxes in a growing economy. The third part of this thesis focuses on the third objective by utilising time series data with autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and the Toda-Yamamoto approach to investigate the long-run relationship and the direction of causality between energy consumption, financial development and economic growth. The findings reveal positive and significant short-term and long-term effects of energy consumption and gross fixed capital formation on economic growth, while population growth has negative impact on economic growth. Notably, the ARDL result report positive but insignificant impact of financial development on economic growth. Meanwhile, the Toda-Yamamoto causality test indicates a unidirectional causality running from economic growth to energy consumption. This finding supports the conservation hypothesis and implies that energy conservation policy can be implemented with little or no adverse effect on economic growth. In addition, the causality test reveals a unidirectional causality running from gross fixed capital formation and population growth to energy consumption, a unidirectional causality running from gross fixed capital formation and population growth to GDP. On the other hand, the test indicates the absence of causal relationship between financial development and energy consumption, and between financial development and economic growth thus indicating that these variables evolve independent of each other. Above all, the findings indicate that tax reform and energy consumption play crucial roles in the growth of the Thai economy. These findings will hopefully encourage policymakers to carefully conduct policies related to taxation and energy. For instance, any tax policies proposed should not add an excess burden to taxpayers and potentially disturb the growth of consumption, production, trade, investment and saving. Regarding energy policy, the findings imply that the policymakers can implement a strong energy conservation policy to households and the business sectors without compromising economic growth. This can enable Thailand to become a low carbon society with inclusive growth as stated in the Thailand 4.0 policy and the 20-year National Strategic Plan. This study contributes to the existing literature in three aspects. First, this study is the first study that analyses the economy-wide impacts of changes in VAT and CIT rates on the allocation of labour and capital inputs, on output and supply as well as on prices and rental rates across sectors and on the levels of households' utility and public welfare in Thailand. Second, this study is the first study that presents the magnitude of the economic impacts from tax reforms taking account of complicated economy-wide income and substitution effects over 25 years of the Thai economy. Third, unlike the existing and growing literature on the energy-growth nexus, this study contributes to the literature in this topic by incorporating financial development in the production model and focus on only in the context of the Thai economy. The analytical framework of this study also allows us to investigate the presence of energy-led growth and finance-led growth hypotheses in Thailand.

Market forces alone will likely provide insufficient incentives for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement; policies are thus playing a key role in accelerating this transition. As the energy sector is responsible for around two thirds of global emissions, understanding the effectiveness of existing and novel policies for the development and deployment of climate change mitigation technologies is critical. This thesis is oriented along three key energy-related challenges: First, how can industrialised countries develop and spread novel low-carbon technologies? To that end, we develop a new approach to trace the development of scientific articles into patented technologies, relying on machine learning, various data science procedures, and econometrics (Chapter 2). With this approach, we then show – using data from 102,301 scientific publications on biofuels, li-ion batteries, solar PV, and wind energy – that open access scientific articles (i.e., those made available free of cost) are more likely to be used in patents (Chapter 3). Moreover, we demonstrate that geographical proximity between scientists and inventors and content similarity between the scientific publication and the patent reduce the diffusion time between the publication of the paper and the patent (Chapter 4). We thereby shed light on the geographic and semantic characteristics of knowledge spillovers. Second, we investigate how industrialising countries can localise a greater part of the value chain in clean energy technologies to meet economic and environmental goals? We analyse the factors that lead to the eventual deployment of these technologies in developing and emerging economies. Using detailed country-level data on two emerging economies, South Africa (Chapter 5) and India (Chapter 6), we provide the first empirical assessment of the short-term cost and benefits of local content requirements in renewable energy auctions, using a credible counterfactual. Third, we also investigate: how can developing countries crowd in financing for renewable energy? We provide evidence on the design and socioeconomic impacts of an internationally supported renewable energy deployment scheme in Uganda (Chapter 7) to demonstrate that de-risking policies to crowd in private sector investment are a promising alternative to current schemes.

This thesis presents three empirical analyses on different aspects of the provision of long term care (LTC), in the paid and unpaid settings, to older adults in Scotland. It contributes to the academic literature by deepening our understanding in three interrelated areas. Firstly, it explores variation in the provision of Free Personal Care (FPC) across Scottish local authorities, in order to establish whether or not FPC provision matches the need of the population. The analysis suggests that there are significant differences in FPC provision, even after accounting for personal care need. This raises equity concerns, suggesting that older Scots might be more or less likely to receive FPC, depending on which local authority they reside. Secondly, it investigates the interaction between paid care and unpaid care, to understand how unpaid carers influence older people's use of FPC. In particular, it aims to establish whether or not unpaid carers substitute or complement FPC. The paper finds that individuals who have an unpaid carer receive around one hour and a quarter more FPC each week. This raises concerns for the pressure unpaid carers might have on FPC resources and for individuals without unpaid carers, who might not be getting the formal help that they need. Lastly, it focuses on unpaid carers themselves and explores whether or not providing care has an impact on their Standard of Living (SoL). Specifically, it estimates the monetary amount an unpaid carer would need to be compensated by in order to reach the same SoL as a non-carer. In doing so, it offers evidence for the extent to which the current Carers Allowance is sufficient in compensating them for the material impact of their care giving duties. The results suggest that unpaid carers have a significantly lower SoL compared to non-carers and demonstrate that the Carers Allowance falls considerably short of compensating unpaid carers for the loss in SoL they experience due to caring.

This thesis is made of three chapters. In Chapter 1 I investigate some of the potential effects of the interaction between minimum wages and job frictions on labour market outcomes in the UK. In a random search model with wage-posting and productivity dispersion across firms, under certain conditions, an increase in the minimum wage has stronger effects on separations between firms and workers facing relatively higher frictions than on separations between firms and workers facing relatively lower frictions. In this chapter, I test this prediction within two separate empirical settings, using two sources of UK data. I find some evidence that employment transitions of "high-friction" workers respond more strongly relative to the "low-friction" group's. In Chapter 2 I analyse voting behaviour of US House Democrats on two separate bills aimed at permanently repealing or reforming the estate tax. Existing analyses of politicians' voting behaviour are consistent with a framework in which voting decisions result from the competing influences of politicians' own ideology and interests, special interests, and the interests of their constituents. Recent analyses of roll-call votes in the US Congress suggest that local interests are more likely to influence political decisions when the issues at hand are prominent and when the stakes associated with them are clear. Making use of data on representatives' wealth and personal characteristics, I am able to assess whether their private interests influence their voting behaviour. Further, I use data on campaign contributions and advertising, characteristics of electoral constituents, and measures of politicians' ideology. My results confirm the predictive power of ideology and campaign contributions found elsewhere in the literature. I am not able to find clear evidence that local interests had an influence on voting behaviour. Finally, I find no evidence that politicians' own wealth had an influence on their voting behaviour. Chapter 3 is co-authored with Brian Bell and John Van Reenen. In this paper, we investigate whether moving to relative performance contracts has improved the alignment between CEO pay and performance. To address this, we use an original dataset on CEO contracts for almost 500 publicly listed UK companies. We find that pay responds more strongly to increases in firm performance than to decreases, and that this asymmetry is present only in weakly governed firms. Further, we find that CEO pay is still linked to positive random industry shocks. This result is due to the fact that failing awards in weakly governed firms are redesigned in ways that reduce the risks attached to them for the CEOs. These findings suggest that reforms to the formal structure of CEO pay contracts are unlikely to align incentives in the absence of strong shareholder governance.

This DPhil thesis is a collection of three empirical papers that study the role of firms in the UK labour market. Each chapter focuses on firms at different points in their lifecycle. Young firms are an engine of job creation but little is known about the quality of the jobs that they offer. In Chapter 1, I use a matched employer-employee dataset to study how starting wages and lifecycle earnings of employees differ between young and mature firms. I find that young firms pay a small premium to new hires, but subsequent wage growth is better at mature firms, both within continuing job matches and when individuals change jobs. Crucially, highly-paid and stable jobs at young firms have become increasingly rare over time, as young firms themselves have become less likely to survive and attain high productivity levels - both in absolute terms and relative to mature firms over the same period. Policies that aim to stimulate job growth by encouraging the formation of new firms should therefore pay close attention to the types of firms that form. Chapter 2 asks what determines the proportion of a firm's income that workers receive as compensation. I use longitudinal firm data from a period of substantial labour share variation to understand the firm-level determinants of the labor share of income - a question that has typically only been addressed with country- and sector-level data. Estimating a dynamic model using GMM, I find that firms with greater market power and a higher ratio of capital to labour allocate a smaller proportion of their value added to workers. Testing the impact of tangible and intangible capital on low- and high-wage firms leads to conclusions consistent with the hypothesis of capital-skill complementarity. Overall, the results suggest that firm-level drivers play a key role in the evolution of the aggregate labour share, which has declined significantly since the 1970s. Chapter 3 co-authored with Brian Bell, focuses on mature firms and asks how wages at such firms respond to idiosyncratic firm-level cost shocks. We create a unique dataset that links longitudinal data on workers' compensation to the unexpected costs related to firms' legacy defined benefit pension plans. We show that firms are able to share the burden of such costs when a significant share of their workers are current or former members of the plan. We also find that firms that respond to deficits by closing down the pension plans effectively reduce the total compensation of plan members. These results point to significant frictions in the labour market, which we show are a direct result of the pension arrangement that workers have. Yet closing schemes has an implicit cost for firms, since it reduces the frictions that workers face, and increases mobility.

[From the Introduction]: The divestiture of formerly nationalised public utilities during the 1980s and 1990s in the UK and elsewhere was accompanied by the vertical unbundling of their natural monopoly elements, i.e. the physical distribution networks, from upstream activities such as electricity generation and gas supply and downstream activities such as retail in order to facilitate competition in the latter. The expectation was that opening up these upstream activities to private firms would foster competition, which would in turn lead to improvements in efficiency, lower prices and increased consumer welfare. There are, on the other hand, possibilities for considerable rents to be made; these could be in the form of profits, but given the regulation that the firms face and the degree of informational asymmetry between utility managers and other stakeholders, such as regulators, shareholders, and customers, they may also take the form of slack within the firm, and the maximisation of managerial utility. We analyse the effect of RPI-X regulation on the efficiency of the UK’s water and sewage and electricity distribution industries using stochastic frontier analysis. We extend the literature in several ways; first, in the case of the water and sewage industry, we look at efficiency not only on the cost side, but also on the revenue side. Second, following the findings of Restrepo-Tobón and Kumbhakar (2014) on the shortcomings of the direct estimation of the alternative profit frontier, we show that the profit maximisation problem of a monopolist with fixed scale characteristics separates into separate cost minimisation and revenue maximisation problems, then derive an alternative specification for the revenue frontier with a firmer basis in theory. Third, we include the publicly-owned Northern Ireland Water and Scottish Water, and the three former Scottish Water Authorities that preceded the latter, in our water cost and revenue analyses, and likewise include Northern Ireland Electricity in one of our cost analyses, providing an original insight into the performance of these utilities relative to their English and Welsh and Great British counterparts, respectively. In addition, we use more recent samples than those found in the literature, providing new evidence relating to the latest price control periods in both industries. We derive two new formulae for calculating the marginal effects of environmental variables on efficiency, and apply these to analyse the impact of annual price caps and time trends on revenue and cost efficiency, giving an insight into the static and dynamic impacts of RPI-X regulation, while also examining the impact of board composition variables and public ownership. This thesis is organised into seven chapters. In the remainder of Chapter 1, we give a short history of the UK water and electricity industries. In Chapter 2, we introduce basic efficiency-related concepts, before moving on to discuss issues of market power and firm performance in utility firms, and the theory relating to utility regulation. In Chapter 3, we review the literature on frontier analysis, introducing some of the main data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) methods in particular. The relative advantages and disadvantages of each method are considered, and the features of the method used in the subsequent empirical chapters are discussed. Chapter 4 reviews the empirical literature on the performance of water and electricity utilities in the UK and internationally, along with several papers on the impact of regulation on the performance in other utility industries. Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 apply SFA to analyse the efficiency of UK water and sewage and electricity distribution utilities, respectively. Efficiency predictions are discussed and compared, trends are discussed, and the marginal effects of our environmental variables on the various efficiency measures are derived and discussed at length. Finally, Chapter 7 summarises the conclusions from our analyses and relates them back to the existing literature, and discusses implications for utility performance and policy. The limitations of this thesis, and suggestions for future research, are also discussed.

As a clean and non-greenhouse gas-emitting energy source, nuclear plants are not fully explored due to high costs, low efficiencies and complex designs of incumbent technologies. However, studies indicate high efficiencies and simpler designs are achievable if developed under the Generation IV (Gen IV) framework. The Gen IV framework offers sustainable energy that reduces and recycles the waste at a reduced cost, which is safer and reliable and improves the control in securing nuclear material through features that eliminate proliferation. The objective of this research work was to develop a Nuclear Techno-Economic and Risk Assessment (NuTERA) conceptual tool known as HYPERION under the Gen IV framework, based on constructed algorithms that enable better understanding of the technology for investment purposes. It concentrated on: component and cycle design, Design Point (DP) and Off-Design Point (ODP) performance, control systems, economics, risk assessment and the Levelised Unit Electric Cost (LUEC). The research focused on the Gen IV Gas-cooled Fast Reactor (GFR) and the Very High- Temperature Reactor (VHTR) using helium and considered 3 cycles: Simple Cycle Recuperated (SCR), Intercooled Cycle Recuperated (ICR) and the simplified and novel Intercooled Cycle without recuperation (IC). The HYPERION technical model quantified aspects that affected efficiency, whilst utilising a comprehensive calculation method to derive the ODPs. The HYPERION economic and risk models quantified the Specific Overnight Cost (SOC) including risks which were incorporated as contingencies into the LUEC. The economically optimised results showed that the ICR is the most efficient cycle (53%), followed by the SCR (50%) and then the IC which had an optimised efficiency of 41%; compared to 46% (DP). However, the IC has the best economics at US$5.57ct/kWh compared to the ICR (US$6.97ct/kWh) and the SCR (US$6.98ct/kWh). In fact, the IC is the cheapest clean energy solution in comparison to other generating sources such as solar and wind. It is the 2nd best option whilst coal without carbon capture is the cheapest option. It is important to note that this individual work resulted in 16 publications, comprising 11 journal papers, 4 conference proceedings and 1 book chapter.

This thesis investigates the experiences of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the agricultural sector of the Russian Federation. The focus is on the form of FDI, and how each investor responds, and adapts, to the Russian operational environment. This is achieved through extensive qualitative, and multiple methods research on three manifestations of FDI: corporate, privately-funded investment; corporate, publically-funded investment; and smaller, individual private investment. Of interest are the Russia-specific constraints that may be largely underprepared for by foreign investors, and unexpected events that occur in the Russian space that hamper the efforts of investors. This thesis, thus, informs the reader of the variable nature of the Russian agricultural sphere, and the problems that exist within its boundaries, and presents the stories of some of the foreign investors that have tried to penetrate its market, mostly since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The thesis consists of four papers that have either been published, or submitted for publication, in academic journals, and utilises fieldwork that was conducted between 2013 and 2014. This thesis finds that all of the foreign investors studied have experienced - in certain aspects - failure on the Russian frontier, though there have also been certain successes. It seems that financial success is dictated by the business model of each investor; those who are afforded longer time horizons, more time to adapt on the frontier, and a source of funds that does not place short-term pressure on the business, are more likely to succeed. The Russian operating environment is unique, peculiar, and unpredictable, with a tendency to produce substantial obstacles that, for investors, are difficult to overcome; for agricultural FDI to avoid these struggles, these environmental conditions need to be anticipated and prepared for, with clear strategies painstakingly thought through before any venture physically begins on Russian soil.

This DPhil thesis is a collection of three theoretical and empirical papers studying labor markets in several advanced economies. Two chapters examine the relationship between the banking sector and the labor market in the US and the UK, while one evaluates a policy that has been proposed to help labor markets in the Euro Area adjust to economic shocks. In the first chapter, I develop a New Keynesian DSGE model that integrates a banking sector subject to moral hazard with a standard random search model of the labor market. I estimate the model using US data and study the role of the banking sector in determining labor market fluctuations. In the second chapter, I estimate a structural VAR model of the UK and US economies and identify bank lending shocks using a mix of sign and short-run exclusion restrictions. Consistent with the predictions of the DSGE model, an expansionary loan supply shock decreases job-destruction and increases job-creation, reducing the unemployment rate persistently. Bank lending shocks are also important drivers of labor market fluctuations, particularly during the Great Recession. Lastly, in the third chapter, I calibrate to the Euro Area a currency union DSGE model to evaluate the aggregate properties of European Unemployment Insurance (EUI). I find that EUI cannot contemporaneously stabilize the monetary union and achieve convergence in regional unemployment and inflation rates.

Momentum behind the economic valuation of ecosystems, after a decade of hopeful support from researchers and policymakers, is currently petering out and decision-makers still do not consider biodiversity conservation to be a political priority. Surprisingly, the economic benefits provided by the conservation of ecosystems have been poorly investigated, unlike the ecosystems themselves. Furthermore, is the valuation of conservation (the valuation of the “interest rate” made on the natural capital saved, instead of the valuation of the natural capital itself) an efficient means to better serve decision-making? The research presented here addresses this question, in proposing a more effective approach to the valuation of conservation. It also investigates how such economic valuation exercises could best serve the decision-making process. The research method for measuring conservation value relies on a comparison of Total Economic Values for analogous ecosystems both within a protected area and in outside adjacent areas. This methodology is tested in a sample of five marine protected areas in West Africa. For the estimation of the Total Economic Values in these sites, the research has applied most of the available valuation tools and includes all values for which data are available, including non-use values. The results indicate a predominance of benefits linked to indirect use values over direct use values and non-use values. The marine protected areas display substantial benefits when compared to unprotected sites. These benefits are thought to derive primarily from the better marine health status associated with protected areas, and subsequent higher indirect use values which compensate for the decrease in direct use values caused by the conservation policy and the subsequent limitations imposed as a result. The ‘paper areas’ (i.e. those protected areas with no management plan) show, however, a deficit even when compared to unprotected sites. The research discusses and highlights the shortcomings of such an approach within the West African context (data-poor situation, non-monetised economies, value transfer to developing countries, difficulties in communicating non-use values of biodiversity) and associated time and space considerations. It also underlines the importance of considering the socio-cultural context in any economic valuation, which provides key information for valuation interpretation. Furthering the approach within the ‘economics of protection’ stream (after the ‘economics of degradation’ and the ‘economics of welfare’), this research delivers a new approach for valuing biodiversity conservation. The extensions of this research for policy purposes may include management support (comparison of conservation benefits with costs of management, increased consideration of indirect use values), advocacy information (through the calculation of the costs of policy inaction), and mechanisms for sustainable financing (through the development of payment for ecosystem services).