The discourse on remittance flows has been predominantly financialised, focusing on their development impacts, securitisation in financial markets, and as risks to global financial systems through money laundering, terrorist financing and tax evasion. This has resulted in neglect of senders' perspectives and voices, even though senders bear the financial and human costs of remittances. This is a complex social phenomenon. Adopting bricolage using a mixed methods approach, based on the experiences of Ghanaian and Nigerian senders living in Britain, this study draws on conceptual frameworks of transnationalism, financialisation and wellbeing, and critical theory, to examine the financialisation of remittances, senders' transnational living and livelihoods, and well-being. The research findings are based on reviews of academic and policy literature from transnationalism, social policy and behavioural finance, synthesised with empirical data gathered from a group interview, quantitative survey and in-depth interviews of Ghanaian and Nigerian senders based in Britain. There are five main research findings: participating senders are not only migrant workers, but include British citizens; remittances constitute transnational social protection finance; efforts made by senders through transnational living strategies, sacrifice, and efforts to make recipients feel cared about, are understood as emotional labour; the policy and regulatory environment represents financialisation from 'above'. By highlighting senders' perspectives on remittance sending as a practice that has socio-cultural meanings, where money plays a role in mediating and shaping the dynamic family relationships underpinning the 'surface' financial transaction, the study additionally illuminates ways in which transnational family relationships can become financialised. Through understanding remittances as transnational social protection, and its sending practices as emotional labour and emotion in finance, the study contributes new data, methods, and concepts, drawing together multiple subject disciplines including social policy, international development, and behavioural finance that have traditionally been studied separately, demonstrating areas where they intersect and enrich each other.

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The thesis comprises three independent essays on capital market integration; focussing on developed financial markets in Europe and GIO industrialised nations. These essays are motivated by a comprehensive theoretical review of the current literature on capital market integration which suggests that further investigation of a number of key issues would be extremely useful. The first essay examines the dynamics of the evolving financial and economic interdependencies between three core European nations (France, Germany and UK) and thirteen other European nations. We employ measures of linear dependence and feedback developed by John Geweke (1982) - JASA, 77, 304-324 - to define periodic integration measures that capture the time varying nature of capital market integration in Europe. Evidence from the tests of capital market integration are analysed in terms of fundamental macroeconomic variables to see whether stock market integration is driven by or dependent on economic convergence. The results suggest that European capital markets are becoming integrated especially since the 1990's. Evidence is found in support of a sfa-ong relationship between our time varying integration measures and some macroeconomic variables indicating an increase in economic convergence. The second essay analyses common asset price behaviour in GIO equity and bond market using an innovative dynamic factor modelling framework. Our methodology combines an observable and a latent variable factor structure and decomposes the total variation in the system into a number of differential effects. Generalised methods of moments (GMM) estimation technique and the Kalman filter are used to derive the decompositions and extract the unobservable factors. The results suggest that GIG equity and bond markets are broadly partitioned on regional lines. However, regional segmentation is more emphatic for the bond markets than for the equity markets. The third essay considers the issue of conditional or time-varying correlations and conditional volatility spillovers across international stock markets. It focuses specifically on conditional sectoral volatility spillovers into the UK stock market and assesses the effects of non-market-wide volatility on UK stock market volatility. The dynamics of volatility emanating from international sectoral portfolios is assessed and their effects on overall UK stock market volatility are discussed. Inter-sectoral volatility transmission between the UK, US and the European markets are also investigated. To extract the time-varying (conditional) correlations between the UK stock markets and the selected US and European sectors and, between the UK sectors and US and European sectors, we rely on both the model by Engle and Kroner (1995) and the dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) model suggested by Engle (2002). The transmission of volatility from the US and European sectors to the UK stock market is assessed in the multivariate generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (MVGARCH) model the model of Engle and Kroner (1995). We find substantial evidence of international sectoral volatility spillover into the UK stock market.

The unprecedented regulatory failures of the global financial crisis forced governments and regulators around the world to fundamentally rethink their regulatory approaches and supervisory practices. Yet, they also revealed that existing political science research provided surprisingly few insights into the cross-national causes and consequences of financial regulatory structures and financial regulators' regulatory policy-making. lVIy dissertation aims at filling some of these gaps by improving our understanding of the political determinants and effects of financial regulatory institutions. Using newly collected comparative data, I analyse the political economy of the diffusion, replacement and policy-making of financial regulatory agencies in three empirical papers. The first paper of my dissertation examines the diffusion of financial regulatory institutions across countries.

Global integration - the lowering of barriers to the movement of goods and services, capital and labour across borders - is one of the most important issues confronting Small States in the new millennium. However, the existing literature focuses, in the main, on developed countries or large developing countries. This thesis extends the literature by deriving measures of capital account liberalisation in small states and explores, through the use of panel data techniques, the impact of the removal of capital account restrictions on economic growth and volatility in these states. After the introduction (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 presents a survey of the recent literature on capital account liberalisation in developing countries. Details on the theoretical models of capital account liberalisation, the historical development of capital controls, indices of capital account restrictions, as well as the empirical evidence on the effects of capital account openness in developing countries are presented. Chapter 3 outlines a variety of indicators used to quantify the ease with which capital can move across borders and identify their weaknesses. This chapter also derives these indicators for a sample of 51 small states between 1970 and 2004. Using the database developed in Chapter 3, Chapters 4 and 5 of the thesis extends the existing literature on the link between capital account liberalisation, growth and economic volatility. Chapter 6 concludes and presents policy recommendations. The results obtained show that capital account liberalisation, on average, increases per capita growth in small states by approximately 4 percent per annum, with little impact on output volatility.

This doctoral thesis consists of three essays on the nature and evolution of informational efficiency in an emerging market context. Each essay uses firm and aggregate level data from an emerging market, namely the Trinidad and Tobago Stock Exchange (TISE). The first essay explores the state of informational efficiency in an emerging market setting and how this efficiency evolves over time. It addresses a key issue in the emerging markets informational efficiency literature: informational efficiency is not a static feature of markets but evolves over time with changes in market features and the investor behaviour. The analysis initially applies a battery of econometric tests of the random walk (variance ratio and signed-rank tests) to the full sample returns of aggregate and stock level data from the TISE, to determine whether the market is informational efficient. The findings show that the market is informationally inefficient at the aggregate level, which is accounted for by the severe lack of efficiency in the bulk of stocks traded on the exchange. This result could imply that by and large, stock prices in an emerging market setting may not be accurate signals for resource allocation. The next part of the analysis considers whether this state of informational efficiency varies over time, by applying the more robust signed-rank test in a rolling sub-sample framework to the stock and aggregate level data. The analysis shows that over time, there are transient periods of informational efficiency, which alternate with periods of inefficiency at the aggregate market level. This pattern of time-varying efficiency is largely mirrored by the Banking stocks of the TISE. Such results could mean that informational efficiency in an emerging market setting may improve in some periods but worsen in others. This does not conform to the classical Efficient Markets Hypothesis, which claims that markets should show a clear trend toward higher states of efficiency over time. The second essay analyses the effects of several market microstructures and financial reforms on time-varying informational efficiency in an emerging market setting. It uses data from the TISE, which is measured at the firm level for the microstructure variables. This allows for the analysis to extract the precise effects of microstructures on efficiency, which may otherwise be hidden by aggregate level data. The analysis is done within a panel regression framework. We find that improvements in the microstructure variables, including liquidity, volatility, automation and the number of shareholders enhance informational efficiency over time. However, the financial reforms, including financial liberalisation and regulation, do not alter efficiency in this analysis. We further find that the liquidity and total shareholders of the banking firms have a greater impact on efficiency, in relation to the other listed firms. Taken together, the results could imply that market microstructures playa more important role in causing informational efficiency in an emerging market setting to evolve over time. The third essay explores price predictability from a lead-lag cross autocorrelation perspective. In particular, it considers whether the degree of institutional investment across firms induces lead-lag cross-autocorrelation among stocks. The analysis is conducted by applying returns data at the firm level from the TISE in a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) framework. It is found that the institutionally favoured stocks (HI) "lead" the institutionally unfavoured stocks (LO), as the returns of HI predict the returns of LO better than vice versa. Moreover, HI stocks are also found to lead the TISE market portfolio. These patterns of predictability arise because the stock prices of high institutionally owned firms adjust faster to market-wide information, which implies that these prices are more informationally efficient. It is also found that the extent to which HI leads LO increases with the liquidity of the institutionally favoured stocks and the illiquidity of stocks that are not favoured by institutions. Collectively, the results of this essay provide evidence of the positive role played by institutional investors in the price adjustment process: stocks with a high degree of institutional ownership have a faster speed of adjustment, making them more informationally efficient.

The present thesis comprises three essays in international finance, with a focus on the foreign exchange market. The first chapter assesses the predictive ability of a comprehensive set of empirical models of exchange rates, in addition to a standard technical trading strategy, on monthly exchange-rate returns for four developed and four emerging countries across different horizons. I implement a rolling window approach to the estimation and forecasting of the models, and construct an encompassing forecast. I also assess the economic value of the out-of-sample forecasting power of the empirical models using a simple dynamic allocation strategy, and find three key results: (1) the Taylor rule model consistently outperforms, economically and statistically, all the other models at the 1-month horizon. (2) The technical rule has superior predictive power over the random walk benchmark, across horizons, particularly for developed markets. (3) There are statistical gains from an unrestricted combined forecasting model at the 1-month horizon. The second chapter constitutes a survey that focuses on internationally tradable goods and services. Our motivation is that while excellent surveys exist in the literature on this topic, they focus largely on broad baskets of prices and, most commonly, on the consumer price index. We instead focus on the specific subset of the relevant literature that analyses deviations from the LOP applied to individual goods and services and specific sectors. The emphasis is hence on tradable items rather than broad baskets that also include a substantial nontradable component. Specifically, the objective is to distil the literature on the properties of deviations from the LOP applied to internationally tradable goods or sectors. We conclude that a careful reading of the literature suggests that this notion of PPP holds in the long run for a broad range of tradable goods and services and for a broad set of currencies. In the third chapter, I build a "commodity currency strategy" for exchange rate forecasting that conditions on changes in the global prices of commodity indices. The risk-return profile of this strategy reveals that the predictive ability of commodity prices for the exchange rate appears to be significant, and the returns appear to be uncorrelated to popular exchange rate strategies such as the carry trade and currency momentum. The market factor captures more than 70% of the cross-sectional returns of the proposed strategy and suggests a negative relation between equity returns and currency returns that are driven by commodity price changes. The commodity currency strategy is prone to high transaction costs which can only be circumvented by investing in developed markets with low costs and high liquidity.

The development of an international financial centre has long been an interesting topic to economists, researchers and policy makers. Understanding the development process and the critical success factors helps much in formulating the suitable strategic development plan for the city and more efficient allocation of resources. Among the various international cities or financial centres, the development dynamics of Hong Kong and Shanghai are of high interest to many researchers not only due to the fast emerging growth of the Chinese economy and its influence on the world economy, but also due to the different economic development path of these two places. Using Hong Kong and Shanghai as examples, this paper reviewed and assessed how closely the link between academic literatures, such as Supply and Demand Theory (Smith 1776) , Location Theories (Thunen 1826, Weber 1969, Losch 1954) and Central Place Theory (Christaller 1966, Crocco, Calvante and Castro 2006), Urban Economic Growth Theory (Jacob 1975), Economies of scale (Rosenthal and Strange 2001), Self-reinforcing (or Cumulative Causation Theory) (Pagano et al 2002), Regulations and Prudential Supervision, and Resources based view (Barney 1991), etc., on this topic against the actual historical development of these two places. A survey was constructed to identify from perception of finance industry practitioners the most important key success factors that contribute to the development of these two places as international finance centres. The six most important factors identified are (1) Political Stability; (2) Infrastructure; (3) Regulation and Prudential Supervision; (4) Legal / accounting / governance systems; (5) Market Openness; and (6) Labour supply & quality. Comparing the two places, the survey also revealed that Hong Kong, in general, was perceived to have better infrastructure, financial market regulations, quality of human resources, economic environment and political environment & government support than the Shanghai counterpart. Compared with Hong Kong, Shanghai was still lacking behind in the development stage of becoming an international finance centre, though it was catching up fast. Looking forward, for either or both Hong Kong and/or Shanghai to further strengthen their status as international financial centres, it will to a large extent hinge on how well the policy makers of these two places can further enhance these key success factors. The paper covered a discussion of the future prospects of Hong Kong and Shanghai and at the end of it, various directions of future research were recommended.