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The private equity industry has witnessed significant growth during the last two decades, fuelled by the increasing demand by institutional investors. Meanwhile, as the industry matured and competition among fund managers increased, attractive early returns disappeared, and performance persistence diminished, increasing the difficulty of private equity fund manager selection. Moreover, fund managers are better informed about their own quality compared to the potential investors, which constitutes an information asymmetry and exacerbates the difficulty of finding the right fund manager. This thesis explores the information asymmetry in the private equity industry and its effects on investor behaviour. Chapter 1 evaluates several ways public pension funds ("PPF") deal with this information asymmetry. I show that fund selections driven by specialist investment consultants overperform. PPFs with experienced trustees need less support from consultants and perform better in internally-driven fund manager selections. Additionally, investors exhibit herd behaviour in their fund manager selection. A strong informational signal by a PPF about a PE fund attracts others to invest in the same fund. Herd behaviour increases under lower information availability and when the source of the informational signal is a more credible PPF. In Chapter 2, we challenge the use of the internal rate of return ("IRR") as the main performance measurement tool for private equity funds, and we demonstrate that the IRR is affected by two biases: a convexity bias, and a "quit-whilst-ahead" bias arising because the returns on PE projects tend to covary with their durations. Using a range of parametric and non-parametric estimation techniques, we show that these biases boost fund IRRs by an average of around 3% per annum - a significant proportion of the average net PE fund IRR (around 12% per annum). These results suggest that IRRs misguide investors during the asset allocation andfund selection processes. In Chapter 3, I assess the quality of the information provided by the fund managers to their investors. I show that adopting fair value accounting increases the accuracy of the interim fund valuations of buyout funds significantly. This increase is accompanied by the increased valuation effort of the private equity funds and is robust to the possible confounding effects of the global financial crisis. Beneficial effects of local fair value measurement standards spill over to other geographies, mainly due to the peer pressure effect. Fair value measurement eliminates the significant heterogeneity in valuation quality from the difference in fund investor profiles.

This thesis consists of three chapters on sovereign default. The first chapter investigates the influences of fiscal austerity on sovereign debt yield spreads, which has caused heated debates since the Eurozone debt crisis in 2010s. The analysis in this chapter is based on an endogenous sovereign default model with private capital accumulation and fiscal rule. The model provides several contributions: First, it rationalizes the empirical evidence of state-dependent relationships between fiscal austerity and debt spreads: When the economy is under high financial stress characterised by high levels of outstanding debt and low productivity, government spending cuts increase spreads. By contrast, under low financial stress, fiscal austerity reduces spreads. Second, as in Greek data, the model predicts that the pre-default spread surge will be accompanied by fiscal consolidation. Third, it reveals a non-negligible role played by the wealth effect: if expected to be long-lived, austerity harms investment, damages production and eventually raises spreads. In conclusion, even though fiscal austerity could reduce sovereign spreads and debt-to-GDP ratios in the long term, its short-term self-defeating probabilities could be non-trivial. The second chapter discusses efficiently deriving numerical solutions to macroeconomic models on Matlab with the GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) Parallel Computing toolkit. For many non-linear models such as the endogenous sovereign default model in chapter one, we resort to the discretized value function iteration (DVFI) approacht to obtain robust solutions. Unfortunately, this method is typically slow and the speed problem worsens when a high number of grid points for state variables is needed. This paper shows that the GPU toolkit on the commonly used Matlab platform provides an up to tenfold speed boost compared with using the conventional CPU method. Using the appropriate algorithm is important to achieve this and Matlab favours a combination of vectorization and serial execution, i.e. the Looping Over Exogenous Shocks (LOES) approach. With LOES, records show the solving time spent on Matlab CPU and GPU is significantly shorter than its Julia counterparts. Moreover, implementing GPU computation is easy on Matlab. The third chapter studies the impacts of shifting long-run growth expectation on sovereign default risk. We show the new evidence of negative non-linear relationships between potential GDP growth forecasts and government debt spreads during the recent Eurozone sovereign debt crisis (2009-2016). Existing equilibrium default models assuming full information rational expectation (FIRE) on trend growth struggle to explain the new evidence because correlation between trend growth and simulated spreads is not statistically significant. In this paper, we build a new sovereign default model where the knowledge of trend growth is assumed to be imperfect and hence agents have to learn about it to make optimal decisions. The simulation results show that embedding such a learning mechanism in sovereign default model provides an easy solution to rationalize our new evidence.

Following the global financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has taken on broader responsibilities in macroeconomic management and financial stability policy. While the existing literature has tended to analyse these new functions separately, I bring them together at the level of money market strategy. To that end, the thesis analyses the impact of the Fed's expanded money market footprint between 2008 and 2020. I show how questions of liquidity governance impart important shortcomings on the central bank's overall money market strategy. As monetary policy, fiscal policy, and financial stability imperatives become increasingly entangled in the organisation of market liquidity, they impose conflicting demands on central bank policy that cannot be easily reconciled within existing policy frameworks. As the result of this impasse, the Federal Reserve has generally pursued a hands-off approach to complex policy issues, notably by relying on its market-accommodating rather than market-shaping capacities, or what is now increasingly called a de-risking strategy. In raising questions about potential contradictions built into the Fed's macrofinancial policy framework, the thesis highlights the politics that inhere in the organisation of highly technical market interventions. To explain the transformation of Fed policy, I draw on two conceptual developments. First, I employ a critical macrofinance lens to view the quintessential task of central banking not simply as reacting to changes in inflation with interest rate measures, but more broadly as ensuring a certain level of liquidity within the system. Analytically, this shifts the focus of attention away from the central bank's role in affecting macroeconomic aggregates-such as inflation, employment, or growth-and towards a macrofinancial understanding of the interactions between central banks and private finance. Second, and drawing on this approach, I link transformations in market microstructure to macro-level transformations in central banking by analysing how central bankers problematise the role and governance of liquidity within financial markets. I show that while liquidity continues to be understood primarily as a technical question of ensuring stability within the financial system, the governance of liquidity entails highly political questions of market organisation that shape how policymakers navigate and negotiate the contradictions between various policy interests.

By following Public Health activities through a historic transfer from the UK National Health Service into local government in the aftermath of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, this project draws together several crucial discussions in the critical accounting literature. Namely, the growing STS inspired accounting literature on the role of accounting representations in making accounting objects both knowable and valuable, together with the public sector accounting literature exploring the role of accounting in constructing value, identity, and ethically informed alternative accounts in times of austerity. In following the transfer of Public Health activities the project focuses on two case localities, both of which had lost over half of their managed expenditure, together with the newly created statutory body Public Health England, through a series of interviews, observations and document analysis between 2015 and 2018. The project explores how professionals in this new organisational environment construct their 'evidence base' in making the case for Public Health, re-establish their professional legitimacy and identity, and work towards 'intelligent accountabilities' in the most difficult of times. Data was collected across a range of settings involving senior Public Health consultants, health economists, finance professionals, and Directors of Public Health, together with observations of workshops, group meetings, and the newly established Health and Wellbeing Boards. To date accounting practices of naming, measuring and reporting have been largely absent from initial studies of the transfer of Public Health activities into local government, but are found to play a crucial role. The study follows the successes and challenges as these strategies are put into practice, but also reflects on the reconstruction of 'Public health' itself, as a discipline, as professionals navigate new and conflicting accountability arrangements, budgetary structures, and funding cuts. In following these practices, the study applies a science and technology studies (STS) inspired methodology, and Karen Barad's agential realism, in its exploration of the active, iterative, and ethical knowledge construction processes applied by Public Health professionals. In so doing, it demonstrates that such processes are far from politically or ethically neutral, arguing that organisational activities that seek to construct the 'facts' in establishing what is made valuable are by their nature dynamic, iterative, and networked. Public Health professionals are found to be rigorously trained in scientific and mixed methods, but increasingly needed to learn how to make use of this evidence in mobilising change in a highly politicised austerity context. This in turn drove new calculative and discursive practices, constructed to better suit the new organisational context. It was in this sense that giving 'account' of the 'facts' became an active, political, and entangled affair.

There has been a significant increase in the demand for temporary skilled workers in the health sector. They provide volume flexibility, but are generally more expensive than their permanent counterparts. A balance must therefore be struck between staffing cost and service quality by recruiting the right mix of temporary and permanent healthcare workers. Focusing on periods of highly uncertain demand, in this thesis, we propose optimization models aiming to inform permanent and temporary recruitment decision making for settings in which all patients must be served. We pursue this under two different scenarios, a mid-term planning horizon and a long-term planning horizon. The first part of the thesis [1] is devoted to recruitment decision making in a mid-term planning horizon. The main trade-off in this case is between recruitment lead times and staffing costs of temporary and permanent workers. More specifically, permanent skilled workers are cheaper for the healthcare provider than equivalent temporary workers, but have a substantially longer recruitment lead time. Longer recruitment lead time of permanent workers implies that providers face a higher level of demand uncertainty when making permanent recruitment decisions and a higher likelihood of not being able to fill the created positions. Considering a single-interval planning horizon, we propose a two-stage stochastic optimization framework to capture this fundamental trade-off. The first stage of our framework identifies the number of permanent positions to advertise, and the second stage determines the number of temporary workers to recruit. Our framework accounts for the uncertainty in the number of permanent vacancies that will be filled, stochasticity of the service delivery process, and imperfect demand information at the time of advertising for permanent positions. Under a general setting of the problem, we characterize the optimal first- and second-stage decisions analytically, propose fast numerical methods for finding their values, and prove some insensitivity and monotonicity properties for the optimal decisions and their corresponding costs. The benefit/loss of delaying the advertisement for permanent positions to obtain a more accurate demand information, at the expense of a higher risk of not filling the advertised positions, is also investigated. A case study based on data from a geriatric ward illustrates the application of our framework to an inpatient department, and further managerial insights are developed using a combination of analytical and numerical results. The second part of the thesis is dedicated to recruitment decision making in a long-term planning horizon. In addition to the different staffing costs and recruitment lead times of temporary and permanent workers captured in the first part, we consider the difference in their placement durations. This is because permanent workers have substantially longer contracts which may cover periods of low demand, hence in the long run, they are likely to be more expensive to the provider than temporary workers. We capture this by a multi-interval optimization framework which involves a two-stage decision making, similar to the two-stage decision making of the first part, repeated in each interval. The time-varying nature of demand over different intervals is also incorporated into this framework. Using a Markov decision process formulation, we prove that the optimal recruitment policy for permanent healthcare workers in this context has a hire-up-to structure. Numerical experiments then investigate the sensitivity of the hire-up-to value to different system parameters. The potential benefits of using the long-term (multi-interval) recruitment model as compared to the mid-term (single-interval) recruitment model is also evaluated numerically.

This thesis focuses on the effect of Solvency II adoption by EU/EEA insurance firms on sell-side analysts' research practices and information environment. Solvency II framework was initiated, designed and finally implemented in 2016 to safeguard insurers' financial soundness (Erdelyi, 2016), as a response to the deficiencies of the previous regulatory regimes (the latest being Solvency I). Prescribing mandatory public disclosures as part of its 3-Pillar structure, called Solvency and Financial Condition Report (SFCR), regulators aimed to enhance transparency and market discipline. Prior to Solvency II implementation, insurance undertakings disclosed risk-relevant and solvency related information to regulators. Thus, Pillar 3 disclosures aim to provide risk-relevant information to other stakeholders, addressing analysts and investors as the main recipients of this information (EIOPA, 2017). From a regulatory perspective, analysts are considered as the cornerstone of the market discipline since they can serve both as "direct" and "indirect" market discipline actors by influencing stakeholders' investment decision ("indirect" monitoring) while, also, scrutinize management decision ("direct" monitoring) (Eling, 2012; EIOPA, 2017). Their interest on risk-related disclosures is established as insurers' ability to conduct business and generate premiums is linked with the level of regulatory capital and solvency metrics (Nissim, 2013a). However, it is largely unexplored whether analysts incorporate such information (and of what type) in their equity research report in terms of Solvency II. From a broad perspective, the uniform adoption of a regulation might reduce information acquisition and processing costs (e.g. in the case of the mandatory implementation of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the EU; Tan, Wang, and Welker 2011; Houqe, Easton, and van Zijl 2014). This could result in beneficial effects of Solvency II adoption. Evidence in relation to the period before the framework implementation indicates divergence in practices of insurance firms regarding the quantity, quality and perceived usefulness of risk disclosures (Malafronte, Porzio and Starita 2016, 2018). Contrary, the use of boilerplate language in the SFCR (Gatzert and Heidinger 2020; Insurance Europe 2021a, 2021b) and divergent audit practices on the report content (Accountancy Europe 2020) might impair the reliability and quality of disclosures. Deriving also from evidence in the banking sector, there is ambiguity whether additional disclosures can be properly used by analysts (Baumann and Nier 2004) and the potential of firms "compliance in form" rather than substance (Bischof et al. 2022). Against this backdrop, the three empirical chapters in this thesis are mostly focused on sell-side analysts. Sell-side analysts rely primarily on publicly available information, their valuation process is addressed to investors and has a pivotal role in financial markets' operation (Ljungqvist et al., 2007; Chen, Cheng and Lo, 2010; Bowers et al., 2014). Evidence on the perceived usefulness of Solvency II information in the analyst context is rather limited. This mainly focuses on a short review of insurers' disclosure practices and some very scarce evidence on analysts' questions in earnings calls on Solvency II disclosures (Honour, 2016) as well as some preliminary evidence on analysts' interest on organic capital generation (Mercer/Guy Carpenter, 2017), though before the publication of the first SFCR. UK regulators published some feedback from analysts' and investors' during roundtable discussions organised by them, in terms of FY2016 disclosures (see PRA, 2017), though it was mainly feedback to regulators on how to improve reporting rather than analysts' use of information. Academic evidence on Solvency II disclosures is limited on equity markets as a whole (see Gatzert and Heidinger 2020; Mukhtarov, Schoute and Wielhouwer, 2021). However, it is not known whether, or to what extent, analysts regard SFCR and Solvency II information as important, how they mobilise this information in their decision-making and production of research, and what determines their usage of this information. The first empirical chapter is an exploratory study of analysts' use of SFCR and Solvency II information. Using semi-structured interviews with five sell-side and four credit analysts, this chapter unveils how analysts acquire and process the relevant information and how they incorporate it into their research reports. This study contributes to knowledge on analysts' information processing while it also provides some policy relevant insights on the perceived usefulness of Pillar 3 disclosures. Further, this chapter paves the way for the next two empirical chapters. The second empirical chapter focuses on sell-side analysts' equity research reports. Specifically, it investigates the extent of presence and thus analysts' use of Solvency II information in analysts' published research reports, using computerised textual analysis on a sample of 11,743 analyst reports. The period covered is 2013 to 2018. Further, it explores firm and country-specific determinants of analysts' levels of discussion of Solvency II information. This study provides insights over the types of Solvency II information that analysts tend to focus on. The third empirical chapter examines the effect of Solvency II implementation on the EU/EEA analysts' information environment and analysts' informational properties. Using a sample of 1-year ahead EPS forecasts and consensus metrics for the period from 2013 to 2018, this study explores the effect of Solvency II adoption on in earnings forecast errors, forecast dispersion and analyst following. Overall, this research, first, contributes specifically to the recent literature on the impact of Solvency II disclosures, as this strand of the existing literature has mainly focused on market wide effects. Second, this research extends the financial and risk-based reporting literature more broadly (e.g. Jorion 2002; Linsley and Shrives 2006; Kravet and Muslu 2013; Abraham and Shrives 2014; Elshandidy, Fraser, and Hussainey 2015) and with reference to the insurance industry in particular (e.g. Höring and Gründl 2011; Malafronte et al 2016; Malafronte et al 2018), by providing evidence on the perceived usefulness and beneficial effects of risk disclosures. Third, this study extends the analyst literature specifically with a focus on insurance (Nissim 2013a, 2013b) and banking (Fosu et al., 2017) by providing evidence on analysts' use and perceptions of risk-based information. Fourth, since analysts are one of the cornerstone groups for market discipline, the study informs the relevant literature in terms of analysts' influence on corporate disclosure practice as well as how the relevant information is used by them as part of insurers' financial condition assessment (Flannery, 2001; Eling, 2012; Bryce et al., 2016; Flannery et al., 2004, 2019). Also, it adds to the wider literature on the usefulness of accounting information by analysts (e.g. Georgiou 2018, Georgiou et al 2021, Mazzi et al 2022). Finally, this study has policy implications in that it complements the findings from the recent 2020 Solvency II review conducted by European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) (EIOPA 2020a, 2020b, 2020c) as well as the relevant amendments made in Solvency II regulation (EU 2021) and provides additional insights that can help improve regulators' understanding of stakeholders' needs.

In my PhD thesis I study the motivations, policy paths, and impacts of economic and political institutions in a number of different scenarios, employing a diverse range of methods and approaches. In Chapter 2 I explore the case of a central bank attempting to deal with a consumption externality created by external consumption habits by designing an application of a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model. In Chapter 3 I expand on the context of the previous Chapter to examine the possibility of a central bank setting monetary policy with a present bias, and what this means for the economy as a whole. Finally, in Chapter 4 I investigate the empirical patterns of political pressure on central banks on a global level. The main contributions of my PhD thesis are to shed more light on the consequences of external consumption habits in a context of discretionary monetary policy; to analyse the previously unexplored case of a central bank with a present bias; and to produce novel empirical findings on the topic of political pressure.

Since independence, governments in most developing countries have implemented various public policies aimed at reducing poverty and inequality. Yet, despite the public policy interventions poverty remains widespread and pervasive and inequality has widened. In this thesis, microsimulation techniques are employed to examine public policies and the extent to which they have failed to achieve the objective of reducing poverty and inequality in Malawi. This thesis contains three interlinked studies covering different topics on the impact of public policy on inequality and poverty in Malawi. Chapter 1 assesses the effect of potential reforms to social assistance aimed at reducing poverty. The results show that the current tax-benefit system decreases income inequality but increases poverty because of income tax and the limited role of social benefits. We find that the current budget allocated to social benefits does not allow for reducing poverty significantly even under a different targeting approach. We further find that reducing extreme poverty by half would represent a large increase in social spending and a significant increase in taxes. Chapter 2 investigates the effects of informality and unemployment changes on the income distribution in Malawi between 2004 and 2016. Increases in informal jobs and unemployment levels have the effect of increasing inequality. Changes in informal jobs explained the reduction in poverty levels while the rise in unemployment had the effect of increasing poverty. Our results suggest that transitioning from informal to formal employment and job creation policies should be a main objective of policymakers. Chapter 3 investigates the impact of changes in employment due to the COVID-19 crisis on inequality and poverty. We find that poverty and inequality increased because of the COVID-19 outbreak. The corrective measures implemented, the Emergency Cash Transfer, were able to subdue the impact of the crisis especially at the bottom of the income distribution.

This thesis discusses how clinicians align their logic with the objective of the organisation that they work for, leading to informal acquisition of accounting literacy and the use of accounting information. The study uses institutional logic theory to explain the transformation that takes place as clinicians work alongside accountants. Data were gathered from document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with GPs, nurses and pharmacists. Drawing on institutional logic theory, the study argues that the objectives that clinicians intend to achieve when they join the management team differ from those of the organisation. However, as they learn about the organisation's specificities such as its politics, budgetary process, and public expectations, their perceptions of what is possible align with those of the organisation. The alignment of these diverse types of logic manifests in the form of trust, minimal conflict and a shared vision, even though the different groups are not necessarily in agreement about the best way to rationalise services. Consequently, the different groups can work together in harmony and allow some actors to direct certain activities while other actors shape different activities but decisions must be justified with sufficient information. The alignment of logic and teamwork fosters informal learning through three processes: attachment to managers; hearing the same information repeatedly; and participation in goal-driven activities. Interdependency between clinicians and accountants and their shared visions are the two key factors in facilitating the informal learning process. The knowledge acquired is then used in decision-making, to influence behaviour, and for the purposes of education and negotiation.

The economic effects of public debt remains one of few subjects that evoke controversy among academics and policy makers, despite being a subject of intense scrutiny for prolonged periods. Earlier literature examined national debt in neoclassical growth models, and focused on its effects on steady state equilibrium. The general finding was that debt issuance by the state reduces factor accumulation in the long run. By the fundamental welfare theorem, the competitive equilibrium is pareto-optimal, and thus, state intervention distorts market-driven outcomes and interferes with optimal allocations in equilibrium. Later research contributions established conditions under which the competitive market environment may reach equilibrium that is not optimal. In this case, the issuance of debt by the government is capable of generating pareto improvements over market equilibrium. Thus far, the theoretical neoclassical literature have limited the positive welfare effect of government debt to the perverse case in which the competitive equilibrium is suboptimal. Recent strands in the literature have explored conditions under which public debt may be invested in infrastructure and other forms of public capital in endogenous growth models. These have been much less rigorous, but have shown that contrary to the result from neoclassical theory, debt issuance for investment may increase equilibrium growth rate in a socially planned economy where the state dictates private saving and consumption decisions. But this is a very restrictive requirement. In addition, even though the recent literature addresses an important aspect of government spending, namely that governments issue debt to provide key infrastructure and public services, no existing work (to best knowledge) has examined the welfare effects of such purposeful government borrowing in a decentralized environment. This dissertation aims to contribute to filling the gap by exploring the effects of debt issuance for investment in public capital using a production structure that is widely used in endogenous growth models, but dispenses with the usual assumptions of a socially planned economy. In other words, we need not require the government to internalize and/or dictate private consumption and savings behaviour for equilibrium to exist. In doing so, a competitive framework is used to examine the role of government debt in a growing economy where public capital is essential to private sector production. We will see first, that the long-run equilibrium of the planning problem elaborated in endogenous growth theory can be supported as competitive equilibrium outcome with lump-sum transfers by government. However, the growth maximizing capital ratio in the planning problem may not yield efficient allocations. Secondly, we will see that in a simple analytic environment, debt-financed public investment can enhance both private wealth and welfare in general equilibrium. This is a novel finding that compares favourably with the Diamond result where debt may increase welfare in the dynamically inefficient equilibrium, but always reduces capital labour ratio in the long-run. Similarly, as opposed to Blanchard result where government expenditure does not benefit individual's utility but imposes a debt-service burden and hence reduces capital and consumption at steady state, debt-financed public investment directly affects agents utility by increasing not only the prevailing interest rate, but in general the rate of return to investment in the economy. As no known existing work has explored the welfare effects of government expenditure in public capital formation through issuance of debt, this is the crux of my contribution to the literature in this dissertation. The analytic results generally show that debt-financed public expenditure that increases the public capital stock does not only improve efficiency where the equilibrium is sub-optimal, it can increase economic efficiency and welfare of agents in the long-run. The data for a large section of developing and advanced economies seem to check out the necessary condition for debt-financed public investment to be welfare improving. I conclude the research with policy discussions on the implications of the analytic and empirical insights on the future of developing country borrowing in the wake of the high debt levels occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the academic year 2019/2020, 6,500 children and young people (CYP) were permanently excluded from school; almost one-third of this population were identified with social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs (Department for Education [DfE], 2021a). For many, this disciplinary sanction leads to academic, social, health and financial disadvantages in addition to exacerbating their mental health needs (DfE, 2021a; Ford et al.,2018; Gill et al.,2017). The responsibility for decisions made to permanently exclude rests mainly with school leadership (DfE, 2012, 2017; Kulz, 2019). Therefore, this research explored the views and practices of senior leadership teams (SLTs) concerning the inclusion and permanent exclusion (PEX) of students with SEMH needs, using focus groups from three mainstream secondary schools in a local authority (LA) with a high PEX rate (DfE, 2016a, 2021b). A thematic analysis identified the overarching theme that 'SLTs grapple with their sense of agency over the inclusion and PEX of students with SEMH needs'. The discussion has been framed within Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological systems theory and has highlighted the tension between performativity and inclusion at various levels in the ecosystem. Within the macrosystem and exosystem, inclusion is inhibited by academic pressures, covert deficit discourses of disability and limited distribution of LA funding. Nevertheless, members of SLTs seek to promote inclusion within the mesosystem and microsystem by pursuing collaborative inter-organisational relations and facilitating containing relationships between the young people (YP) and significant others. Implications highlight that complex interactions within the ecosystem affect senior leaders sense of collective agency to promote the inclusion of students with SEMH needs, contributing to PEXs (Bandura, 1985, 2018). Recommendations include the DfE to perhaps acknowledge the systemic causes of PEX then provide policy and funding to support inclusion. At the school level, SLTs may wish to share effective strategies and utilise educational psychologist support for training, supervision and the development of inclusive systems.

This thesis consists of three chapters investigating some of the interactions between the media and both voters and politicians. In chapter 1, I analyse how the introduction of an open data initiative can affect budget allocations of local administrators in the context of Italian municipalities. I find that mayors react to the disclosure of their own data on expenditure and public good provision by improving the published indicators. We find that they sustain the cost of such improvement by worsening other indicators which are not public. These results contribute to the literature by providing the first causal estimates of the effect on mayors' budget choices of their own data being disclosed. In chapter 2 I exploit mayors' online activity on the same open-data platform, OpenCivitas, to reveal a network between mayors which is relevant for tax and yardstick competition. I find that mayors in this network are different from the average on several dimensions and that they do not engage in tax competition with neighbouring municipalities as all the other mayors do. Mayors in the network compete with each other, despite the physical distance, by interdependently setting their property tax rates. We also show that this network existed before the website opened, but that the behaviour of mayors in the network changed after data disclosure. This chapter contributes to the literature by showing a previously unknown framework in tax competition. Chapter 3 investigates, in the context of US counties, how a decrease in the number of local newspapers, or the complete disappearance of them, affects splitticket voting, a commonly used proxy for voters' knowledge of candidates in local elections (Governors, Senators, Representatives). Surprisingly, I find that more exits of local newspapers are associated with higher share of split tickets in the county. Additionally, I find no evidence that losing the last newspaper affects party-line voting. These results are new in the literature and partially in contrast with previous evidence.

This thesis centres around two main topics of public and behavioural economics: the sources of bias in perceived income ranks and the determinants of passthrough of soda taxes. Chapter 1 explores the role that income taxes play in shaping taxpayers' perceptions of income distributions. Contrary to the predictions of classical models, low-income people tend to display lower support for redistribution due to a biased perception of society's income distribution. Can income taxes themselves amplify or reduce that bias? I present a theoretical framework that maps the information from the tax schedule onto informative signals that taxpayers use to infer their perceived position in the income distribution. Running probabilistic regression analysis on data from the General Social Survey, I find evidence supporting that changes in the federal income tax system influenced the perceptions of income ranks observed in the USA in the last decades. To identify causality in a controlled environment, I then test the main predictions of the theoretical model by randomising tax systems in an online experiment conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk with American workers. The results of a large pilot identify statistically significant differences between individuals facing a proportional tax system with a unique average tax rate and those facing a progressive tax system with increasing marginal tax rates. Compared to no tax information (control), facing the progressive tax system used in the experiment induced a 12% higher perceived average income level and a 25% lower perceived probability of being above the average income level among low-income individuals. In contrast, the proportional system did not generate significant differences. These findings encourage further research to identify the exact elements in a tax schedule that generate a bias that can affect support for redistributive policies. Chapter 2 evaluates the pass-through of sugar taxes on soft drinks in online markets. The UK introduced the Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL), a sort of sugar tax levied on producers, in April 2018. Using web-scraped daily prices from Amazon for non-alcoholic beverages sold in the UK, I explore the pass-through of such tax to online market prices of soft drinks. In addition to the traditional measure of average pass-through, I estimate the impact of the tax on prices of direct (untaxed) substitutes, and I compare categories and package sizes facing different demand elasticity and levels of market concentration. My results confirm the predictions of a general model of tax pass-through in a market with imperfect v competition and product differentiation. The UK sugar drinks affected by the SDIL experienced full pass-through of the tax to consumer prices on average, with over-shifting on middle-sized packages (400ml-999ml). The impact of the tax was larger on prices of cola drinks, the category with lower demand elasticity and higher market concentration. At the same time, prices of sugar-free alternatives also increased by nearly 40% of the tax value, despite being exempted from it. Chapter 3 investigates the impact of psychological pricing on the pass-through of soda taxes. Following the path of a growing number of countries and the recommendations of the WHO, Spain increased taxes on sweetened soft drinks on 1st January 2021. Nevertheless, the evidence on pass-through of such corrective taxes is mixed, with estimates ranging from 30% to above 100%. Furthermore, psychological pricing is widespread in grocery stores, with over 60 per cent of product prices with odd endings (e.g. .49 or .99) in some countries, and has been linked to price rigidity in other settings. Using web-scraped prices data from three major supermarket chains in Spain, I estimate that psychological prices are a significant determinant of tax pass-through. Looking at the last digit of prices, I find that the VAT tax increase on sweetened drinks overcame the price rigidity of zero and nine-ending prices observed in control items. Indeed, products initially priced at round endings (double zero) over-shifted the tax on consumer prices. On the other hand, items initially priced around the half of a Euro (with the cents digits between 40 and 58) experienced partial pass-through levels below 75 per cent. This implies that corrective taxes may result in more significant price increases in markets with a higher frequency of round endings, even if those endings usually increase the price-rigidity of products facing smaller cost shocks. It also confirms that a tax that accounts for ten per cent of product prices is enough to raise the prices of unhealthy drinks significantly, overcoming the rigidity effect of psychological price endings.

This research examines the role of Gulf Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in foreign and security policy and in doing so fills an important but neglected gap within the existing literature. The thesis contributes to our knowledge of SWFs by examining the role of Kuwait, Oman and Qatar's SWF in three distinct foreign policy crises, whilst contextualising each SWF in terms of their investment patterns, strategic roles, stabilisation purposes and geopolitical orientation. By conducting elite interviews, with until now inaccessible elites, I have been able to collect important primary information that allows us to interpret SWFs actions in new ways. Namely, to confirm what has until now only been suspected, that actors within SWFs see themselves and their organisations operating within a geopolitical context and use their wealth as a means of achieving foreign and security policy. This is not only an important finding of this research, but moving forward, provides us with a lens through which to interpret SWFs actions. By way of context, SWFs were pioneered in the Gulf by Kuwait just as the country gained independence from the UK. Since the turn of the millennium, this investment vehicle has since mushroomed- in size, because the price of oil and gas (the main economic outputs of the GCC) has increased dramatically, resulting in sizeable surpluses for their governments. Today, the six GCC countries account for at least 40% of global SWF assets and their importance as part of the global financial system was demonstrated during the 2007/08 financial crisis. Their investments in failing Western financial institutions and other 'trophy' projects caused questions to be asked regarding the true nature of their investment intensions. Accordingly, this research is timely, as it allows us to reflect on that moment of crisis and reinterpret SWFs actions. We live in the shadow of that period, and therefore this research helps shed new light on contemporary international politics. This is all the more important, as SWFs actions have all too often lacked transparency in their operations, leading to academic investigations relying on secondary sources to project estimated values as well as their investment intentions. On the one hand, SWFs are seen as a rent-seeking vehicle to support governments when oil and gas revenues are insufficient to underpin their economies while, on the other hand, they are often seen as simply domestic political tools. This thesis breaks with that literature, by directly asking elites about their reasons for action, and revealing a much more geostrategic orientation than previously described within the literature. This was made possible by building a long-term trust with GCC elites - policymakers, practitioners and academics with first-hand accounts of the workings of these SWFs. Herein, this thesis provides new qualitative evidence to shed new light on important and contemporary issues, and this new knowledge underpins a novel perspective on the role of SWFs in global and regional politics.

This thesis seeks to investigate the associations among Executive Compensation (EC), Sustainable Banking Disclosure (SBD), Financial Performance (FP), competition and Bank Risk-Taking (BRT) in English-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa (ESSA) countries. Additionally, the thesis explores the mediating role of Corporate Governance Disclosure Index (CGI) on these associations in the ESSA banks. The thesis adopts different statistical techniques to provide an in-depth analysis. Specifically, and to address endogeneity problems, the study employs two stage least squares (2SLS), generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation and lagged structure. Using 220 banks in the ESSA region for the period from 2007 to 2018, the thesis finds that internal governance practices and competition are key determinant of BRT in the region. Next, the findings of thesis suggest that the pay-for-sustainability sensitivity (PSS) is mainly positive, and also enhances in banks with high CGI, implying that the PSSis contingent on the internal CGI of banks. Further, the evidence of the thesis show that, the sustainability-for-performance sensitivity (SPS) is generally positive, and this association is reinforced in banks with high CGI, indicating that the SPS is dependent on banks internal CG mechanisms. The results of the thesis are robust to alternative measures, estimation methods, potential endogeneity issues and sample selection problems. The findings of the thesis have important implications for banking practitioners, regulators, environmental activists and policy-makers in the ESSA region.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced in 2015 that the United Kingdom would introduce an apprenticeship levy. This came into effect in 2017 and covers all UK employers with a payroll in excess of £3 million. Apprenticeships are a devolved policy and this research focuses exclusively upon the impact of the levy on employers in England. The levy was introduced as a consequence of a marked decline in employer training. Its aim is to overcome a perceived market failure in training and to stimulate employer demand for training (i.e. additional training that would not have happened in the absence of the levy), for both new and existing employees. The levy has also sought to improve the quality and perception of apprenticeships. The 'apprenticeship' term became protected by law in the Enterprise Act 2016. This was in response to the previous widespread use of the term in association with poor quality training, which threatened to damage the apprenticeship brand. New stipulations mean levy-funded training must be for a minimum of 12 months and include (at least) 20% off-the-job training whilst also being approved by the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE). In order to clarify the distinction between apprenticeships pre and post levy, the research refers to apprenticeships (post-levy) as levy-funded training. The research, based upon interviews with over one hundred private sector employers, seeks to understand employers' views regarding the levy, in particular whether it has overcome perceived market failure in training provision, or has stimulated fresh employer demand for training. It also assesses the government's stated intention to place employers 'in the driving seat'. In addition, it seeks to ascertain the impact of the levy on the quality of training provision. The research finds positive indications that the levy is indeed able to stimulate employer demand for high quality training and may (over time) be capable of re-engaging larger numbers of employers with training activity.

The process of decentralisation in many countries sought to empower local governments as part of a strategy to build state capacity, to reduce the distance between governments and their citizens, and to ensure increases in public goods provision. Although some countries successfully granted administrative and fiscal autonomy to subnational governments, political autonomy, especially competitive elections of mayors and councils, remains a major challenge, particularly in democracies of developing countries. How do political conditions affect the economic performance of devolved local governments? This thesis revisits the theoretical debates and provides empirical testing on the effects of executive support in legislatures, term limits, and perceptions of performance and approval as determinants of different measures of local government performance. Colombia, one of the oldest democracies in Latin America, established political and fiscal autonomy for municipal governments in the nineties and provides a relevant testbed for these relationships, with detailed election records, administrative data on public goods provision and its expenditures, and anticorruption audits in 1,122 municipalities. Survey data on citizens’ perceptions of their government is also available for some major cities. Findings in Chapter 1 suggest that for municipal governments in Colombia a larger opposition in councils improves fiscal discipline and cost efficiency in public education provision. Chapter 2 finds that increas-ing municipal council re-election rates does not affect corruption at the local level. Lastly, the analysis of citizens’ perceptions in Chapter 3 indicates that tax morale is positively affected by approval and performance of mayors in Bogotá.

After almost two decades of implementing New Public Financial Management (NPFM) reforms, progress in reforming Public Financial Management (PFM) systems, processes and institutions in developing countries has been limited and uneven. This is in spite of the substantial financial and technical support from Development Partners. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence and often the evidence cited is anecdotal about the specific role of non-technical drivers in in explaining the state of PFM reforms in developing countries. This is in part, because each of the approach used to study PFM reforms has focused mainly on addressing only limited aspects of PFM, leaving many critical aspects unaddressed in the reform strategy. In response to the many challenges and shortcomings of current approaches, this study adopts a holistic approach, using case studies and the process-tracing method to investigate the cumulative contributions of the underlying drivers to understand why progress in PFM reforms is limited and uneven in post-conflict Liberia and Sierra Leone. This evidence-based study reveals the substantial progress made in upstream reforms is not enough to deliver on the promise of PFM reforms and has not trickled down to downstream service delivery elements of PFM. Partial implementation of reform initiatives has been typical in post-conflict Anglophone countries. The untypical progress made in some downstream reforms, such as Integrated Financial Management Information Systems is partly because politicians and civil servants have found ways to bypass core control and accountability mechanisms. It is easier to align the interests of International Partners and Country Governments in upstream and de jure reforms, but downstream and deconcentrated reforms areas remain the challenge. They are deeply rooted in the interests, incentives and power-relations of Political Leaders and their appointees. The implications of this study, therefore suggest that strategic nuancing of PFM reform programming, through the holistic approach is needed, capable of addressing both the low-hanging fruits and more far-reaching reforms by expanding the reform space, engaging wider stakeholders and deepening reform of downstream service delivery units.

This thesis explores the effects of various public policies on the behaviour of Italian municipalities. The different topics are summarised below. Chapter 1 studies how the implementation of an anti-corruption measure in a municipality affects the procurement behaviour of neighbouring municipalities that are not directly targeted. I exploit the implementation of the dissolution of a municipal government for infiltration by organised crime. I show that these municipalities react in two ways: first, they issue more contracts under a threshold (40,000 Euro) below which evidentiary requirements become less stringent and transparency is lower, making more difficult to prove any illicit. The response accounts for approximately 20 per cent of the yearly average expenditure from 40,000 Euros to 100,000 Euros. Second, municipalities amend less often contracts for public works and the existing amendments are smaller in size. Amending a contract is a practice considered as a signal of potential corruption. Chapter 2 investigates how fiscal decentralization affects local public spending in Italy. We exploit an unexpected reform of the property tax implemented in Italy in 2012. The reform increased in decentralization with the increase of the municipal property tax coupled with a large reduction in national transfers to municipalities. Using an instrumental variable approach, we show large het- erogeneity in the amount municipalities actually collected with their newfound discretion, compared to the government suggestion. On average, municipalities increase the total revenue and spending on public services. Finally, we show that greater decentralisation affects differently municipalities subject to fiscal rules. Chapter 3 studies the impact of fiscal rules limiting the deficit accumulation on the procurement behaviour of Italian municipalities. Using data on procurement contracts from 2008 to 2015, we show two findings. First, municipalities subject to fiscal rules decrease by 4 percent the number of contracts issued every year and municipal spending on public works is reduced by 18 percent. Second, fiscal rules also impact the effectiveness of public spending. After the DSP is implemented, delays in the execution of public works are approximately 40 percent shorter. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that fiscal rules impact both the level of investment and the effectiveness of public spending.

This thesis explores topics in public and labor economics summarized below. Chapter 1 explores drivers of native support for immigration. It studies the importance of labor market concerns and the role of labor protection in shaping native preferences over migration policies. We look at the Swiss context and national votes which took place in the period from 2000 to 2014. Our results show that a higher migrant exposure reduces pro-immigrant vote shares in municipalities with a relatively low-skilled native population. The negative response is mitigated under higher levels of labor market protection as measured by collective bargaining coverage. Consistent with labor market concerns driving support for immigration, we find that immigration reduces wages of low-skilled natives, but this effect is weaker under higher collective bargaining coverage. Chapter 2 investigates how the introduction of free movement of workers affects enrolment of natives in tertiary education. We exploit a Swiss policy change that led to a significant increase in the share of cross-border commuters in local employment in border regions of Switzerland. Our results show a rise in enrolment in affected relative to non-affected regions in the post-reform period driven by universities of applied sciences. Consistent with returns to education driving enrolment decisions, we observe a decrease in wages to upper-secondary degrees and a rise in wages for tertiary educated workers. Furthermore, we link occupations to study fields and divide subjects according to how much they are affected by the inflow of commuters. Our results show that enrolment in less affected fields rises. These are non-STEM subjects which build skills that are less likely to be transferable across borders. Chapter 3 studies the impact of simplification, deterrence and tax morale on tax compliance. We ran five natural field experiments varying the communication of the tax administration with the universe of income taxpayers in Belgium throughout the tax process. A consistent picture emerges across experiments: (i) simplifying communication substantially increases compliance, (ii) deterrence messages have an additional positive effect, (iii) invoking tax morale is not effective, and often backfires. A discontinuity in enforcement intensity, combined with the experimental variation, allows us to compare simplification with standard enforcement measures. We find that simplification is far more cost-effective, allowing for substantial savings on enforcement costs.

Since the end of the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic there has been a call for countries to recognise the role frameworks of resilience can play in health system development, particularly in low resourced settings. This thesis will use the findings from five papers in two related studies to examine and critique frameworks of resilience in relation to the health system in Sierra Leone. Study one addressed the quality of pre-registration education for maternal and child health aides and study two examined the impact of the Ebola epidemic on maternal and newborn care. Findings from the included papers are utilised to explore how theories of human and social capital may be utilised to examine concepts of resilience in relation to the health system in sierra Leone. The framing of resilience among health care workers and pre-registration tutors; the current capacities and characteristics of health care workers and their relationship to the human capital requirements of resilience frameworks will also be explored. Findings from this thesis demonstrate that discussion on human capital for developing resilient systems is largely missing from the resilience agenda. Elements of everyday resilience may be evident amongst health care workers and tutors, but this has not led to system adaption and transformation. In a fragile state such as Sierra Leone there is a danger that focusing on resilience alone will mask the investments that are needed in human capital and the political and social changes needed to improve health care. In the context of Sierra Leone concepts of resilience need to be reframed to acknowledge the cultural context, and recognise the underlying fragility of the state and lack of agency amongst the majority of the health care work force. Investment in human capital should therefore be included as a pre-condition in resilience frameworks which can then be built upon to bring about universal health coverage and system resilience.

This dissertation gathers three essays on public economics. The first chapter studies the effects of local income taxation on tax base and individual mobility since the early 2000s in Italy. I combine novel fine-grained data on the universe of tax residence’s transfers with 89,860 local income tax changes and income bracket-by-municipality-level panel data on the tax base. I propose different empirical strategies, resting on tax rate variations both over time and across individuals within locations. I find that taxation significantly affects the location of the tax base. The mobility response mostly reflects tax residence relocation and involves a separation between residence and work-place. Yet, my estimates imply that efficiency losses due to tax-induced mobility are relatively small, thus making local redistribution feasible at least in the medium-run. The second chapter studies the effects of stricter tax enforcement on tax collections, public goods provision and local tax rates. I study these links in the context of the Ghost Buildings program: an anti-tax evasion policy that detected buildings not reported on land registry in Italy. Using cross-municipality variation in scope for enforcing buildings’ registration, I show that tax collections account for around three-fourth of the projected revenue increase. I find complementarity between enforcement and local tax rates on property and income, which ultimately led to larger investments in schools. The third chapter studies the effect of regulation on intergenerational transmission of occupations. Focusing on the case of Italy since the early 2000s, we exploit the impact of two major reforms in the regulation of professional services. Leveraging the differential effect of regulation among occupations and over time, we show that the progressive liberalization of professional services has affected the allocation of individuals across occupations, leading to a substantial decrease in the propensity to follow the parents’ career.

This thesis demonstrates the interactions of key players in government budgeting, i.e. Executive and Legislative in a traditional setting. Drawing on Weber's (1964) traditionalism and Black's (2008) legitimacy and accountability relationships guided by Archer's (1995) morphogenetic approach as the broad methodology, it seeks to understand the interactions of key players in government budgeting practices situated in a traditional setting, and to explain how and why traditional domination in organisations continues to survive or is at least perceived as legitimate amidst the wave of modernity through the enhancement of formal rationality. This study undertakes a case study in a local government in Indonesia. Amidst the absence of a study of the interactions of Executive and Legislative in the budgeting process, this case study provides an in-depth picture of how the key budgeting players undertake budget decision making. It also depicts that formal bureaucratic control of the local government is also influenced by the control logic imposed by strong family groups, promoting the intervention of familial control over the formal bureaucratic mechanism, thus causing budgeting practices to also serve the whim of family groups. Interestingly, contrary to previous studies on accounting in traditional settings, this thesis found the strategic role of government budgeting as an accountability mechanism to maintain the legitimacy of strong family groups to ‘rule’ the local government or to maintain the status quo. The frameworks of both Weber and Black are very useful in explaining why the budget is also used to serve familial interests and as an accountability mechanism. This thesis contributes further to the study of the interaction of Executive-Legislative in the budgeting process, depicting how they interact and exercise their power to achieve a consensus on the budget. It also contributes to accounting studies in traditional settings, exploring the role of accounting as an accountability mechanism, a finding contrary to that of previous studies.

In seeking to better understand how the sustainability of cities can be improved, this thesis found that English local authorities struggle to nurture innovation - specifically sharing platforms - due in part to their own process of platformisation, which involves a shift away from delivering services to acting as intermediary between service users and potential providers. Allied with public sector austerity and a non-conducive local government innovation regime, these factors lead to a new form of pubic management, the 'enabling authority'. This contemporary form of local governance constrains opportunities for cities to transition to sustainability. Combining literature from urban theory, evolutionary economics, and sustainability studies, with empirical data collected through semi-structured expert interviews, this thesis investigates the sharing economy as a business model that may be able to deliver a transition to economic sustainability in cities in England. This is based on claims of its ability to optimise the use of resources by providing access to under-utilised assets. Three methods were employed to assess this business model: a systematic literature review; semi-structured interviews; and longitudinal case studies. The systematic review provided greater analytical nuance to the chaotic concept of the sharing economy, as well as a robust foundation for the empirical investigation. This investigation, comprised of the semi-structured interviews and case studies, utilised a systems innovation framework known as the multi-level perspective (MLP). The local authority institution was chosen for investigation due to its unique niche-level characteristics as well as existing attempts to implement sharing economy technologies. The systematic review confirmed that access to under-utilised assets via an intermediary platform is the aspect that most distinguished the sharing economy from the many adjacent business models that surround it in the literature, policy reports, and in the tech press and media. This pointed to ‘access platforms’ as a more useful term to assist in the empirical investigation. Interviews with twenty-four Senior Directors in eighteen local authorities in England, conducted between Nov 2017 – Feb 2018, illuminated existing attempts to implement access platforms at the urban scale, identifying the enabling factors of activity as well as barriers to other opportunities. Two platforms, Comoodle in Kirklees and Share Peterborough, were chosen as case studies, based on their levels of funding and maturity, as well as their close fit with the definition of access platforms. Through longitudinal interviews with the platform programme managers the socio-technical factors of their development were compared to assess how such innovation is nurtured to deliver a transition to urban economic sustainability. Instead of nurturing access platform innovation, what I term a platformisation of the local authority institution itself was uncovered. This shift from providing services to facilitating community members and organisations to provide services themselves, echoed the worst tendencies of asset-stripping ‘lean platforms’, and is pushing local authorities away from survival and towards a responsibilisation and marginalisation narrative. Combined with the severe financial restrictions placed upon them by ongoing policies of austerity, and exacerbated by an equally restrictive local government innovation regime, this thesis contends that the current iteration of public-sector management is that of the ‘enabling authority’. The processes that create enabling authorities place considerable pressures on opportunities to deliver a transition to urban economic sustainability. The creation of a multi-authority intermediary body was advocated as being better placed to harness the niche-level characteristics of local authorities, whilst also mitigating the risks of nurturing innovation in this environment.

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays that investigate self-government accounting practices in the salient context of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt). The first essay (Chapter 2) explores the enactment of New Public Financial Management (NPFM) as a component of the liberal peace-building discourse, disseminated by the World Bank. The study relies on the Fairclough dialectical relational approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (1992, 1999, 2010, 2012). The essay performs a semiotic analysis of the text of the World Bank’s (NPFM) strategies in the context of the peace-building efforts in the oPt. The analysis revealed the use of the genre of governance to mediate the relationship between the donor community, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority post-peace-agreement. This mediating genre specialises in ‘action at a distance’, such as initiating mechanisms for budget revenue transfers. The essay identifies value assumptions in the NPFM discourse, and exclusion of social agents (nominalisation) on several occasions, for instance, in the revenue-collection process or invoice validations. Further, extensional assumptions are ideologically vital as they reflect powerful representation. The second essay (Chapter 3) explores the budget of indigenous self-governing entities in the context of settler colonial studies. It adopts settler colonialism theory (SCT) as a theoretical framework and was initially introduced by Denoon (1979), subsequently developed by Wolfe (1994, 1999, 2001, 2006), and theoretically extended by Veracini (2010, 2012, 2018). The study highlights several strategies implemented by settler-colonisers to liquidate indigenous self-governing entities—and ultimately indigenous nations—using the budget as a weapon (e.g., the legitimisation of budgetary cuts and the suspension of the main source of indigenous self-government revenues, known as clearance revenues). It also presents an account of how settler corporate capitalism serves illegal settlements by channelling services and investing in the intelligence architecture of these settlements. This type of capitalism has also promoted settlers’ collective obsession with sovereignty, which has translated into a segregation regime that prevents indigenous self-governments from holding settler states financially accountable. The third essay (Chapter 4) examines the nature of accountability between settler state and indigenous self-government in an extreme power imbalance. The essay deploys Hopwood's (1994, 1990) account of accountability and visibility. Three examples were presented in the essay regarding the nature of accountability between the settler state and indigenous-self government. The first example discusses the sharing revenue mechanism and the refusal of computerised system invoice. The second example presents the failure of revenue transfer from the settler state to indigenous self-government. The third example presents an untraceable deduction in health and electricity bills. All examples indicate that the settler state refuses to ‘provide an account’ to indigenous self-government, which enhances the invisibility. This has also weakened the internal accountability of indigenous self-government.

This thesis is made up of three essays on international corporate taxation. This thesis answers three important questions. First, what is the size of strategic spillovers from international tax competition? Second, what determines the magnitude and direction of corporate tax base spillovers? Third, what is the fundamental reason for taxing firms and what does this imply for the optimal design of the corporate income tax? The theory of tax competition tells us that when governments compete for mobile capital, tax rates fall below the social optimum, leading to the under-provision of the public good. But magnitudes matter—how big a problem is the under-provision of the public good? That depends on how big strategic tax rate spillovers from corporate tax competition are. In the first essay, I estimate the size of strategic spillovers. To do so, I identify tax competition as being an optimal response to base spillovers. Using the stock of foreign direct investment between countries to approximate bilateral base spillovers, I estimate a spatial autoregressive model of tax competition. I find strategic spillovers to be a third of the magnitude of previous estimates. More specifically, I find that governments respond to a 1 percentage point reduction in the foreign average tax rate with a 0.23 percentage point cut of their own. This implies low revenue loss from tax competition and modest under-provision of the public good—much lower than is commonly implied. Corporate tax reforms do not occur in a vacuum. In the second essay, I estimate corporate tax base spillovers on a country-by-country basis for European countries. Corporate tax base spillovers are the international externalities that occur when one government's tax rate change affects another country's tax base. We normally assume that tax base spillovers are substitutionary—that a cut in the tax rate in one country must lower corporate profits in neighbouring countries. I find that spillovers are, on average, substitutionary. However, spillovers vary across country-pairs in size and significance. Some spillovers are even complementary. I isolate theories that help us to understand this heterogeneity in spillover semi-elasticities and try to determine whether variation in the estimated semi-elasticities is explained by the structural features predicted by these theories. This essay seeks to enrich our understanding of corporate tax base spillovers. In the third essay I derive an optimal benefit-based corporate tax rate formula as a function of the public input elasticity of profits and the (net of) tax elasticity of profits. I argue that the existence of the corporate income tax should be justified by the benefit-based view of taxation: firms should pay tax according to the benefits they receive from the use of the public input. I argue that benefit-based corporate taxation is normatively fair. Since the public input is a location-specific factor, a positive benefit-based corporate tax rate is also feasible even in a small open economy. The benefit-based view gives three clear principles of corporate tax design. First, we should tax corporate profits at source. Second, the optimal tax base is location-specific rents. Third, profit shifting is normatively wrong. An empirical application of the formula suggests the optimal benefit-based corporate tax rate on public corporations in the United States lies in the range of 35 to 59 percent. Together, these three essays provide a clear perspective of the mechanisms of the international corporate tax system. By combining theory with evidence throughout this thesis, I show that the international corporate tax system is a complex creature. Importantly, I also provide concrete suggestions for the redesign of the corporate tax so that it fulfils a fundamental economic purpose.

Although the banking literature offers a very rich assessment of financial risks, this thesis at-tempts to extend the empirical literature by narrowing the important gaps in various aspects. Guided by the fundamental-based view (Calomiris, 2007) and supported by the theory of financial intermediation introduced by Allen and Santomero (1997), this thesis presents three distinctive empirical models to analyse the determinants of financial risks among banks in the United States over the past few decades. In first essay (chapter 2), I examine the factors and the extent to which they affect the probability of bank failure across different size categories. Results suggest that factors affecting bank failure vary across respective size categories, and the Average Marginal Effects (AMEs) of mutually significant covariates also exhibit signifi-cant variability across different size classes. In second essay (chapter 3), I explore the system-atic trend in bank risk and its sources. I find that the risk level for each new cohort of banks are higher than its predecessors. In addition, I find that the risk differences (cohort risk phenome-non) are broadly persistent because each new cohort of banks adopts riskier business strategies than its predecessor. In third essay (chapter 4), I investigate the impact of tail risk on financial distress among publicly traded bank holding companies (BHCs). My results show that tail risk is significantly and positively linked to the financial distress, implying that BHCs with a higher tail risk have higher financial distress.

The accounting and finance literature views institutional investors, such as pensions and insurance companies, investment advisors and banks, hedge funds and mutual funds, as a heterogeneous class of shareholders with different incentives and abilities to monitor corporate management. Chapter 2 of this thesis focuses on the corporate governance role of one such shareholder type, namely foreign institutional investors. One view is that larger ownership levels by foreign institutions could lead companies to myopic decisions in order to boost short-term investment returns. The proponents of this view argue that foreign institutional investors could prompt corporate managers to prioritise short-term earnings over long-term growth, thereby leading companies to short-termist strategies. However, foreign institutions are arguably better positioned to act as efficient monitors of managerial decisions in their investee firms. Due to their independence, they can undertake a more effective monitoring activity since their ties with local business actors, such as managers, governmental authorities and communities, are likely lower relative to their domestic counterparts. In addition, their international expertise and higher degree of financial sophistication makes them better suited to understand growth opportunities of their portfolio firms. In chapter 2, I examine the effects of foreign institutional ownership on corporate tax planning using an international sample of more than 26,000 firms. If foreign institutions are pure profit-maximizers, they would forego the risks of reputational loss, payments of additional taxes, penalties and interests if a company's tax strategy is later considered abusive and encourage the adoption of a more aggressive tax avoidance approach to boost short-term after-tax earnings. In contrast, I argue that foreign institutional investors favour a more balanced tax planning approach that trades off costs and benefits of tax avoidance. Results of chapter 2 are consistent with the latter hypothesis. They provide evidence that foreign institutions act as effective monitors by leading corporate management to select a tax avoidance level similar to the tax position of the company's peers and therefore makes it less likely to attract regulatory and public scrutiny since it does not stand out from other firm peer levels. Results also show that this effect is more pronounced for larger companies, pointing to a political cost interpretation of my findings. Chapter 3 of this thesis focuses on the role played by index-tracking institutional investors in corporate governance and transparency. Indexed institutions are generally characterized by passive trading strategies, based on an index-benchmarking activity, and low expenses. Some studies claim that this class of investors exert limited monitoring over corporate management because their portfolios include a large number of company stocks and their resources available for monitoring are scarce. In contrast, other studies show evidence consistent with indexed institutions operating as active owners. According to this stance, indexed institutional investors have the incentive to undertake active monitoring over managerial decisions due to their long-term investment horizons linked to index reconstitutions. In chapter 3, I examine whether indexed institutional ownership is associated with greater transparency and information production related to companies' geographic operations. I find that larger shares of ownership by indexed institutions are associated with greater geographic transparency only in companies that lead most of their operations in tax haven countries and have more entrenched corporate managers. This result is consistent with a view of indexed investors trading off costs and benefits of monitoring by more actively engaging, selectively, with those companies that are more exposed to information asymmetries and governance problems. Besides external sources of financing, companies can use internally generated funds to finance their activities. One way for companies to generate capital internally is by taking advantage of tax planning opportunities. Reducing tax payments leads to higher tax savings and, presumably, larger cash balances. Yet, companies engaging in tax avoidance incur the risks of reputational loss, additional payments of taxes, interests and penalties if the chosen tax strategy is later ruled improper. In chapter 4, I examine the relation between tax avoidance and firms' labour investments. Consistent with the argument that risks and uncertainties related to tax avoidance make firms more cautious when investing, I provide evidence that firms with low effective tax rates, my proxy for tax avoidance, undertake sub-optimal labour investments relative to the level justified by the firms' underlying economic fundamentals and industry medians. I find this effect using a quasi-natural experiment around Ireland's statutory corporate tax cut of December 1997. More importantly, I find my result to be more pronounced in sub-samples of firms exposed to greater tax risks and uncertainties, which is consistent with the view of firms withholding their hiring decisions in response to potential reductions in cash flows and shareholders' wealth.

Following economic crisis in 2008, a new Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government came into power in 2010 and introduced various measures and policies which prioritised reducing the national debt. Such measures and policies impacted county council funding which in turn meant that the county of Treescape decided to focus its services on the most vulnerable. This resulted in the local authority youth service being disbanded, with all open access youth work, as well as the majority of infrastructure support and associated services stopping and buildings closing. A new targeted youth support service was thus created. If local communities in Treescape county wanted open access youth work, it was their responsibility to provide it. This thesis undertakes a comparative study exploring the response of individuals and local parish/town councils from four communities, who proactively secured forms of youth provision in their area. Through the conceptual lenses provided by Michel Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman, the findings reveal that individuals and local parish/town councils responded to the challenges by exercising forms of neoliberal governmentality and discipline in order to achieve local solutions. In so doing they have created a unique mix of neoliberal and business-based approaches with local values that privilege the importance of relationships. I call this the ‘loconomy’. Given the precariousness and insecurity felt by individuals and youth providers, I discovered the presence of a ‘situational dynamic’ where youth providers needed to consider how much to invest in a local community in order to strengthen their case to be a parish/town councils’ preferred provider, which meant keeping both the young people and funder contented. However, this was not easy as youth work had become financialised, with finance limiting what could be offered at a local level compared with what was previously available via the local authority youth service. This resulted in varied forms of youth work, all of which had experienced shrinkflation.

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays exploring the interaction between fiscal capacity and state-building, as well as the impact of external relations on fiscal capacity in sub-Saharan Africa. The first essay (Chapter 2) explores the links between taxation and accountability improvements. Historical experiences connect taxation with improved government accountability through tax bargaining. However, for contemporary developing countries the validity of this argument is less clear. Using new governance data, I test this hypothesis in a panel of 47 African countries from 1980 until 2015. I show that taxation and accountability are still positively correlated. This effect is mainly driven by direct taxation. Instrumenting tax revenue, with terms of trade and exchange rate shocks, confirms the results. This suggests a causal interpretation for the relationship. The second essay (Chapter 3) estimates the revenue effect from the introduction of semi-autonomous revenue authorities (SARAs). A major component of international tax reform in sub-Saharan Africa for the last 30 years has been the creation of SARAs. The core argument of this essay is that existing research suggesting diverse and contradictory outcomes has not taken account of trends in revenue performance in the years before the establishment of SARAs. Allowing for this revenue history our analysis based on 46 countries over the period 1980-2015 provides no robust evidence that SARAs induce an increase (or a decrease) in revenue performance. The third essay (Chapter 4) describes how Burundi used its fiscal policy to counteract the fiscal effects of the suspension of aid. Economic sanctions, and the suspension of budget support in particular, are supposed to pressure target governments to comply with donors' demands by putting spending commitments at risk. The essay argues that this is too simplistic since governments have more fiscal levers at their disposal. Using monthly data on Burundi's fiscal position between 2005 and 2017, the chapter presents evidence from a time series analysis showing that aid does not affect spending because aid shortfalls are compensated with domestic borrowing.

This thesis presents three empirical studies on household finance. The thesis is inspired by the following phenomena: (1) the development of household finance; (2) the importance of enhancing financial inclusion; (3) the rising prevalence of obesity in western countries; (4) the global ageing challenge. Using the China Household Finance Survey, I investigate the determinants of financial inclusion, focusing on the role played by informal finance. I test the extent to which financial inclusion affects households' consumption. My findings suggest that enhancing financial inclusion in China may play an important role in rebalancing the economy towards domestic consumption. Using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, I investigate the extent to which households' consumption profile changes after health shocks. My findings suggest that non-medical consumption is generally insured against health shocks in China. Using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, I find a positive association between financial stress and bodyweight in Europe. I find that individuals are more likely to respond to self-perceived financial stress than to objective levels of debt. Thus, policies aimed at improving citizens' ability to cope with financial stress may play a role in tackling the obesity epidemic in Europe.

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter contributes to the literature on the Laffer curve as a means of measuring the sustainability of public finances. In particular, it proposes to construct Laffer Curves via policy experiments where fiscal policy is set optimally and fiscal instruments are jointly varied along the transition to steady-state. This relation is labelled as an 'optimal Laffer curve'. It is shown that the tax revenue and welfare gains relative to the 'quasi-static' policy experiments examined by the previous literature are dramatic. The second and the third chapters are instead dedicated to developing and estimating a DSGE model of the Scottish economy and the rest of the UK. The second chapter reviews the literature of DSGE models developed in academia and central banks in recent years, and outlines our model. In the third chapter, the model is then estimated and its quantitative implications are explored.

This thesis seeks to examine contemporary factors that prevent an orderly resolution to a sovereign debt crisis. It comprises of five chapters. The first chapter introduces the research and highlights its main contributions. The second chapter narrates the background and motivation for the study. The third chapter studies a related paper on holdouts in sovereign debt restructuring and finds that, under a discrete time version with two creditors, asymmetric pure strategy Nash equilibria exists. This result, overlooked by the original paper, implies immediate agreement as the time between successive periods tends to zero. The fourth chapter investigates the impact of heterogeneous beliefs on delays in sovereign debt restructuring and finds that parties inefficiently delay settlement when their combined beliefs of court-outcomes are sufficiently heterogeneous. The chapter also explores other model expositions and establishes delay conditions. The fifth chapter studies the implied duty on the debtor to act in good faith in sovereign debt restructuring and is divided into two parts. The first part theoretically examines the efficiency and distributional impacts from enforcing a good faith duty on the debtor when bargaining with heterogeneous creditors. Here, good faith is defined as the non-violation of the court interpretation of the pari passu clause. The second part identifies judicial attempts made to enforce the good faith debtor duty to negotiate and proposes a doctrinal threshold that restricts judicial intervention to situations in which there is clear evidence of a failure, on the part of the debtor, to negotiate in good faith.

This thesis provides a qualitative study of control of the labour process and its relationship to technology in Revenues and Benefits departments within local government. The study, from a Marxist analytical perspective, focuses on three aspects of Information Communication Technology (ICT) as a tool of control within the labour process. Firstly, why would management seek to control the labour process in a sector where the profit motive is absent? Secondly, having established a motive for control, how has ICT been utilized as a means to achieve it? Finally, how has the use of ICT affected workers' capability to resist such control? The thesis seeks to place these aspects within the context of the state's position within the capitalist system as an employer of labour and the relationship between central and local government. Literature has been reviewed around the three aspects identified and feeds into the research. Research was carried out at two metropolitan authorities responsible for the administration of Revenues and Benefits. The components of this fieldwork were questionnaires, with the two-fold objective of gathering data on worker attitudes and as a means of interview selection, and a total of 35 interviews carried out with managers, workers and trade union officials to gauge views across a range of perspectives within the workplaces. The findings of the thesis locate the desire for control of the labour process in the public sector within its position as a component part of a capitalist system and within a dynamic relationship between central and local government. This has led to management seeking to use ICT as a tool of control to achieve an intensification and displacement of labour, and to a challenging environment for labour to exercise resistance. However, the thesis still views the frontier of control as shifting and not finally settled.

The aim of this research is to present and discuss the challenges of achieving sustainable competitive advantage through effective project management assets, processes and practices,within a Local Authority Third-Sector collaborating scheme. Post 2008 global financial crisis the UK public sector has undergone unprecedentedreform and severe fiscal retrenchment (Evans, Hills & Orme, 2012). Increased competition and a financial landscape radically changed the way public sector services are delivered (Westwood, 2011). A significant challenge of austerity was the retrenchment of local authority grant dependant third-sector funding. In the UK, local authorities would enter into a collaborative contract with third-sector organisations to deliver services across a wide range of social needs. However, these arrangements were becoming increasingly financially unviable. Thus, local authorities need to find ways to make their third-sector collaborating arrangements sustainable, within a context of increasing competition, whilst honouring their range of public duties and services. Project management practice is recognised as a management discipline to manage change and execute strategy (Shenhar, 2001). A growing body of knowledge link the deliberate investment in project management assets and associated processes and practices as a strategic source of competitive advantage (Mathur, Jugdev & Fung, 2013, 2014). The opportunity presented in this research was how Local Authority collaborating third sector arrangements can achieve sustainability through effective project management practices;in particular the acknowledgement, development, deployment and exploitation of project management assets, processes and practices as a source of competitive advantage. However,the unique context of this investigation poses two challenges: i) the notion that competition is not relevant; and, ii) the non-professional project management nature of both the local authority and their collaborating third sector organisations. Thus, in partnership with a UK local authority and 26 third-sector partner organisations(LASIS), the RBV VRIO framework (Barney, 1991; Barney & Wright, 1998) was the lens empirically operationalised within a mixed methodology approach. Designed to identify which,project management assets and associated processes and practices LASIS strategic managers should deliberately acknowledge, develop, deploy and exploit when conceiving competitive advantage strategies, to deliver project impact and sustainable competitive advantage. Hence,the research seeks to identify the specific project management assets, processes and practice endowments leveraging degrees of competitive advantage, how advantage is provided and identify endowment mix that are more likely to indicate performance. Academic literatures on resource-based view, project management and the public-sector post 2008 financial crisis was reviewed, in order to establish knowledge gaps and a foundation to advance theoretical positions and practitioner solutions. A significant set of quantitative and qualitative empirical analysis identified several models of theoretical, conceptual and practitioner significance. Data was collected via survey questionnaire (n=70), semi-structured interviews (n=13) and informal conversations (n=9) during a 30-month period in which the researcher had full access to the LASIS. The core contributions of this research include: i) a mix of tangible and intangible project management assets leverage sustainable competitive advantage (SCA); ii) a mix of Acquire Assets and Facilitating Process Assets are necessary for SCA; iii) how advantage is provided; and, iv) the conceptual formula >vrio + >pk = >cap linking - the degree of deliberate project management investment and the level of project management performance knowledge, as moderators of competitive advantage and performance. Finally, this research makes a contribution to: v) practice knowledge through the empirical development of competitive advantage models exploiting project management assets;vi) advancing theoretical strategic management knowledge of a new application for the VRIO framework; and,vii) to the general project management knowledge, that maybe of practitioner value to strategic managers across the wider public and third sectors.

This study calls into question the use of sovereign bond yield differentials (spread) as an indicator of fear of default during the euro crisis. The spread between the German bund and other euro area sovereign bonds has been widely employed by academics and regulators primarily as an indicator of the financial markets' perception of sovereign default risk. I argue that the fixation with fear of sovereign default as the key driver of market sentiment stems from a significant gap in the literature regarding the mechanisms underpinning the provision of bank funding in the euro area. On the one hand, sovereign bonds are the main source of collateral in repo contracts, key financial instrument banks use to access short-term funding in the euro area. On the other hand, central counterparty clearing houses (CCPs) clear a significant proportion of repo trades in the euro area, which means that these companies play a fundamental (yet neglected) role in the connection between sovereign debt and bank funding in Europe. One of the arguments made here is that the ways in which European financial integration has been carried out has made sovereign debt markets in the euro area vulnerable to what I call CCP-induced collateral crises. Indeed, the key finding of this study is that the sudden increase in collateral requirements by LCH. Clearnet, one of the world's largest CCPs, reduced the liquidity of Irish, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish sovereign bonds as collateral to access short-term funding in repo transactions. This led banks in the euro area to conduct largescale bond sell-offs of the above mentioned securities, destabilising sovereign debt markets and widening spreads. This project concludes that the widening of the spreads from 2010 to 2012 was therefore also an indication of investors' concerns with liquidity risk, and not only of fear of sovereign default.

This doctoral thesis studies sovereign credit risk during periods of uncertainty about the state of a government's fiscal position. A new measure of fiscal uncertainty is introduced, based on the disagreement in official forecasts of the public budget deficit, and forecast revisions to approximate common uncertainty shocks. It is shown that in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, fiscal uncertainty increased substantially in advanced economies. The effects of fiscal uncertainty are largely unknown, in particular in the context of sovereign credit risk. To estimate the response of sovereign credit ratings to fiscal uncertainty, a new empirical framework is developed for the analysis of rating determinants. Rating transition is modelled as the joint outcome of two processes, which determine the frequency of rating changes, and their direction. This thesis finds that fiscal uncertainty is perceived a credit risk by rating agencies and increases the probability of a rating downgrade. Fiscal uncertainty also affects the attention paid to sovereign ratings. An event study analysis shows that the attention to rating announcements increases, the more noisy publicly available information about fiscal outcomes is.

This thesis presents three chapters on the macroeconomic effects of fiscal contractionary policies in emerging economies and UK in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis using dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. The first chapter assesses the dynamic effects of fiscal contractionary adjustments on the exchange rate movements in emerging economies to establish which movements are associated with expansionary fiscal contractionary episodes. The results show that exchange rate depreciations are more likely to support fiscal consolidations in emerging economies. The second chapter draws on the Leeper, Plante and Traum (2010) framework to analyse the effects of austerity measures on public debt and the economy in the UK when households are heterogeneous. The findings show that austerity measures reduce government debt-to-GDP but initially contract the economy. Reduction in government consumption results in the largest government debt-to- GDP reduction while transfers shocks are better suited for expansionary fiscal contractionary episodes. The third chapter investigates the effects of the interactions between fiscal contractionary and unconventional monetary policies on the movement of long term interest rates in the UK. The findings show that, spending based fiscal contractionary and unconventional monetary policies reduce the long term interest rates and spur economic expansion.

This thesis studies the promotion and financing of industrial diversification in natural resource-dependent countries. It tries to contribute to the existing literature by addressing three research questions in three main chapters. Chapter 2 attempts to answer the following question: Does financial development induce the diversification and complexity of exports in natural resource-dependent countries? Financial development and deregulation are standard recommendations in order to achieve greater industrial and economic development in these countries. However, using standard panel data econometrics, this chapter shows that financial development has no positive impact on export diversification or complexity. It argues that a general financial development policy recommendation is not expected to be a key for industrial and export diversification in these countries. This result provides an essential motivation for the following chapters. Chapter 3 looks at the financing of industrial diversification in two specific countries, namely Chile and Malaysia, which were both natural resource-dependent, but managed to successfully diversify their respective economies. The two countries have followed different strategies. In Chile, diversification has been towards niche natural resource-based industries, while in Malaysia the strategy has been to defy comparative advantages, resulting in specialization in sophisticated and high value added products. This chapter examines the role of the state and the financial system in financing the industrial diversification. The main finding is that in both countries the state has always played a key role in directing finance to strategic sectors and in contributing to the emergence of new industrial activities. Diversification in Chile and Malaysia has not occurred through free market operations and liberalized financial systems settings. Chapter 4 concentrates on promoting industrial diversification in oil dependent countries using Saudi Arabia as the case study. It starts by reviewing various strategies of economic diversification in the context of resource-dependent countries. In particular, it reviews the literature on resource-based industrialization (e.g. Perez, 2015), the literature on the Growth Identification and Facilitation Framework (i.e. Lin 2011) and the literature on the product space theory (i.e. Hidalgo and Hausmann 2009). This chapter, then, uses these frameworks to suggest possible diversification strategies in Saudi Arabia and to assess the government’s recently promoted diversification plan (Vision 2030). Furthermore, the potential role of the Saudi financial system is fully examined.

This thesis studies multi-sector macroeconomic models suitable for policy analysis. The first and second chapters use a variety of empirical and theoretical macroeconomic models allowing for the consumption of goods with different durability, and analyze which modeling assumptions and features of the economy are crucial for the conduct of monetary policy. The third chapter focuses on the role of fiscal and monetary policies in the Euro Area, thus providing insights about the joint policy stance that have the potential to inform future policy choices. In the fi rst chapter, we challenge a crucial assumption made in the literature of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models with durable and nondurable goods about their relative price stickiness. We start with a thorough empirical analysis by estimating a Structural Vector Autoregressive model of the US economy, in which we find that the response of the relative price of durables to a monetary policy contraction is either flat or mildly positive. It signi cantly falls only if narrowly de ned as the ratio between new-house and nondurables prices. These findings are then rationalized via the estimation of two-sector New-Keynesian (NK) models. Durables prices are estimated to be as sticky as those of nondurables, leading to a flat relative price response to a monetary policy shock. Conversely, house prices are estimated to be almost flexible. Such results survive several robustness checks and a three-sector extension of the NK model. These findings have implications for building NK models with durable and nondurable goods, and for the conduct of monetary policy. This chapter is based on an article co-authored with Dr. Giovanni Melina (International Monetary Fund) and published in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. The second chapter adds imperfect labor mobility to a two-sector New- Keynesian model with durable and nondurable goods and estimates it with Bayesian methods. We use the model to design optimal monetary policy and find that an inverse relationship between sectoral labor mobility and the optimal weight the central bank should attach to durables inflation arises. Moreover, we show that the combination of nominal wage stickiness and limited labor mobility leads to a nonzero optimal weight for durables inflation even if durables prices were fully flexible. These results survive alternative calibrations and interest-rate rules and point toward a non-negligible role of sectoral labor mobility for the conduct of monetary policy. This chapter is co-authored with Dr. Giovanni Melina (International Monetary Fund). The third chapter of the thesis focuses on the role of shocks and policies in the Euro Area business cycle. We consider the long-term structure of government debt and introduce a financial sector. These features allow the model to account for both the recent nancial and sovereign debt crises, and the effects of the unconventional monetary policy implemented by the European Central Bank. We then determine the joint fi scal and monetary policy stance in the Euro Area and find that it has been expansionary in the aftermath of the financial crisis but has turned to be contractionary after the sovereign debt crisis. The joint effect of the austerity measures taken by governments of European countries and the zero-lower-bound constraint on the monetary policy rate caused the reversion of the policy stance, which was prevented to be even more contractionary only by the quantitative easing implemented by the European Central Bank. This chapter is based on a paper co-authored with Dr. Nicoletta Batini (International Monetary Fund), Dr. Giovanni Melina (International Monetary Fund) and Dr. Stefania Villa (Bank of Italy).

This thesis examines the allocation of human capital in the public sector. I build a new global school-level database comprising 1.73 million public primary schools in 86 countries to study the allocation of teachers across schools across countries at different income levels. In line with common wisdom, I find a strong negative correlation between schoollevel pupil-teacher ratios (PTRs) and the level of income of a country. More strikingly, I document that the within-country variation in PTRs is also higher in lower income countries. This negative correlation between PTR variation and per capita income is also found within countries over time. Cross-country regressions and cross-district regressions within developing countries suggest that teachers may be misallocated across schools in developing countries: aggregate educational attainment and PTR variation are negatively correlated - even after controlling for differences in per capita income and aggregate PTR. I build a theoretical framework to characterize the notion of misallocation and calibrate the model to simulate counterfactual teacher allocations. I find that aggregate gains in grade promotion from teacher reallocation would be substantial in many developing countries. I finish by discussing the causes and implications of my findings. A case study from Zambia points to lack of managerial capacity and weak enforcement of teacher allocation policies as important underlying factors. A comparison of the distribution of health workers across public primary care facilities in Zambia and England suggests that misallocation of public human resources could also be an issue in other public sectors in developing countries.

Higher education plays an important role in economic growth, job creation and export performance. It also has implications for research and knowledge creation. However, there is a notable lack of studies conducted in MENA, and other Arab countries. In particular, there is a dearth of research in the context of Libya, which has been witnessed the massive transformation that in terms of its political, economic, and institutional environment; and, there is a need to explore and understand the current applied system of higher education funding. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the Libyan government’s policies for the provision of funding to higher education. In addition, this study investigates and explores the obstacles and challenges experienced by the higher education sector in recent years. Furthermore, the study identifies the government policies, institutions and other factors influencing the decisions regarding the financial allocations to public universities. This study adopts a qualitative approach to collect data using semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The data was analysed using the thematic analysis technique following the length guidelines of Braun and Clarke (2006). The findings suggest that the operations of Libyan public universities are not only contingent upon government funding but also on the exploitation of universities’ resources. Besides, the findings reveal that there are certain factors behind the low levels of universities’ resources, such as legislation, government restrictions, lack of government encouragement and seriousness for universities to improve their income. The study also identifies various motivational factors behind government funding decisions. Furthermore, the findings confirm that, for universities and government agencies alike, economic (that is, resources available, government priorities, and instability of economic and political status in Libya), social (tribal as well as personal influence) and political factors (i.e., political clout, government and legislations restrictions) influence the distribution of resources.

This research aims to examine the effect of fiscal policy on economic growth. To achieve this aim, the study has carried out an extensive review of the literature on the importance and challenges of fiscal policy, from which the associated theoretical and empirical frameworks have been critically reviewed. Moreover, the effects on economic growth through the instruments of the fiscal policy in Libya and Saudi Arabia in the long or short run have been examined. The research has employed annual time series data that contain 873 observations for nine variables for both countries. Libyan data includes 204 observations for four variables using the time series data during the period between 1962 and 2012, while Saudi Arabian data includes 180 observations for the same four variables between 1970 and 2014. To examine the long- and short-terms effects of fiscal policy on economic growth, the cointegration tests, the VECM and VAR models, and the causality tests, have been applied in this research, the findings of which indicate that there is a long-term effect of certain fiscal policy tools, namely government expenditure and revenues, on the economic growth of the Libyan economy. Additionally, there is a long-term causal relationship between government expenditure and revenues and economic growth. On the other hand, the outcomes found for the Saudi Arabian economy indicate that there is only a short-term effect of the fiscal policy tools - again, government expenditure and revenues - on economic growth, and short-term causal relationship between government expenditure and revenues on economic growth. Moreover, the econometric forecasting tests were applied in this research depending on the estimates found by the VECM and the VAR models. The outcomes of these tests revealed that the estimation models have a strong forecasting ability.

Gloucestershire County Council (GCC) had embarked on a process of change. Reductions in public sector funding, increases in the numbers of vulnerable people and the need to save money across its services were outlined within its 2015 strategy 'Meeting the Challenge 2 - 'Together We Can'. The principle aims of the research were to develop a different relationship between GCC and communities - to enable them to become more resilient and empowered. The research used multiple methodological approaches to explore the personal and political meanings of empowerment and resilience during this period of change. The approach was novel and unique in this area, utilised to explore the experiences of individuals within those communities. This included Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, to investigate the experiences of participants (Elected councillors, Council Officers, Voluntary Sector employees, Volunteers, Carers) living and working in Gloucestershire, and Discourse Analysis which focussed on the role and impact of language. The findings of the research reflected an iterative and interpretative cycle, highlighting key findings in the convergence and divergence of meaning in terms of community, empowerment and resilience. This was categorised and developed through four distinct but overlapping themes of 'Problems, Power, Identity and Relationships'. For all of the processes, policies, regulations and progress articulated in the discourse and encountered in experience, participants often described empowerment as a simple awareness of others and confidence to act in a more open and transparent way. Resilience, understood through practices of coping with the state system and its behaviours could help to recover or rediscover the nature of the relationship with communities. Yet regardless of the context, there appeared to be recurrent patterns of behaviour on both sides. 'Recovery', a concept encompassing both empowerment and resilience is proposed by the thesis as a key framework for developing future practice, policy and research.