This thesis aims to examine the response of a behavioural finance model and a financial frictions model to the financial crisis which was triggered in 2007.This thesis will test both models by using indirect inference as an evaluation method.The results of this study show that,when compared with the rational expectation model, behavioural expectation does not improve the model's ability to explain the real world. Therefore, behavioural expectation is unable to respond to the current crisis to form expectations .However,the financial frictions model which is suggested by the literature is found to be an efficient model that improves the model's overall performance. This thesis finds that although financial shocks contribute to the out put gap variation during the crisis, it does not respond so much to the variations of inflation and policy. interest rate.

<p> The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of oil income and the gold price fluctuation on the stock market of Iran, and to examine whether consideration of the oil and the gold markets followed by other investment markets, such as the real estate market and the foreign exchange market have any significant impact on the stock market behavior. This study examines the impact of the oil income and gold price fluctuation, as well as other macroeconomic indicators such as housing construction, deposit interest rate, foreign exchange rate, consumer price index, and gross domestic products on the Iranian stock market, as measured by the quarterly data from January 1990 to December 2012. First, regression analysis was applied for oil revenue, housing activities, deposit interest rate, foreign exchange rate, CPI, and GDP to examine the stock market reaction to each market activity. After this, ceteris paribus, oil revenue was replaced with gold price to examine whether the price of gold without consideration of the oil revenue had any impact on the stock market activity. Finally, the model was run to examine the impact of all variables, including oil revenue and gold price, upon stock market activity. In a separate model, this paper also examines the relationship between all of the above-mentioned variables and stock market volatility. In the next phase, the impulse response function based on the vector auto-regression model was generated to examine the behavior of the stock market followed by a shock to each independent variable. Because Iran is an oil-exporting country&mdash;not an oil-importing country&mdash;economic forces, market structure as well as the investment culture and investing policies are different in Iran than in Western nations or other oil-importing countries, it may not be wise or productive to analyze investment in the Iranian stock market from the same perspective or with the same methods used when analyzing investment in Western countries. Because gold, foreign currencies, and the real estate market are the most popular and common investment markets in Iran for domestic investors, this paper aims to determine whether there is any relationship between those markets and the stock market in general from an investment point of view.</p>

The first chapter - Crisis? Which Crisis? - constructs a new series of industrial value added at constant (1938) prices for Italy, for the period between 1928 and 1938. The data employed are shown to be better indicators of the dynamic of the Great Depression than those used by Carreras and Felice (2010) and allow to substantially revise the profile of the Crisis. The contraction appears to be more pronounced and persistent, placing the Italian experience more in line with that of other industrialised countries. The second chapter - The Italian Climacteric - presents new estimates of total factor productivity growth for Italy over the Fascist era and compares them with analogous ones for the pre-World War One period and for Germany and Britain. Because of the absence of a fully reliable GDP series, a dual growth accounting framework is employed. This approach permits the incorporation of new data on land rents and of new evidence on the returns to human capital. Results show that during the interwar era Italy experienced a “climacteric", defined as a cessation of TFP growth, which compares poorly with the coeval performance of Britain and Germany. This disappointing result contrasts vividly with what occurred in the late liberal Italy, when TFP grew less quickly than in Germany, but faster than in Britain. The third chapter - A Tale of Two Fascisms - offers the first quantitative assessment of labour productivity dynamics within the Italian industrial sector and of their links with Fascist competition policy. We argue that the institutional context in which Italian firms operated and, in particular, changes in the level of product market competition had a significant effect in determining their productivity performance. By relying on a new dataset and on new labour productivity estimates, we show that the earlier more liberal period of the Fascist era was characterised by a true productivity boom, which ended following the switch to a more interventionist industrial policy. Panel data evidence shows that reductions in the level of competition in the industrial sector were associated with lower productivity growth, while changes in industrial structure were a less significant factor.

The central aim of this thesis is to examine the multiple dimensions of poverty, using the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS, 2008 and 2011) for the Punjab province of Pakistan. The thesis is based on three core chapters, with a focus on the measurement and determinants (particularly household size) of poverty. Chapter 3 calculates and analyses the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) developed by Alkire and Foster (2007) and the destitution measure (strict subset of the MPI), using health, education and standard of living dimensions for 2011. Chapter 4 extends the multidimensional poverty framework to a multi-period context by investigating the changes in the MPI and destitution measure from 2008 to 2011, and it contributes to the literature by assessing the impact of the severe 2010 floods on poverty. Applying probit and IV-probit methodologies on MICS 2008 data, Chapter 5 examines the complex and largely unexplored relationship between household size and poverty (income, child health and education), and highlights other important poverty determinants. The key results for 2011 illustrate that rural South Punjab experienced considerably greater deprivation than the urban North, that almost half of the MPI poor households were also destitute, and that the ‘years of schooling’ indicator was the highest contributor to both MPI and destitution, reflecting the dire state of education in Punjab. The intertemporal results indicate that the MPI increased from 2008 to 2011, with an intensification of poverty for rural households, especially in the flood-affected zones. Providing a micro lens for viewing deprivation, the destitution results showed that households in many districts and towns graduated into the less extreme form of multidimensional poverty. The econometric results of Chapter 5 show that larger households experienced lesser income and education poverty when endogeneity was controlled for, but household size was not a significant determinant of child health deprivation. No clear causal link could be established among the different poverty dimensions and household size. The results of this thesis paint a comprehensive and dynamic regional picture of the various dimensions of poverty in Punjab, providing policymakers insights for formulating targeted poverty reduction strategies.

<p> The only two certainties in life are death and more uncertainty&mdash;with change the only constant. Rapidly changing environments require speedier response. We do not know what the future holds. Crafting strategy when the future is unknown and unknowable is challenging. The increasing uncertainty and turbulence has seen the gradual replacement of forecasting with scenario planning. Unfortunately, we are still trapped in the Taylorist paradigm that there is always one optimal strategy for any company to pursue. The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 provided a dramatic demonstration of the risk inherent in any strategic plan that relies on a unidimensional view of the future.</p><p> Using this crisis as a Petri dish, this research examined how well scenario planning worked. As the objective of scenario-based strategy development is to improve organizational agility (defined as the speed with which firms sensed and responded to an organizational crisis), the research measured how agile these firms were, measured against an established timeline and a sense and respond model, the Puthenveetil Model.</p><p> This study used a qualitative longitudinal case study method using purposive sampling of 14 firms that used scenario planning in strategy development and examined their strategies during the crisis <i>ex post facto</i>, only to find that most firms did not anticipate the crisis. Of those that did, only two&mdash;General Electric and Herman Miller, firms steeped in the learning/organization development culture&mdash;responded during the pre-crisis period. A surprising finding was that in six of the 14 firms, headcounts increased during this period. As to why so many firms failed to anticipate this crisis, there were three possible explanations: (a) the Cassandra Syndrome, (b) blind confidence in probability, and (c) reactive approach to change. The Puthenveetil Model could be used by individuals and organizations to prepare for the challenges of the VUCA world by hedging against the inevitable surprises that lurk in the background. Uncertainty is not an ally of confidence. Confidence is needed for commitment. Scenario-based thinking should help decision makers think clearly, feel confident, and act decisively.</p>

The thesis looks through the lens of bank balance sheet accounting to investigate the structural change in the British banking system between 1780 and 1832, and how classical quantity theorists of money attempted to respond to the ensuing financialisation of the wartime economy with its growing reliance on credit funded with paper-based instruments (the ‘Vansittart system’ of war finance). The thesis combines contributions to three separate fields to construct a holistic historical example of the challenges faced by monetary economists when ‘modelling’ financial innovation, credit growth, ‘fringe’ banking, and agent incentives – at a time of radical experimentation: the suspension of the 80-year-old gold standard (“the Restriction”). First, critical text analysis of the history of economics argues that the 1809-10 debate between Ricardo and Bosanquet at the peak of the credit boom, bifurcated classical theory into two timeless competing policy paradigms advocating the ‘Scarcity’ or ‘Abundance’ of money relative to exchange transactions. The competing hypotheses regarding the role of money and credit are identified and the rest of the thesis examines the archival evidence for each. Second, the core of the thesis contributes to the historical literature on banking in relation to money by reconstructing a taxonomy of bank business models, their relationships with the London inter-bank settlement system, and their responses to the Restriction - drawing on some 17,000 mostly new data points collected from the financial records of London and Country banks. The final section contributes to the economic history of money by constructing aggregated views of total bank liabilities from the firm-level data, scaled to recently available British GDP estimates. These are examined to establish (with hindsight) the relative merits and lacuna of the competing theoretical hypotheses postulated by political economists. It was the period of deleveraging after 1810 that revealed the lacuna of both paradigms.

Swedish dairy industry was established in the late 19th century to provide butter for the evergrowingBritish consumer market. The first world war (1914–1918) reformulated the conditionsof the export dependent Swedish dairy industry and threw farmers and dairy men alike into atime of dwindling profits. This thesis study how Svenska mejeritidningen as a representative ofthe organized Swedish dairy industry responded to the war-time challenges and what strategieswere formulated to find and create markets for dairy products and thus maintain the Swedishdairy industry.The thesis concludes that the first world war may have been a catalyst for a Swedish dairyindustrial transformation, bringing many industrial bottlenecks to the surface such asinfrastructure and technology and stating that considerable efforts would be needed to regainits economic significance of the late 19th century. Moreover, the scale of these concerns incombination with the uncertainty of milk’s profitability makes development blocks a usefultheory for understanding the nature of dairy industrial change in Sweden 1914–1918.

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