The objective of this thesis is to avoid misspecifications and to seek efficiency improvements in cross sectional and time series econometric applications using semiparametric methods. We restrict our attention to single equation models and the use of conditional moment restrictions as well as maximum likelihood methods. The first part of the thesis deals with cross sectional studies on the United Kingdom car market and the second part deals with time series studies of the United States consumption function. There are five main contributions of the thesis. First of all, we have suggested minor extensions of existing semiparametric models; secondly, we have suggested the use of a dimensional reduction method prior to nonparametric estimation; thirdly, we have investigated the use of various rules of subjective and automatic bandwidth selection methods using real and simulated data; fourthly, we have suggested a new approach to overcome problems in the hedonic approach for cross sectional studies,; and finally, we have established a relationship between expected real interest rate and consumption using US time series data.

Previous work on shopping behaviour can be catergorised into three themes. Work has been done to identify different motivations for shopping, developing the original thinking of Stone, (1954) and Tauber, (1972). Work has been done on retail patronage, examining shopping behaviour from the image promoted by retailers, building upon the original work of Matineau, (1958) and Lindquist, (1974). A third body of work, somewhat less coherent, contains a collection of different models of patronage, the most relevant here being that concerned with retail location, based on the work of Huff, (1964) and Christall and Loch, (1930) where patronage is seen to decline with distance. This thesis draws mainly from the perspective in the first theme. It takes as its starting point the concept of the individual being an allocator of time as well as money. People are seen as being motivated in their allocation of time to activities such as shopping by their time orientation. This in tum creates different attitudes to shopping which influences shopping behaviour. Previous work on time attitude and shopping behaviour has tended to emphasise solely time pressure and time saving as being linked (Berry, 1979), although others have seen time orientation as more complex (Gronmo, 1989 and Graham, 1981). A framework is developed that links attitude to time to attitude to shopping and then to actual shopping behaviour. The main contribution from the thesis is in the development and testing ofthis framework. 12 Attitudes to time are claimed to be culture specific (Graham, 1981 and Sheth and Hirshman, 1987) and so the framework is tested in two countries, Britain and Thailand. A questionnaire was developed to measure time attitude, shopping attitude and shopping behaviour in the context of food shopping. This was applied in Blackburn and Bangkok. Factor analysis is used to identify time and shopping attitudes. These are correlated with shopping behaviour specifically time spent shopping, shopping frequency, time of the day used for shopping and the patronage of individual outlets. Cluster analysis is used based upon the time and shopping factors to identify four market segments in each country. Comparisons are made between the results from each study. Although the results contain certain similarities, there are also significant differences that may be linked to differences in attitudes to time between the two countries. The main conclusion from the research is that the time perspective is useful in understanding consumer psychology and patronage behaviour. The results show that time orientation plays an important role in segmenting consumer markets. There are a number of theoretical and practical implications. The conceptualisation of time attitude being linked to patronage behaviour makes a significant contribution to marketing theory. The thesis shows that time orientation and shopping motivation are valuable dimensions in understanding consumer shopping behaviour.

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The practice of health promotion has been dominated by approaches based on theories of the attitude and social cognition. Drawing on two basic assumptions, (a) that individuals are primarily rational, and (b) that there is a causal relationship between attitudes and behaviour, the interventions based on these models assume that the provision of information will affect the attitude and hence lead to behaviour change. Based on the theory of social representations the thesis develops a broader and more heuristic perspective for the study of health issues. This theory proposes that rationality is a collective issue and views the relationship between concepts and actions as symbolic phenomena to be understood in their context of occurrence. Based on this theory the thesis explores the contents and structure of the representation of healthy eating in four groups in Colombian society (two rural and two urban, professionals and non-professionals). A multi-method approach combines an observational study, a multi-level content analysis of media and group discussions, and the structural analysis of the representation using free association procedures. The data are analysed using qualitative techniques, analysis of corpus, factor correspondence analysis and calling into question procedures, and interpreted within the structural perspective of social representations theory. The results indicate that eating is being transformed into a dilemmatic issue, of everyday life, reflecting important social and economic changes at the end of the century. The ambiguous and paradoxical representation of health and healthy eating is evident in the more affluent environments and both a transformation in the perceived relations between culture and nature, and concerns about the longevity and disease prevention. Health marketing and policy implementation, it is argued, must take account of these influences to develop effective campaigns. The thesis concludes with an examination of the potential contributions of the theory of social representations to understand the social psychological aspects of nutritional behaviour.

This work analyzes the linkages between consumption, housing and financial wealth, asset returns, and monetary policy. In Chapter I, I show, from the consumer's budget constraint, that the residuals of the trend relationship among consumption, financial wealth, housing wealth and labor income, cday, should better predict stock returns than a variable like cay from Lettau and Ludvigson (2001), and that this is due to: (i) the ability to track changes in the wealth composition; and (ii) the faster rate of convergence of the coefficients to the "long-run equilibrium" parameters. In Chapter II, I analyze the empirical relationship between wealth shocks and portfolio composition, and find evidence consistent with counter-cyclical risk aversion. I also show that: (i) there is no evidence of inertia; and (ii) time-variation in expectations about future returns partially explains changes in the risky asset share. In Chapter III, I show that monetary policy contractions have a large and negative impact on housing prices, although the reaction is extremely slow. On the contrary, the effect on stock markets is small and very quick. In Chapter IV, I analyze the importance of the risks for the long-run, and show that they explain a large fraction of the cross-sectional variation of average returns. I also find that the preference for a smooth path of consumption, a low intertemporal elasticity of substitution, and a high risk aversion, imply that agents demand large equity risk premia when they fear a reduction in economic prospects. In Chapter V, I investigate the role of three major sources of risk: future changes in the housing consumption share, cr, future labour income growth, Ir, and future consumption growth, Irc. I show that the predictability of many empirical proxies can be achieved without relying on a specific functional form for consumer's preferences.

The thesis looks at changing everyday normative distinctions between consumption practices in three generations of Hungarian families and explores the ethical and practical beliefs that these distinctions are based on. It builds on the one hand on material culture studies, Miller's work in particular, which sees consumption as a realm objectifying relationships and cosmologies. On the other hand it takes up Slater's argument that different notions of needs mediate normative visions of how to live; hence people's diverse definitions of needs have to be taken seriously as a basis of a political debate. The fieldwork that forms the basis of the thesis was carried out in Budapest in 2005-2006 with eight families of two or three generations from different class backgrounds. The oldest generation grew up during pre-socialist times; the middle generation was born under socialism; while those in the youngest generation started their adult life under capitalism. The methods included individual and joint family interviews with observations in everyday contexts. First, the thesis investigates ethical and practical concerns that definitions of needs and 'appropriate' practices draw on in different generations. Second, by comparing different generations of the same families, it maps the way practices and the concerns underlying them are appropriated and changed. Finally, it looks at links between private and public moralizing discourses on consumption, drawing on the existing literature and participants' own accounts and practices. The theoretical argument I put forward is that normative distinctions between practices draw on relatively coherent personal cosmologies that include on the one hand practical wisdom, on the other hand ethical visions of how to live, who to be and entitlement, which are bound up with particular self-understandings, social and personal relationships and visions of a good life. Furthermore, the thesis shows that public discourse and previous practices are not simply adopted, but incorporated into personal ideas through these cosmologies.

This research analyzes the dynamics of vulnerability in Bogota through a study conducted on a 900 households sample during 1997 and 1998. It builds on Moser's key findings and her Assets Vulnerability Framework, concentrating on causal relations between critical life events faced by households, the causes that directly determine them, the consequences or short-term impacts these events implied and, finally, the strategies they adopted in order to face, cope with, as well as react to them. The main added value of the research can be found on the methodological ground. That is, in a further operationalisation of vulnerability analysis as a tool for poverty studies and micro-level livelihoods-centered social policy. The insights provided to answer the main question concerning the research question about the possibility to operationalise vulnerability analysis beyond Moser's Assets Vulnerability Framework show that this is possible on the basis of life events-related vulnerability patterns employment, which have in income-generation, health, violence and the inner dynamic of the household are the interlocking epicenters of a crisis that involves simultaneously a number of dimensions in the lives of low-income groups in Bogota, well beyond the lack of income. Confirming Moser, Pryer, Rakodi and Chambers' findings the research illustrates that different vulnerability patterns reflect different degrees of resilience in the face of the crisis. Since nowadays the debate on vulnerability is not anymore restricted to the respective merits of a static versus a dynamic understanding of poverty, but it is embedded into a wider social protection debate. Therefore, the thesis opens a dialogue not only with a technical but also a social policy dimension of the debate concerning the level of operative decisions about people's livelihoods, choices, well-being and freedoms and it is on this ground that the thesis finds also a conceptual relevance.

This thesis studies three aspects of the financial lives of poor people, using theory and empirical analysis of data from South Africa. The first chapter studies the effect of mode of payment on household savings behaviour. Savings have been linked to consumption smoothing, investment and economic growth. A theoretical framework is set up to study four possible mechanisms through which electronic payment may have an effect on savings. Using difference-in-difference estimates around a policy change, it is found that households are more likely to have savings when their grant is paid directly into an account. These findings are mapped back to the theory in an attempt to identify the relevant mechanisms. The second chapter analyses funeral insurance as a distinct form of insurance. Funeral insurance is probably one of the oldest and historically most important forms of insurance, and is still widespread in parts of Africa today. Though funeral insurance is often provided by informal risk-sharing groups, this analysis abstracts from organisational form and asks under what circumstances funeral insurance is preferred to general life insurance. A model is set up in which there is an inter-generational conflict of interest over funeral expenditure, which funeral insurance may resolve. Predictions from the model are consistent with results from empirical analysis. The third chapter investigates an assumption which is nearly ubiquitous in development economics - that of constrained household liquidity. Direct empirical evidence of such constraints is surprisingly scarce. Many observations consistent with liquidity constraints are equally consistent with precautionary saving or a lack of forward planning. Using a South African panel data set and a source of anticipated income, the standard model with perfect capital markets is rejected. Finding that it fails, further analysis attempts to distinguish between liquidity constraints, precautionary saving and myopia as possible explanations.

This thesis will present a theoretical case for a new indicator of poverty, and construct a specific version of this indicator for the UK. It will calculate the actual poverty line, analyse its components, and discuss its implications. The thesis will begin by demonstrating that the outcomes of poverty studies are highly sensitive to the choice the indicator. It will document the history of poverty measurement in the UK, concentrating on the interaction of theory and measurement in different periods. Since current poverty indicators are not strongly connected to the underlying living standards, this thesis will also provide a new account of how living standards of the least well-off have evolved over the past decades, concentrating especially on recent research findings on measurement issues in this field. This documentation prepares the ground for the actual poverty indicator to be constructed in later chapters. The thesis will proceed to a discussion of the macroeconomic policy implications following from different poverty definitions, integrating the poverty literature into the wider economic literature. This step will identify the existence of problematic trade-offs in poverty policies, providing a case for scrutinising poverty indicators more carefully for their robustness and plausibility. It will move on to perform a ‘robustness test’ on existing measures, and highlight their shortcomings. The critique of existing measures will then be turned into a blueprint for the construction of an alternative measure. This measure will then be constructed with data from a variety of sources. Its results will be presented, and its implications discussed.

This thesis explores the relationship between fiscal decentralisation and poverty. The thesis consists of four parts. First part reviews the related literature addressing different aspects of fiscal decentralisation and poverty and highlighting the research gap that this thesis intends to address. It also explains the possible channels through which fiscal decentralisation potentially affects poverty. Second part describes the political economy, fiscal decentralisation and poverty in Pakistan. It underlines that fiscal policy decisions in Pakistan are made to reflect many vested interest groups and institutions that may be failed to provide basic social services. Additionally, it discusses the development of federalism and fiscal decentralisation in Pakistan and shows that how the vertical and horizontal resource distribution affect the social and economic development of the provinces. This part also discusses various approaches, measurements and trends of poverty in Pakistan. Third part presents a systematic relationship between fiscal decentralisation and poverty both theoretically and empirically. The theoretical framework implies that if the federal transfer rate is larger, then the decentralisation measure will be greater. Since a larger federal transfer rate reduces poverty, poverty and expenditure decentralisation are expected to be negatively related. In addition to the model, there is an extensive empirical study on Pakistan to look at the impact of fiscal decentralisation on poverty besides investigating the potential channels through pro-poor sectoral outcomes. Ordinary Least Squared, Fixed and Radom Effect Models and Generalised Method of Moment Instrumental Variables methodology is used on simple time series as well as panel datasets covering four provinces of Pakistan over the period from 1975 to 2009. The empirical results suggest a strong relationship between expenditure decentralisation and poverty – proxy alternatively by headcount poverty, poverty gap, severity of poverty and the human development index. Both rural and urban poverty reduction have statistically significant relationship with expenditure decentralisation. The results also reveal that decentralisation improves pro-poor sectoral outcomes of education, health and agriculture that consequently affect poverty. The last part illustrates the effectiveness of the devolution reforms by transferring fiscal, political and administrative authorities to local governments on certain social and economic sectors that are believed to be pro-poor. The evidence shows that the devolution significantly changes the size and magnitude of investment on many social and economic sectors. In all provinces, the investment increases in sectors such as education, healthcare, agriculture, water management, water supply and sanitation, rural development and the civil work. Since these services are strongly associated with local needs, it is reasonable to conclude that the devolution implicitly enhances the living standard of the local communities, especially the poor.