Micro data have provided invaluable contributions to a better understanding of the drivers of, and factors affecting, wages, productivity and productivity growth. The literature in this area has highlighted both ownership and innovative activity as two factors that consistently seem to affect productivity and its dynamics at the micro level and the empirical regularity that larger firms pay higher wages. This thesis provides evidence on these issues. In the first chapter I investigate the implications of ownership concentration and the presence of financial institutions for productivity, using both accounting data and detailed data on shareholdings for a panel of quoted UK companies. I control for unobserved firm fixed effects and the endogeneity of inputs and ownership using GMM estimation. The second chapter considers whether nationality of ownership affects productivity. The analysis challenges previous evidence of a foreign ownership advantage in the UK by showing that the foreign advantage is by and large a multinational advantage, except for US firms. In addition, longitudinal analysis disentangles the sources of the US and MNE productivity advantage. The third chapter examines the hypothesis that multinational firms have accessto larger knowledges tocks and quantifies how much multinationals' innovative successis due to higher innovation expenditure and how much to access to their intra-firm worldwide pool of information. The fourth chapter matches information on innovative activity with production data to investigate the link between innovation expenditure, knowledge flows and productivity growth. The results confirm the importance of knowledge flows for innovation and of innovation for productivity growth. The final chapter of the thesis investigates the empirical regularity that larger establishments pay higher wages. The longitudinal estimates demonstrate that positive effects of firm size on wages persist after controlling for observed and unobserved worker, firm and match specific characteristics and correcting for non-random mobility of workers.

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The focus of the work of this thesis is to develop demand uncertainty models for retailers making optimal pricing and inventory decisions on substitutable and perishable products. In particular we study three applications of demand uncertainty models: (i) a stochastic programming approach for two substitutable and perishable products over a two period planning horizon; (ii) a stochastic programming approach for multiple substitutable and perishable products over multiple periods; (iii) a robust optimization approach for two substitutable and perishable products over a single period. The three models support decision makers in retailing to incorporate the future demand uncertainty and substitution between similar products into their pricing and inventory decisions. In the context of a stochastic programming approach for two substitutable and perishable products problem over two periods, a stochastic dynamic programming model has been proposed in which the retailer aims at maximizing the total profit. The property of decision variables is analysed, an efficient search algorithm is developed to obtain the optimal results. Numerical results are reported using a case study based on a high-street fashion company. The sensitivity of the models' parameters is also analysed to address the great importance of data accuracy on decision variables and total profit. The benefits of considering pricing and inventory decisions simultaneously will be demonstrated and the total profit is observed to be significantly improved through the consideration of price substitution between substitutable products. In the context of a stochastic programming approach for multiple substitutable and perishable products problem over multiple periods, two stochastic dynamic programming models are proposed in which the decision maker can employ multiple markdowns on the prices. An efficient search algorithm has been developed by analysing the property of the decision variables. The benefits of making joint pricing and inventory decisions, considering substitutions between similar products; and dividing selling periods into more periods have been quantified. In the context of the robust optimization approach, we relax the assumption on the complete knowledge of the demand distribution from the stochastic dynamic programming model and develop a robust optimization model. The demand function is assumed to belong to an uncertainty set, and our objective is to find the optimal ordering quantity and price which maximize the worst-case profit. We extend a Newsvendor model in the face of uncertainty to consider the optimal pricing and inventory decisions of a retailer. Numerical tests are presented based on a case study of the retailing branch of a solar panel manufacturer. The trade-off between uncertainty level and total profits is illustrated, the sensitivity of parameters is also analysed.

This thesis is not intended as a biography of Sir Dennis Holme Robertson. It is an examination of one important aspect of his work as an economist: his theory of industrial fluctuation.

This thesis investigates the instability of a financial system by taking a specific country’s example with the Indonesian financial system as a case study. To achieve its objectives, this research study aims to answer the following questions: (1) Are there any factors that contribute to financial instability? (2) How is the state of the financial system? (3) Are the policies available effective at dealing with financial instability, in particular external instability? To answer these questions, this study discusses the Financial Instability Hypothesis, employs different time series techniques, explores the relationships between relevant variables and investigates specific events within the observation period. First, this thesis examines the arguments of McKinnon (1973) and Shaw (1973) and applies them to the implementation of Indonesian financial reforms. By modifying IMF’s financial liberalisation index and using it as one of the control variables, this thesis finds that financial liberalisation has a positive association with the volatility of the exchange rate. Second, this thesis develops the measurement of financial instability and investigates the potential for it to become an instrument for the detection of the country’s fragility condition. In developing these instruments, this study takes two different approaches into consideration, namely the ‘static’ and the ‘dynamic’ approaches. The former argues that the cause of financial instability is an exogenous process or a random shock. The construction of the instrument has the main purposes of predicting the occurrence of a financial crisis and measuring the instability of a financial system. Whereas, the latter assumes that financial instability is an endogenous process. In constructing the instrument, it has the objective of detecting the condition of a financial system. This study applies the financial instability measurements in Indonesian’s case and compares their performances with respect to crisis prediction. Third, this study investigates policies to handle the capital flows. It explores the implementation of policies to handle and manage the capital flows. Based on the empirical analysis, this study finds that the capital management policies fulfill its objectives in managing capital flows. Besides, this thesis examines the implementation of the compensation thesis and finds that this mechanism applies to Indonesia.

The object of this research consists in the various forms and features of social movements that have emerged in Greece during the current period of crisis, all evaluated as part of “the social movement as a whole”. The studied period spans from April 2010 to October 2011, and includes the emergence of different forms of mobilization (general and sectoral strikes, the “movement of the squares”, various forms of civil disobedience). The focus was placed on the forms of political participation and the transformation of the actors’ consciousness in relation to their participation and experience, in connection with (1) the objective conditions; (2) their own social position in society; and (3) their own conceptualization of the “political”. The development of new relations between people and politics as well as of various forms of political representation (existing and/or new ones) have been given special attention. Methodologically, this research focuses on two key points. The first concerns the theoretical context of social movements literature and its relevance to the Greek case, as well as the detailed study of the Greek social and political formation, of its class structure and of the crisis. The second point concerns the specific study of the social movement in Greece, including field research, and using in-depth, semi-structured interviews. The sample was chosen according to purposeful sampling, in a way that provided the opportunity to investigate the forms and the effects of political participation. The criterion has been to interview people with little or no prior relationship with politics and activism. Since the focus is on the consciousness of participation and engagement as developed by the participants themselves, and the transformative effects of action upon them, the theoretical conclusions discuss the issue of subjectivity and class consciousness within specific conditions, in relation to the popular perception of the political.

With the current situation of credit spread contagion illustrated by the European sovereign bonds crisis and the chain reaction triggered by the derivatives books of Lehman Brothers, financial institutions have increasingly focused on pricing and risk management of counterparty credit risk. Recent credit contagion through financial contingent claims highlight the fact that contagion links impact the value of products when investors are exposed to counterparty risk. This thesis plan to build on reduced-form credit risk models to assess the credit risk contagion that is inherent in a obligor multivariate framework. The aim is to evaluate the requirements that are necessary in generating a mathematical framework consistent with the valuation of financial claims, credit and non-credit related, where the parties of those claims exhibit credit risk contagion. By applying a multivariate framework of credit contagion to counterparty credit risk based on a queueing theory, called phase-type distribution, we hope to highlight the benefit of bottom-up models versus top-down ones in terms of extracting information relative to dependence within an identi able obligor set. We will review the mathematical literature in addressing credit dependence modelling in dynamic and static format. This will be the opportunity to value a set of claims under our model to show that claims that contain "credit leverage" are particularly sensible to credit risk contagion and could benefit from our developed framework to gain adequate counterparty credit risk pricing.

This research develops and analyses a new set of agent-based models for pricing European options and option portfolios in the context of double auctions. After the financial crisis of 2008, it became obvious that the banking industry had been over-reliant on mathematical models such as Black-Scholes in pricing financial derivatives despite their major assumptions such as the efficiency of markets, the homogeneity and the risk-neutrality of traders, and the limitations in evaluating the risk itself. Although the Black-Scholes framework is regarded as the cornerstone of arbitrage-free pricing of financial derivatives, it does not involve market microstructure in forming option prices. In this research, I add a simulated market component to the existing option pricing methodology through modelling automated option traders and running them on various auction-based mechanisms. My simulation model consists of three consecutive steps: asset pricing, automated traders, and market mechanisms. Firstly, I simulate asset prices beyond Black and Scholes’ initial assumption which also involve fat-tailed distributions and mean-reverting aspects of risk-free interest rates that are common in most underlying markets. Secondly, I design option traders according to my extended version of Information- Inventory-Knowledge-Behaviour (IIKB) framework. While the information and knowledge layers of the framework involve gathering and computing basic statistical parameters of the market, the behavioural layer is designed using three sublayers which are responsible for determining the option price, the quantity to bid/ask and the proxy trading algorithm. I also use Zero- Intelligence (ZI) and indifference pricing techniques along with the Black- Scholes formula to generate heterogeneous option prices. For proxy trading algorithms, I re-purposed well-known inventory- and information-based trading models to deal with options. I also use popular ZIP and GD trading algorithms to model the behaviour of speculative option traders. Finally, in the third step, I feed the orders generated from automated traders to different mechanisms and analyse the obtained option prices. First, I consider direct double auction which has the Dominant Strategy Incentive Compatibility (DSIC) property, so that traders submit only truthful orders. I develop option prices. I also analyse the allocative efficiency and budget-balance of the mechanism. Then, I run trading agents with proxy trading algorithms in an online double auction. I evaluate the obtained option prices and the performance of each proxy trading algorithm used. Another important aspect of the research is the new perspective on pricing of compound financial contracts such as option portfolios using a combinatorial exchange. I explain the substitutability and complementarity of options in given option portfolios, and apply these concepts to the design of the combinatorial exchange for option portfolios. I also illustrate the expressiveness and flexibility of using combinatorial exchanges through a Tree-Based Bidding Language. The main contributions of this research are the design and implementation of a direct double auction for multi-unit and atomic orders, revealed mechanisms for forecasting traders, inventory- and information-based option traders, Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule (LMSR) option pricing based on option portfolios, and the application of combinatorial exchanges to the realm of option pricing.