This thesis analyses three distinct economic problems through the common lens of informational asymmetries. In each chapter we show how market behaviour is best understood as the outcome of differentially informed market participants interacting with each other within the rules specified by the respective market under consideration. Chapter 2 provides an explanation for the variety of contracts offered by competitive firms for seemingly identical products or services, e.g. in mobile communication or personal banking. We show that firms’ menu of tariffs can be understood as screening devices for consumers with mistaken beliefs about their future demand. We furthermore show that while competition between firms prevents firms from exploiting their customers’ limited cognitive ability, competition is not able to correct the inefficiency caused by customers making suboptimal choices. Chapter 3 studies the effect of a financial transaction tax on the trading of a security. We construct a market microstructure model and estimate it using intraday transaction data for a stock traded on the NYSE (Ashland Inc.). The estimates are then used to simulate how a financial transaction tax would impact volume, spreads and informational efficiency in the asset market under consideration. Chapter 4 constructs a model of observational learning with payoff externalities that provides a justification for the use of short term debt in the financing of investment projects. While financing with debt that is subject to roll over risk is often seen as a source of instability, potentially triggering investor runs on financially sound institutions, we show that it can play an important role in facilitating the revelation of privately held information about future performance of the investment.

This thesis is comprised of two papers, both related to the criminal justice system. In the rst paper, I examine racial and ethnic sentencing di erentials in US federal courts. The aim is to better understand not just the magnitude of these di erentials, but rather their source. The second paper evaluates a cannabis depenalization policy in a single London borough, and assesses how such a policy can impact both drugs, and non-drugs crime, considering the responses of drug users and the police. As such, these papers contribute to a large body of literature concerning the economics of crime. The rst, by better understanding sentencing outcomes, and the second, by considering how drug users and police respond to change in illicit drugs policy.

At the heart of China's economic transition is the privatisation reform launched in the late 1990s. This thesis identifies the driving force behind the dynamics, characterising the privatisation story in China, in terms of the shrinkage of state sector. Nine hypotheses are established to test the influence of a variety of factors across macroeconomic environment, microeconomic condition and the context of political economy. Two panel datasets, generated from public data sources with respectively 450 and 3,300 observations during the period from 1994 to 2008, are analyzed by system general method of moments (system-GMM) in a dynamic specification. New empirical evidence adds to our understanding of privatisation in China by rejecting a uniformly consistent path, but highlighting its enormous complexity, captured in its evolutionary, regionally and sectorally diverse nature. The process of privatisation appears to be multi-dimensional, which not only reflected a centrally-determined national policy, but was played out as a drama in which the principal actors were the central reformers, local bureaucrats, enterprise managers, bank lenders and private investors.

Financialisation addresses the rising importance of the financial sphere in contemporary capitalist economies, but the concept has remained theoretically vague, often failing to go beyond the narrow confines of the rise of finance and to examine the broader interaction of finance with the rest of the economy. Furthermore, scarce attention has been paid to the relevance of financialisation to developing countries, particularly to middle-income countries. South Africa is an important case-study that enables a stronger conceptualisation of financialisation, encompassing its relation to developing countries. The thesis first develops a political economy approach to the concept of financialisation by drawing on recent work that stresses the changing conduct of non-financial enterprises, banks and households. A theoretical framework for financialisation is developed and is then set against the empirical reality of South Africa. To be specific, the thesis examines the evolution of financial flows as well as of the financial position of different sectors - focusing on non-financial enterprises, banks, and households - during the post-apartheid period, thus testing the relevance and applicability of financialisation to South Africa. The thesis shows that the South African economy is indeed a financialised economy, but which nevertheless presents a number of distinguishing features for each sector due to the specific domestic historical context and connections with the world market. Non-financial enterprises have become increasingly engaged in debt and equity markets, but still rely on traditional sources of funding, such as bank credit. Banks have targeted households as a rising source of income, but investment banking activities have remained marginal. Finally, households have accumulated increasing volumes of debt, although with unequal distribution and cost, reflecting the extreme inequality of the South African society. The results presented contribute to a more robust understanding of financialisation in developing counties showing its variety of form as a phase of capitalist development.

The first chapter proposes an alternative (`dual regression') to the quantile regression process for the global estimation of conditional distribution functions. Dual regression provides all the interpretational power of the quantile regression process while largely avoiding the need for `rearrangement' to repair the intersecting conditional quantile surfaces that quantile regression often produces in practice. The method can be appropriately modified to provide full structural distribution function estimates of the single equation instrumental variables model. In the second chapter, I consider nonparametric identification in nonseparable triangular models. I construct a conditional independence representation which coincides with a normalized version of the structural function in the outcome equation. I illustrate the methodology by estimating a semiparametric nonseparable triangular model with an endogenous regressor. An empirical application to the estimation of gasoline demand functions in the United States is given, and I find that the estimated demand functions are mostly downward-sloping once endogeneity of prices has been accounted for. In the third chapter, I give a falsifiable characterization of a conditional exogeneity restriction imposed upon a vector of instruments given the first stage disturbance in a nonseparable triangular model. I assume that at least two instrumental variables are available, one continuous and one binary or discrete, and use exogenous shifts in their values to generate sets of transformations under which the distribution of observables is invariant. This invariance property is shown to be equivalent to the conditional exogeneity restriction. This result can be used for testing the validity of the available instruments. The fourth and final chapter describes the set of overidentifying restrictions generated by nonmonotonicity of the relationship between the endogenous variable and a continuous instrument in a nonseparable triangular model. The graph of `inverse' functions of a nonmonotone conditional quantile function with respect to the instrument is shown to identify observationally equivalent subpopulations. A procedure for constructing such `inverse' functions is proposed and illustrated with an empirical example.

NGOs have arguably become the most prominent actors in development, managing increasing volumes of funding and becoming important interlocutors to government and international agencies. This thesis contributes to the increasing body of academic literature on NGOs. It presents a case study, namely Lebanon, in recent historical perspective and in the context of changing funding frameworks in overseas development aid. It is examined how country context as well as donor frameworks shape NGO operations. Project implementation by NGOs is judged as highly context specific. That is to say NGO characteristics change with historical, political and social context. NGO operations are shaped by regulatory framework, international development discourse and donor demands. This dissertation addresses how country context, donor preferences and funding frameworks affect project implementation by NGOs Two data sources are used to address this question firstly a large NGO survey, covering more than 3000 non-governmental organisations and secondly a qualitative study consisting of firstly a small database of 197 projects and secondly records of semi-structured interviews with NGO staff and experts. The qualitative data focuses rural development projects. Descriptive analysis of the NGO survey is used to build a historical analysis of the Lebanese NGO sector in various periods. The focus of activity as well as staffing and funding patterns are found to vary across activity and time. Following an analysis of country specific influences on NGO operations is an analysis of donor preferences. Multi-variate logistic regression analysis is used to analyse which donors fund what type of NGOs. Empirical manifestations of donor preferences indicate that Lebanese third sector, governmental and international donors have specific preferences of certain NGO characteristics, such as institutional sophistication, access to networks or sectarian affiliation. Thematic analysis of qualitative data of rural development projects shows that, though donor influence is not articulated directly by NGO staff, it can be revealed through an analysis of implemented projects and a critical appraisal of their impact. Through funding frameworks donors are found to define from the outset a significant share of NGO project implementation.

This thesis is a detailed study of several of the most controversial aspects of parliamentary enclosure. The extent to which some of the allegations of contemporary and modern writers can be applied to Leicestershire is examined, and the limitations of the historical sources for a statistical enquiry pointed out. This work has two principal objects. The first is to show why and how enclosures took place in this county, and to discover how far a conflict of interests between the various social classes arose. The work of the enclosure commission was of fundamental importance, and therefore the appointment and the procedure of the Leicestershire commissioners are examined in detail and their integrity assessed. The case study of the enclosure of Whitwick illustrates the nature and volume of pre-enclosure negotiations amongst the leading interests in the parish, and shows how the administrative and legal problems, which arose after the Act was passed, were overcome. A subsidiary study is made of the extent to which direct influence was exerted in the unreformed Commons over Members dealing with enclosure Bills. The second object is to analyse the principal social and economic effects of enclosure. Thus the factors bringing about changes in the distribution of landownership, notably the cost of enclosure and the commutation of tithes, are considered in detail. The land tax returns reveal that, although the large proprietors and farmers were steadily acquiring land, the effect of enclosure was not so revolutionary as is sometimes supposed. One hundred and nine parishes have been grouped according to the date of their complete enclosure, and the course of poor releif expenditure traced in each group. It is seen that, despite the large acreage converted to pasture in Leicestershire, enclosure was not one of the main causes of the great increases in the sums spent on the poor during the period under consideration. The widely differing circumstances of each parish, however, indivate the danger of broad generalisation in this field.

This thesis is an original and innovative contribution to the debate on the efficiency assessment of the mail business, which is the core business of postal operators. Postal services are an important economic sector for two reasons. First, due to the labour-intensive nature of their work, postal operators are often among a country’s top two employers. Secondly, because of the nature of their business, which is connecting domestically and internationally people, companies and governments, they contribute significantly to economic and social cohesion. The efficiency of postal operators is important in light of the European Commission’s recent focus on state aid in this sector. In a 2012 decision it criticised previous methods of assessing cost efficiency, specifically the two pillars of cost analysis used in the past decade: NERA, 2004, and Cohen et al., 2002. It suggested the development of a more robust and comprehensive methodology. This thesis aims to provide a robust method for assessing this efficiency by building on earlier work to develop an original and comprehensive three-stage framework which could be applied in a hypothetical case in front of European Institutions. The three stages are: 1) assessment of the segment under analysis to comprehend the level of competition, 2) for the more competitive segment, the application of the survivor technique is suggested and 3 ) for the less competitive segment, the proposal is to apply the Principal Component Analysis to identify the determinants of demand, then utilise parametric, non-parametric and semi-parametric methods to analyse efficiency (ideally a two-stage DEA with Tobit with exogenous variables), and the Spearman technique to investigate ranks emerging from the analysis. This method has potentially wide application. It is a useful tool for regulatory authorities, European Institutions and national courts and could be extended to other regulated industries with similar characteristics.

This thesis aims to provide helpful insights into trade in goods and services. The first two chapters focus on the micro-level determinants of international trade in services in the UK: The aim of the first chapter is to investigate the determinants of trade in services in a gravity framework, considering both country- and firm-level factors. The second chapter investigates how the determinants of service trade vary along the distribution of trade value and how the firm-level characteristics influence the impact of typical gravity variables. The third chapter focuses on the UK's imports of goods from China and investigates the impact of increasing Chinese import competition on local labour market outcomes in the UK. The results from the first chapter show that the gravity equation succeeds in explaining the determinants of service exports and imports. When the disaggregated level data is taken into account, the coefficients of the trade determinants change considerably, suggesting that the policies adopted according to the results of the country-level analyses do not fit all of the trading firms. The second chapter provides evidence for the parameter heterogeneity in firm-level service exports and imports in a gravity context. According to the findings, the impact of typical gravity variables is influenced by the firm characteristics and differs along the distribution of trade value. The findings from the third chapter show that exposure to Chinese imports does not have any significant impact on workers in the UK. The results are sustained when the different demographic groups, such as age, gender and education level are considered, except in the case of graduate employment. Accordingly, exposure to Chinese imports is associated with a decline in graduate employment only. The analysis regarding the firm characteristics suggests that exposure to Chinese imports within these local labour markets decreases the average firm size, whereas the average labour productivity remains unaffected.

The first systematic analysis of the skew-normal distribution in a scalar case is done by Azzalini (1985). Unlike most of the skewed distributions, the skew-normal distribution allows continuity of the passage from the normal distribution to the skew-normal distribution and is mathematically tractable. The skew-normal distribution and its extensions have been applied in lots of financial applications. This thesis contributes to the recent development of the skew-normal distribution by, firstly, analyzing the the properties of annualization and time-scaling of the skew-normal distribution under heteroskedasticity which, in turn allows us to model financial time series with the skew-normal distribution at different time scales; and, secondly, extending the Skew-Normal-GARCH(1,1) model of Arellano-Valle and Azzalini (2008) to allow for time-varying skewness. Chapter one analyses the performance of the time scaling rules for computing volatility and skewness under the Skew-Normal-GARCH(1,1) model at multiple horizons by simulation and applies the simulation results to the Skew-Normal-Black-Scholes option pricing model introduced by Corns and Satchell (2007). Chapter two tests the Skew-Normal Black-Scholes model empirically. Chapter three extends the Skew-Normal-GARCH(1,1) model to allow for time-varying skewness. The time-varying-skewness adjusted model is then applied to test the relationship between heterogeneous beliefs, shortsale restrictions and market declines.