The study examines and analyses the Government of Zimbabwe's investment policy in water and irrigation agriculture between 1980 and 1985 from an economic and policy approach. The approach emphasises both the economic and policy implications that result from such public investment. The major objective of the study is to assess whether or not public investment in water and irrigation has satisfied Government economic and policy objectives of 'growth and equity'. The cost-benefit framework has been adopted in the assessment of the performance of the commercial irrigation sector. Using this framework, the study seeks to show whether chosen policies have optimized such economic benefits as economic growth, profitability, foreign exchange earnings, and employment creation, for the costs incurred. Small-scale peasant schemes are assessed using cost-effective analysis framework. On the basis of this method, the study examines the extent to which chosen policy strategies and projects have maximized equity objectives such as the increase in food production, improvement in standard of living, and increase in income earnings etc, at least cost of production. Throughout the analysis of the two sectors, the role played by public subsidies in all the cost structures is examined. In the case of peasant schemes the costs are compared with those of the rain-fed peasant agriculture in order to assess the incremental equity, or lack of it, due to irrigation. Social and environmental effects of these policies and their impact on costs and benefits are also discussed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The whole analysis takes place against the background of national economic decline, rising investment costs and rising public debt. The question of the economy's ability to support a subsidy-based investment policy is central in the whole study as this raises serious implications for future investment. Alternative investment strategies and future research areas are suggested.

Volatility is a measure of risk, and as such it is crucial for finance. But volatility is not observable, which is why estimation and inference for it are important. Large high frequency data sets have the potential to increase the precision of volatility estimates. However, this data is also known to be contaminated by market microstructure frictions, such as bid-ask spread, which pose a challenge to estimation of volatility. The first chapter, joint with Oliver Linton, proposes an econometric model that captures the effects of market microstructure on a latent price process. In particular, this model allows for correlation between the measurement error and the return process and allows the measurement error process to have diurnal heteroskedasticity. A modification of the TSRV estimator of quadratic variation is proposed and asymptotic distribution derived. Financial econometrics continues to make progress in developing more robust and efficient estimators of volatility. But for some estimators, the asymptotic variance is hard to derive or may take a complicated form and be difficult to estimate. To tackle these problems, the second chapter develops an automated method of inference that does not rely on the exact form of the asymptotic variance. The need for a new approach is motivated by the failure of traditional bootstrap and subsampling variance estimators with high frequency data, which is explained in the paper. The main contribution is to propose a novel way of conducting inference for an important general class of estimators that includes many estimators of integrated volatility. A subsampling scheme is introduced that consistently estimates the asymptotic variance for an estimator, thereby facilitating inference and the construction of valid confidence intervals. The third chapter shows how the multivariate version of the subsampling method of Chapter 2 can be used to study the question of time variability in equity betas.

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There has been an exponential growth in International Investment Agreements (IIAs), signed by countries to protect foreign investments, in last two decades. These agreements provide broad standards of treatment and give private investors the right to challenge allegedly treaty- inconsistent regulatory actions of sovereign countries at international arbitration. Over the last decade or so, such investor-state disputes have increased manifold where all sorts of regulatory actions, like urban policy; health policy; monetary measures; taxation, property rules, environmental policy, have been challenged by private investors. These developments have not only brought the investor-state dispute settlement system under the scanner but have also made it imperative to critically review the substantive law the investor-state tribunals apply i.e. the IIAs. In this light, this thesis will critically analyse Indian IIAs, which have not been subjected to detailed research yet, despite India’s gigantic IIA programme and India’s increasing integration with the global economy. This thesis will analyse the provisions on fair and equitable treatment; expropriation; monetary transfer; and non precluded measures (NPM) in 73 Indian IIAs from the perspective of India’s regulatory power as a host nation. The thesis hypothesises that the present formulations of these four provisions, in Indian IIAs, are capable of being interpreted in a manner that gives precedence to investment protection over India’s regulatory power to adopt policies and measures directed at achieving legitimate policy objectives. Hence, the thesis concludes that these provisions in Indian IIAs should be reformulated in a manner that balances investment protection with India’s regulatory power.

This document evaluates the market; timing records of professional portfolio managers. It concentrates on measuring the market timing. activities of mutual fund portfolio managers, with particular emphasis on the role of liquid asset management. It begins by demonstrating that the industry's growth from 1960 through 1971 was characterized by an increasing propensity for capital gains rather than investment income. It is also shown that the managers rarely hold more than two percent of their assets in non-yielding forms such as cash and demand deposits. Instead, they hold sizeable amounts of low risk instruments such as U.S. Government Bills, Notes, and Bonds as well as high-grade commercial paper.

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