This thesis identifies the nature of the values that students hold about business and whether they are acquired through education; the uniformity of the transmission/communication process is addressed. The study traces the views of policy makers and teachers in the policy chain, interviews students and observes classroom interactions in a longitudinal study. The research has been conducted at a time of increasing student numbers on Business Studies courses and during an ongoing debate about the sources of values students hold about business. A distinction is drawn between the values intrinsic to AngloAmerican capitalism and the values that students espouse enabling insight as to whether students are taught and hold AngloAmerican capitalist values or not. Other sources of values such as gender and students’ parttime jobs are considered. Seven policy makers (individuals influencing the creation of the ‘hidden’ or ‘overt’ curriculum) and four groups comprising ‘A’ level and GNVQ Advanced in Business Studies students and their respective teachers participated in the research. The study draws the following conclusions: students, typically, see profit as the primary business objective and this view is framed by the values intrinsic to AngloAmerican capitalism, with other values such as customer service seen as ‘instrumental’ in the pursuit of profitability. Values intrinsic to AngloAmerican capitalism were not directly being transmitted down the policy chain; however, work socialisation values were. The students were able to distinguish between their own personal values and those of business organisations; their personal values often conflicted with those of business. Factors extraneous to education, for example, students’ parttime jobs appear to have a greater influence over their knowledge of business values than that of their teachers. The students often expressed scepticism at business activities, despite no clear evidence that teachers ‘transmit’ antibusiness sentiments. Gender had some influence on the values that students held.

This dissertation consists of three essays on the role of asymmetric information in economics. The central theme is on how asymmetric information, which can arise either exogenously or endogenously, have important implications on welfare and market design. Chapter 1 is entitled Within-Household Selection in the Health Insurance Market. This chapter studies the existence of adverse selection in Vietnam's Social Health Insurance program and how household decision making affects individual enrollment into insurance. I find that while there is a strong evidence of adverse selection at the individual level, selection into insurance happens both \emph{across} and \emph{within} households. I then explore different household factors that affect the selection of health insurance within the household such as the household's ability to share risk and within-household bargaining power. These findings have important policy implications for two reasons. First, in the presence of household decision making, price discrimination policy to reduce adverse selection at the individual level such as age-based pricing might not always be welfare improving. Second, any policy that attempts to generate pooling beyond the level sustained by the private market can distort the household's incentive to buy health insurance and worsen adverse selection for the rest of the market. Chapter 2 is entitled Household Bundling to Reduce Adverse Selection: Application to Social Health Insurance. This chapter explores the use of bundling to reduce adverse selection in insurance markets and its application to social health insurance programs. When the choice to buy health insurance is made at the household level, bundling the insurance policies of household members eliminates the effect of adverse selection \emph{within} a household since the household can no longer select only sick members to enroll. However, this can exacerbate adverse selection \emph{across} households, as healthier households might choose to drop out of the insurance market. The net effect of this trade-off depends on the characteristics of the household demand for medical care and risk preferences. I explore this issue using individual survey data on insurance enrollment and medical spending in Vietnam that contain detailed information about the structure of the household. I develop and estimate a model of household insurance bundle choice and medical utilization that accounts for these features. The results suggest that much of the adverse selection is concentrated within the household. Counterfactual analysis reveals that under optimal pricing, household bundling yields significantly higher consumer surplus and insurance enrollment than individual purchase. Furthermore, the insurance market is less susceptible to complete unraveling under household bundling. Chapter 3 is entitled Information Control in the Hold-up Problem, and it is a joint work with Teck Yong Tan. In this chapter, we study the use of information control to mitigate hold-up risks. Our main result identifies a separation between information that creates ex-ante investment incentive and information that causes ex-post inefficiency, which then allows ex-post inefficiency to be eliminated without compromising the ex-ante investment incentive. We characterize the properties of the optimal information structure and the investment levels and welfare achievable with information control in the presence of hold-up risks.

Scotland’s economic capacity to prosper independently of Britain has become a key political issue, dominating the independence referendum of 2014 and continuing to influence British politics since. Often, that debate centres on the contested terms of how we imagine or construct Scotland as an economic entity. Thus, it offers a major opportunity to study the broader issue in critical social science of how economies are “imagined”. However, to date most studies of Scotland’s economy comes from the discipline of economics or from the policy profession. This study aims to address this gap. It highlights the comparatively recent history of professional interest in the Scottish economy; asks what these professionals are “doing” or “constructing”; and looks at how this influences Scotland’s conformity with and deviance from mainstream British politics. Using Jessop’s concept of “economic imaginary”, and drawing on cultural political economy, I thus examine the current Scottish economic debate’s conditions of possibility. These include the emergence of British regional policy, the discovery of North Sea oil, discourses of competitive regions in Europe and the elective affinities between devolution and “enterprise”. I pay particular attention to a general shift in attitudes away from top-down plans to equalise growth across Britain to a focus on the “spirit” of enterprising regions. My research used critical discourse analysis to analyse 100 key documents that played important roles in or highlight key issues in Scottish economic development. I also drew on 23 in-depth semi-structured interviews with professionals and journalists. My original contribution is to examine the path-shaping role of Scotland’s economic imaginary, how choices were made and how alternative paths were closed off. By looking at one contested case, we can gain insights into broader imaginative processes in national and regional economies.

The financialisation literature is an invaluable resource to explore the expansion of finance in modern capitalism. However, the debate focuses on the US and the UK extensively, whilst being too general with regard to other contexts. This inattention hinders a proper understanding of financialisation in its di↵erential nature across societies. To rectify such limitation, this thesis advances a theoretically controlled and historically informed study about a striking instance of financial excess outside the Anglo-American scenario: derivatives in Italy. The work argues that scholars are inattentive to the heterogeneous nature of financialisation because they conceptualise the power of finance as entrenched in socio-economic structures. As a result, they underplay the actors who adopt financialised practices di↵erentially. Premised on this critique, the thesis advances an agency-centred approach that analyses power from the perspective of agents. In so doing, it examines the diverse traits of financialisation in relation to the specific power struggles in which actors are involved. Drawing on this method, the work shows that financialisation studies fail to appreciate how key social forces deployed derivatives for political-strategic purposes in the Italian context. During the 1990s, a neoliberal-reformist alliance of pro-market technocrats and centre-left politicians got to power and pushed for Italy to join EMU. This project functioned as an external limit on the domestic political-economic establishment which relied on high public debt, the vast state-owned enterprise and the opaque corporate-governance regime. In brief, citing a slogan widely used in those days, the neoliberal-reformist coalition attempted to make Italy a ‘normal country' in Europe. Derivatives were crucial in this regard because they helped the Italian government comply with the EMU admission criteria. First, reformists encouraged hedge funds to arbitrage the interest-rate convergence between Italian and German bonds via OTC derivatives markets. Second, they arranged a currency swap that window-dressed the 1997 deficit. The thesis concludes by examining how other actors adopted derivatives to deal with the neoliberal-driven modernisation of Italy. It studies how the Agnelli family used equity swaps to secure ownership over FIAT and how municipalities manipulated budget restrictions through interest rate swaps.

The aim of this dissertation is to analyze how modernization theory of values change and capitalist ideology affect individuals' attitudes toward generosity. Because generosity is a concept rooted in our human value system, it would be worthwhile attempting to explain the interplay between individuals' values and larger socio-economic environment. From modernization theory explanations of values change, it is expected that noble, higher-order values such as generosity will receive more approval and support as economic pressures decline as result of economic development. However, individuals' values are also being influenced by principles of the specific type of economic ideology embraced in each country around the world. This study will explain how the different types of capitalist ideology impact individuals' values. In relation to these, it is suggested that the notion of `economic ideology' should be taken into consideration as a factor interacting with the modernization thesis of values change in influencing individuals' predisposition toward generosity. An economic ideology motivates behavior and determines norms for many human interactions. In this study, `economic ideology' is constructed as the interaction between capitalism characteristics and materialistic values. One hypothesis suggests that capitalism is negatively correlated with the emergence or advancement of generosity. A second hypothesis, examines whether the effect of capitalism is moderated through the presence of materialistic values or specific type of economic ideology. Within this enquiry the study uses a cross-national and a multilevel approach that mainly concentrates on the analysis of the World Values Survey which presents a broad examination of cross-national differences. The results indicate the validity of the economic ideology effect. Initially, at the individual level capitalism is associated significantly, albeit weakly, to generosity. When this relationship is allowed to vary across countries, then capitalism coefficient is not significant. Nevertheless, when the original argument about the influence of the economic ideology on individuals' values is considered, the new model modifies the previously reported results. The capitalism coefficient not only turns out to be significant, but also changes the direction of its coefficient demonstrating the moderating effect of the economic ideology hypothesis.

No description available.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Changing the behaviour of firms to take environmental concerns into account is seen as unlikely without effective regulations. However, corporations are increasingly keen to represent themselves as ‘green’, including those in the world’s largest manufacturing sector: the car industry. Given rising concern for the environment and environmental sustainability since the 1990s this thesis asks: what motivates car firms to actually make environmental commitments? Answering this question has implications for whether these commitments are ‘real’ and if so whether they are occurring in response to material factors (e.g. state regulations and consumer demand) versus normative factors (e.g. social attitudes and internal company strategies). In order to answer it, the thesis applies the insights of the institutional varieties of capitalism approach to the German, United States and Japanese car industries, and specific firms within them, in respect of the environmental issue of climate change from 1990 to 2004. Empirical national data is analysed, as well the environmental reporting of individual firms and interviews with key personnel. The main findings are that what leads the car industry to see environmental issues as central to their business interests hinges on the impact of differing national institutional factors. Specifically, it is a matter of whether firms have a liberal market economy (LME) as their home base, in the case of US firms, or a coordinated market economy (CME) as their home base, in the case of German and Japanese firms. US car firms react more to the material imperatives of consumer demand and state regulations. German and Japanese firms are more mindful of normative factors for their initiatives, such as social attitudes (especially for German firms) and internal company strategies (especially for Japanese firms). They have more of a partnership approach with government. Therefore, car firms have very distinct ‘lenses’ through which they see the environmental performance of the cars they produce. As such, the thesis concludes that the variety of capitalism of nations has implications not just for the type of products that economic actors such as car firms produce, and the competitive advantages they develop, but also the way they address related issues arising as a result of their activities, including environmental issues.

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore and understand how the dominant ideological effect of capitalism has influenced the development of one local ten-year plan to end homelessness in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Ten-year plans to end homelessness were instituted through a national initiative launched by the Bush Administration in 2003. The Allegheny County Homeless Alliance Advisory Board (HAAB) was studied because they were the appointed group held responsible for the implementation of the local plan. The literature review established a context for homelessness and capitalism, exploring how the two concepts are connected. Analysis occurred on multiple levels to reveal power-based constraints in both a local, extralocal, and theoretical context. The study was conducted utilizing an extended case method approach, exploring sociological aspects of capitalist phenomenon utilizing Marxist tradition. Data was gathered during open ended interviews with HAAB members, participant observation of meetings, field notes, and within document analysis of three years of quarterly meetings. The study revealed an association between submerged and tightly interwoven internal and external systems of control as exerted by the local governmental body responsible for implementing the group's plan. Secondary outcomes indicated that there were increased levels of awareness and communication among the diverse membership of the HAAB. Furthermore, the data illustrated that internal networks and relationships had spawned transformative actions outside of the institutionalized governmental structure of the group. The theoretical findings in this dissertation indicate that Marxism can be reconstructed and extended to better explain the dehumanizing effects of capitalism. The research suggests that praxical transformation of embedded capitalist-driven social relationships can be initiated through a cyclical process of reflection, evaluation, education, and critical discourse. Furthermore, empowering and educating group participants to carry out plan implementation through democratically-informed consensus building processes may be more effective than bureaucratic-led, state-run, government-driven approaches to ending homelessness. Expanded research focusing on how capitalism influences interpersonal relationships and corresponding institutional structures is needed to better reveal unjust power-based relationships that defeat the purpose of plans to eradicate homelessness and poverty. / Dissertation Chair: Dr. Harvey Holtz (Retired) Dissertation Committee Members: Dr. Melanie Hildebrandt and Dr. Thomas VanDyke

In this article, Immanuel Wallerstein tries to anticipate the evolution of world conflicts and structures over the next decades. In his analysis, he identifies three main cleavages which structure future global conflicts: the triadic cleavage between the United States, Europe and Japan, who compete economically; the North-South cleavage between core zones and the periphery of the world economy; and, finally, the cleavage between what he calls the "Spirit of Davos" and the "Spirit of Porto Alegre" as a conflict between alternative images of the future world order. The structure and the dynamics of each cleavage are analysed and their evolution over the next decades is anticipated.

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