There is a large literature on housing submarket definition and identification. They did not address how to model submarkets once they have been identified. Yet the modelling literature has produced several different approaches. These approaches are being applied in different contexts at different times and using different data sets. This thesis seeks to control some of this variation. It applies four (market-wide hedonic model, hedonic models with submarket dummy, separate hedonic models for each of submarkets, multi-level model) of the most common methods to a data set comprising 2175 transactions in the Istanbul housing market. The performance of these models is compared on the basis of their accuracy in terms of proportion of estimated prices that fall within tolerable range of the actual price. The results show that that the hedonic and multi-level models with experts' submarket dummy variable can predict more accurately than the models with a priori and cluster analysis stratified submarkets. Similarly, the root mean square error test results indicate that the hedonic and multi-level models with experts' submarket dummy variable show better performance than other models. These test results show that both the hedonic and multi-level models with experts' stratified submarkets dummy variable yields better performance than market-wide hedonic models.

Relationships in business are and will always be of extreme importance. Marketing is not an exception to this generalised idea, developing relationships with customers being hence one of its key aims. Undoubtedly, relationship marketing (RM) is a major field of research nowadays, with a massive literature in this subject. The relevance of direct marketing (OM) as a powerful tool to achieve RM aims is also clearly recognised. Therefore, these two marketing areas are closely linked by many authors. Surprisingly, there is a significant lack of empirical evidence on how the relationship development through OM "really happens". It is not sufficient to state that OM has an important role in RM. It is needed to understand how this link between OM and RM "works", namely which are the activities and processes behind it. Moreover, the current literature linking OM and RM is almost entirely focused on business-to-consumer (BTC) markets, being more quantitative-oriented, and neglecting the customers' side of this "relationship" development. This research covered these gaps found in the literature, exploring qualitatively customers' perceptions on the relationship development through OM, in a business-to-business (BTB) context, using a grounded theory approach. No " empirical study 'was found examining this particular combination. 30 semistructured interviews were conducted with training customers, specifically training directors and participants of 30 different companies" in Portugal. This research contributes significantly to the OM and RM literature, both as a link and also to each of them individually. It explains which are the OM key roles in the relationship development, namely in its different stages of establishment, maintenance and enhancement. Moreover, differences among customers were found, some of them being more, tran~actional others more relationshiporiented: Finally, customers have entirely different perceptions regarding OM received in a BTC or in a BTB setting. The research findings will be applied to the marketing practices of the training company where the author works in Portugal; the aim being to develop better and more effective relationships - through OM with their customers.

This thesis argues that hostilities between the two main trade partners in the international farm market, the United States and the European Community, have their roots in the defence of their market share rather than in the conflict between different economic ideologies. In contrast to non-primary products, the agricultural trade rules in the stillborn Havana Charter and in the long-lasting GATT allowed wide room for manoeuvre for protectionist and subsidising measures. In the twenty years that followed the coming into being of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade the United States tried to secure its market in the member states of the European Community and to curb its growing competitive potential in the world market, but it does not seem that it was ready to make a reshaping of its own system conditional on an international agreement. The strains that afflicted the US and the EC systems in the early 1980s had some features in common but their causes and their effects differed. It is, therefore, natural that the attitudes of the parties in the Uruguay Round negotiations differed. The proposals tabled by the United States aimed at a freer market but did not mean the removal of all kinds of government-financed support and above all were bound to impose a much heavier burden on EC farmers than on their US competitors. In turn the European Community was not ready to commit itself to international deals whose effects on its farm policy would go beyond those of the limited domestic reforms agreed on by the member states. Finally, a formally multilateral, but actually bilateral, agreement was reached when the European Community implemented a farm reform that partially replaced its traditional price support system with an income support system similar to that in place in the United States and the latter abandoned its demands for a radical curtailment of domestic and export subsidies and focused on limited commitments that, however, could rein its European competitors' export capacity.

This dissertation examines various determinants of productivity. First, it examines the effect of size on the performance of industries in Malaysia. Different proxies for size are used to see if it makes a significant difference to the results. Results show that: annual sales turnover is a better measure for size because it is not biased to capital intensive and labour intensive industries; the change in size of large industries seems to be able to explain more of the variations in output per labour compared to the medium and small ones. Second, it examines whether research and development has a long run relationship with total factor productivity of the manufacturing industries in the UK. R&D are decomposed into R&D capital by the industry's own enterprises, other industries' enterprises, and foreign R&D capital. Panel unit root and panel cointegration tests are performed on a panel of 20 industries during 1980--2002. I find R&D and productivity to be cointegrated in the long run. The elasticities of productivity with respect to these R&D variables show that the industries significantly benefit from other domestic industries and foreign R&D but not their own. Third, it re-examines the direction of the causality between exports and productivity for Malaysian industries by using the error-correction and Granger causality models. By including other variables like size and capital intensity in my models, I have captured the indirect effects besides the direct effects between exports and productivity. I find that these industries support the export-led growth hypotheses, not the growth-driven export hypothesis. However, a further look into the results indicates that there is a possibility of an indirect causality from productivity growth to export through size, as productivity causes size, and size in turn causes exports.

In this thesis, I examine three empirical research questions that are concerned with the expansion of international trade and the increasing activity of multinational firms. First I attempt to determine empirically the effect of the rising volume of international trade on the relative wages of skilled and unskilled workers in the US economy for the period 1967-1991. Secondly, I try to assess the causal effect on total factor productivity ( TFP) growth of a change in the status of British firms from domestic producers to either exporters or subsidiaries of multinational firms over the period 1990 to 1996. Finally, I decompose the growth rate of the volume of US net exports into five components. These are a term of trade component, an endowment component, a production technology component, a preferences component and an income component. Then I obtain estimates of each component's contribution and I am able to provide possible explanations for the particular path the volume of US net exports followed in the period 1966-1991.

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Impulse behaviour in general and impulse buying in particular have a long history of negative associations in research. Consumers are advised by the popular press to refrain from impulse buying. Marketing practitioners, on the other hand, strive to further increase consumer impulse buying expenditures, which have already been on the increase for decades. This may be an indication that impulse buying makes consumers feel happy. Although the topic happiness has received considerable attention in various fields of research, there is little evidence of an in-depth empirical exploration of the role of happiness in impulse buying, which was addressed by this study. This thesis was based on the phenomenological paradigm and adopted a subjective stance, exploring happiness in female consumers' impulse buying experiences. In this inductive exploratory study, qualitative data were collected from focus groups and individual interviews with female consumers aged between 18 and 35 years in Germany. This research sought to investigate how happiness evolves over the impulse buying experience, which was addressed by the longitudinal nature of collecting data over a period of three months in weekly individual interviews. The empirical evidence showed that the pursuit of happiness is one of the major motivations for impulse buying and the subsequent evaluation of the purchase. For instance, the presentation of a newly acquired item to other people with the intention of receiving positive feedback is one of the eight themes which emerged from the iterative process of data analysis. The findings indicate that impulse buying is often appreciated by consumers as an enjoyable experience which may yield positive emotions even after careful reflection some time after the purchase. Impulse buying should not generally be devalued as the dark side of consumption. This research underlines the complexity of impulse buying and indicates overlaps and interdependencies with planned buying. Suggestions for marketing practitioners and retail managers on how to increase impulse buying activities are implicit in these findings.

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Economics of Government Export Promotion The main thrust of this thesis is concerned with finding a new quantitative method for establishing the value or utility of government export promotion. It is set against a general examination of the role and economics of such activities. This is the first academic study in an area which is of increasing interest to governments of both developed and developing economies because there is no satisfactory quantitative measure. To date, such investment has therefore been in the nature of a blind and open-ended commitment. Specific literature On the subject is sparse. Examination of a wideranging literature was therefore necessary. This included: the "conceptual and historical framework; previous qualitative research; societal or public expenditure accounting; international trade and international trade theory; exporters' marketing needs; and, the major disciplines found in government export promotion. The result was the identification of four avenues of evaluation and.also criteria for the possible development of a new measuring technique. Field research was directed to three main areas: (i) the export promotion organisations of eleven overseas governments; (ii) in-depth research into the United Kingdom's export promotion machine; and, (iii) UK exporting firms using the official export services This revealed the evaluation methods employed by government export promotion organisations in some of the major industrialised economies. Further, it enabled a new methodology to be evolved and pilot-tested. A newlevaluative technique is proposed. Relative to other existing techniques, it should permit a quick,.inexpensive and substantially more realistic estimate of the utility of government export promotion services to be made. The approach is based on exporters' turnover and cost-savings effects.

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