The service industry accounts for an ever-growing share of the global economy, and service aspects have become increasingly important for all goods. Since service expectations play a key role in the quality perceptions that consumers ultimately develop, it is important for service marketers to understand the nature of consumer expectations and the influences upon these expectations. Current research indicates that national culture affects service expectations, especially the information sources that consumers use and their opinion seeking propensity. However, cross-cultural expectation formation is a particularly under-researched area and researchers using national culture as an explanatory variable tend not to develop rigorous conceptual models clearly explicating how culture is meant to affect the consumer behaviour being examined. This research examines cross-cultural expectation formation and thus contributes to increasing academic understanding and improving marketers’ ability to manage the expectation formation process across cultures. Specifically, this research sought to empirically test the influence of individual-level cultural dimensions on the relative importance of the key antecedents of consumers’ expectations of service quality. A conceptual framework linking cultural factors to the formation of expectations was developed and empirically tested in a multicultural setting to explore similarities and differences between customers with significantly different cultural values. An experimental design was used in which five sets of 1x2 manipulations were developed for the manipulated independent variables (past experience, advertising, price, firm image, and word-of-mouth). Existing scales from the literature were used to measure predicted service quality expectations (the dependent variables) and individual-level cultural values (the measured independent variables). Data were collected in English via the Web from university students of different nationalities across three countries (UK, Malaysia, and China) and the final sample size was 486 respondents. To test the hypotheses and propositions five separate 2x2 between-subjects MANCOVAs were performed on the dependent measure in aggregate as well as on the three decomposed elements of predicted service quality expectations identified in this research: Tangibles, Customer Care, and Empathy. The findings indicate that service quality expectations are significantly influenced by the five antecedents of expectations investigated and that word-of-mouth communications and past personal experience explained a greater proportion of the variance in service quality expectations than explicit and implicit service promises. Adding to previous studies, findings show that advertising was significant only as an antecedent of Tangible expectations, word-of-mouth communications was particularly important in developing Empathy expectations, and price was most important for developing Customer Care expectations. The findings also supported the proposed conceptualisation, indicating that individual-level cultural factors moderate the relationship between the antecedents of expectations and predicted expectations. Long-term Orientation and Power Distance moderated the relationship between the antecedents and predicted expectations the most. Long-term Orientation and Masculinity have tended to be overlooked in the research stream but this research indicates that all five individual-level variables moderate the relationship between the antecedents of expectation and predicted expectations and also that these dimensions may explain consumer behaviour best when used in tandem. This information is also important for managers, who need to recognise that customers’ usage of various information sources in forming service quality expectations is partially culturally determined. Finally, the examination of cultural values at the individual level allows academics to develop a ‘cultural service personality’ at this level and allows practitioners, with the use of their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, to collect this information from consumers and use it to inform the type of information directed at consumers’ with different cultural service profiles.

The global crisis of 2007-2008 is the most severe crisis since the Great Depression in the financial markets. Starting with the subprime defaults in the United States, it quickly spills over into other markets leading to the collapses of many financial institutions, bail-outs of banks worldwide and downturns in asset prices. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the repercussions of this crisis on CDS and interbank market and provide empirical evidence on the changes in the pricing of CDS contracts and interbank deposits. Chapter 2 discusses the determinants of CDS spread changes on European contracts. The most remarkable finding of the study is that the relation between credit spreads and their determinants is regime dependant and depends on the sector of economic activity. Before the crisis the underlying credit risk in the overall CDS market is sufficient to explain credit risk. During the crisis investors have a differing view on the risk of financial and non--financial contracts Interestingly, non-financial CDS contracts reflect the credit risk of the counterparty, but financial contracts do not. This implies that governments are expected to bail out dealers to prevent systemic risk. Chapter 3 provides further insight into the European corporate CDS spreads and proposes an equilibrium model accommodating the occurrence of structural breaks in the long-run relationship between the variables. These breaks are endogenously determined within unit root specifications used to describe the dynamics of the explanatory factors. The findings highlight that crisis shocks are persistent and have the potential to change long-run equilibrium dynamics. The systematic credit risk factor is proxied by the European iTraxx index and the idiosyncratic factor by the stock price of reference entity. The model indicates that stock market leads price discovery process. Vector error correction model confirms the strong predictive ability of the iTraxx index and the error correcting vector for changes in the CDS spreads. Chapter 4 focuses on European interbank market and has two main contributions. First, it estimates the cross-sectional density of interbank funding rates using nonparametric kernel methods. Second, it analyzes the effect of banks size, the operating currency and banks' nationality on the cross-sectional distribution of these rates. The findings strongly support the statistical significance of these effects and highlight the importance of these factors as early warning indicators of financial distress. Prior to the crisis, the borrowing segment of the market exhibits distinctive features such as highly volatile and multimodal distributions suggesting the occurrence of distortions in the cross-section of funding rates. During crisis, large domestic banks operating in Euros enjoy the most favourable rates. Banks' nationality analysis further confirms that interbank market provided early warning signals of incoming sovereign crisis.

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the spatial scope of regional economic growth and regional economic development policy in Brazil. First, it reviews the theoretical background on the spatial scope of economic development and growth literature as well as sets this discussion for the Brazilian context. This part forms the basis for the following empirical investigations. Then, the thesis investigates how the determinants of economic growth in Brazil may have manifested themselves differently on various spatial scales during the period of 1991-2000. The analysis suggests a general framework for addressing multiple spatial scales, spatial autocorrelation, spatial heterogeneity and model uncertainty. The robustness tests identified variables that are simultaneously significant on different spatial scales – higher educational and health capital, and better local infrastructure were related to higher rates of economic growth, although their impact on growth may differ across spatial scales. Next, the thesis investigates the extent of spatial autocorrelation effects in the context of regional economic growth at different spatial scales from 1970-2000 using standard panel data models. Among other results, it shows that spatial autocorrelation appears negligible at the state level but shows positive and significant values at the other three spatial scales. Moreover, the panel data models that control for time invariant fixed effects do not completely eliminate the spatial autocorrelation in the residuals at different spatial scales. Finally, the thesis formulates a framework to measure the micro- and macro - impacts of regional development policies in Brazil and applies this framework to measure the impact of northeast regional fund (FNE) industrial loans on employment and labour productivity growth at the micro (firm) level and on GDP per capita growth at macro (municipalities, micro-regions and spatial clusters) levels for the 2000-2003 and 2000-2006 periods. The results show a positive and statistically significant impact of the FNE industrial loans on job creation at the micro level but no significant impacts on the GDP per capita growth at the macro level.

This thesis analyzes three topics in macroeconomics: Mortgage default, demographic change and factor misallocation. The first chapter asks which theories of mortgage default are quantitatively consistent with observations during the U.S. mortgage crisis. Different default models are simulated for the path of observed house prices and their predictions are compared to observed default rates. The double-trigger hypothesis attributing mortgage default to the joint occurrence of negative equity and a life event like unemployment explains this data well. A structural partial-equilibrium model with liquidity constraints and unemployment risk provides micro-foundations for this hypothesis. The model implies that subsidizing homeowners can mitigate a mortgage crisis at a lower cost than bailing out lenders. The second chapter investigates the macroeconomic effects of population aging in the United States during the coming decades. In particular we analyze the role of endogenous human capital formation during this process. We build a large-scale overlapping generations model with endogenous human capital accumulation and calibrate it such that it replicates observed life-cycle earnings profiles. We then simulate a realistic demographic transition. Our key finding is that human capital adjustments may act as a quantitatively important mitigation mechanism that dampens the macroeconomic and adverse welfare effects of demographic change. The third chapter estimates the degree of capital and labor misallocation between the agricultural and non-agricultural sector in different countries. The framework employs the flexible Translog production function and performs non-linear regressions on crosscountry panel data observed during 1967-1992. The findings are that in developing countries marginal products of labor are higher in non-agriculture than in agriculture. The reverse holds for capital allocation. Industrialized countries are closer to an efficient factor allocation. A sensitivity analysis reveals that using Cobb-Douglas production functions leads to much higher estimates of misallocation.

Offshoring, as part of globalisation, first started decades ago with manufacturing processes disintegrated along the global value chain and dramatically redistributed to low-cost regions. The next global shift of work involving ICT-enabled business services has arisen since the 1990s, especially featuring the success of India’s supplier role. The possibilities for the Global South to move up the value ladder are well demonstrated by the achievements of the newly industrialised economies in East Asia in the first shift and of India in the second. In the services sector, however, potential for upgrading is conditioned by quality-based elements, such as trust, culture and language, which vary both between producing and market areas. Flows are increasingly multi-directional, requiring attention to the neglected issue of demands from fast-growing Southern economies. So how do locations and firms in the Global South attempt to upgrade in the regime of rising services offshoring? The Indian experience especially in serving Anglophone markets in the Global North has been widely documented – but not that of East Asian economies, with their distinct characteristics and strong historic, ethnic and cultural ties with each other. This study examines the upgrading possibilities and constraints of China, Hong Kong and Singapore along the global services chain. For cross-case analysis, it focuses on three specific sets of services, including information technology, finance and accounting, and customer contact services. The concepts of global value chain, competitive advantage and capabilities are applied to reconstruct the phenomenon of services offshoring from both the demand and supply perspectives in the selected locations, and synthesise the dynamics between locational characteristics and firm strategies. A series of distinct upgrading strategies are identified, involving mixes of manufacturisation, knowledge-intensification and deepening relational capabilities to exploit both regional advantages of language/cultural proximity and established global links.

This thesis deals with one obsession: the role of external factors in generating boombust cycles in Latin American countries. In the first chapter, I employ a Markov switching model to statistically validate the claim that the region is currently experiencing a combination of unprecedented favourable external conditions: high commodity prices and low global real interest rates. Based on this evidence, I introduce a model of a resource-rich small open economy with financial frictions in which external conditions switch stochastically between two regimes: “windfall” and “shortfall”. The model is calibrated to Argentina to study how changes in external conditions give rise to boom-bust cycles. I contribute to the current debate on the desirability of controls on capital inflows by studying, from a positive perspective, the effects of introducing a regime contingent tax rate on debt holdings. I conclude that the welfare effect, albeit always very small, is determined by the strength of the domestic financial frictions. The third chapter attempts to empirically evaluate the model by performing an event study. I assess the ability of the model to reproduce the behaviour of the economy during a five-year window period centered around the Great Recession of 2008/09. To capture the external environment following Lehman Brothers’ collapse, I introduce a regime switch in global financial conditions: normal and panic periods. I conclude that the model captures remarkably well the dynamic in this period and that its main weakness is the inability to reproduce the large swings observed in asset prices. The second chapter presents and studies a novel mechanism through which low-frequency fluctuations in foreign interest rates can generate different boom-bust patterns in an internationally borrowing constrained small open economy: intertemporal spillovers via collateral markets. When interest rates are low, the presence of a binding international borrowing constraint creates an intertemporal wedge that spills over into the intertemporal equation for capital due to its dual role as physical capital and financial collateral. As a result, in economies where the main source of collateral is reproducible capital, the spillover effect resembles an investment subsidy and fluctuations are smooth since there are no valuation effects. In contrast, when non-reproducible capital is posted as collateral, the disturbance resembles a financial service dividend and the interest rate fluctuations cause ample swings in macro aggregates due to their strong impact on asset valuations. It is my belief that in these chapters, I have contributed to our understanding of medium-run macroeconomic fluctuations in “semi-peripheral” countries.

This thesis examines the contribution of the bottom-up approach towards local economic development (LED) in Mexico. It applies a combination of methodologies to assess if the growing importance of this approach in the public policy arena is supported by a more focused and systematic analysis. In doing so, the aim is to offer a broader and deeper understanding of the key elements of the bottom-up perspective and their specific impact on the economic and social development of places, by considering a large sample of Mexican municipalities; and to better comprehend the effects of local actions and interactions on the shape and effectiveness of those key elements by focusing on two municipalities, which have adopted different strategies. The first part of the empirical analysis uses a quantitative methodology and presents – to the best of our knowledge – the first nationwide quantitative assessment of the impact of the constituents of the bottom-up approach on the development fortunes of local jurisdictions. The analysis relies on a purpose-built database of 898 municipalities in Mexico and on heteroscedasticity-consistent ordinary least square (OLS) regression methods to evaluate whether the implementation of six different components of the bottom-up development strategies – development plan, sustainability, entrepreneurship, capacity building, participation mechanisms, and development links – has delivered greater human development across Mexican municipalities. The results of the analysis indicate that municipalities engaging in LED have witnessed improvements in human development, relative to those which have overlooked it. The increase in human development has been greatest for those local authorities which have pursued capacity building, the establishment of development links and which have drafted a development plan based on a local diagnosis. The second part of the analysis uses a case-study methodology to dig deeper on two Mexican municipalities – Apizaco and Chiautempan – located in Tlaxcala, one of the Mexican states which has set up an institutional framework aimed at encouraging greater participation. Our findings reveal that while the implementation of certain aspects of the bottom-up approach have had a clear relevant positive contribution to economic and social development, a series of local challenges have clearly shaped the effectiveness of the LED strategies applied in both municipalities. In addition, the analysis shows that Apizaco, the local authority which pursued LED in a more comprehensive way, experienced a greater improvement in socio-economic development.

I present three essays discussing the impact of archaic institutions and technology on inequality in wages and political participation. First I examine a modern facet of the Indian caste system: political quotas for disadvantaged minorities and their impact on political participation. I find that aggregate turnout falls by 9% of the baseline and right-wing parties win 50% more often, but electoral competition is not significantly affected. Detailed individual-level data for one state suggests that voter participation falls among women and minorities. This suggests that restricting candidate identity to minorities may cause some bias in voter participation. Next, I study caste and human capital: specifically why workers remain in lowpaying hereditary occupations, providing an explanation for both occupational specialization and hereditary occupations. I use a simple model of insurance provision in which parents pass on human capital to their children in return for insurance in the event of sickness, and find that workers with low human capital are likelier to participate in the arrangement, and that a higher cost of sickness can sustain higher human capital transfers. I conclude by studying human capital and technology- the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on wage inequality. We tested the hypothesis that information and communication technologies (ICT) polarize labour markets, by increasing demand for the highly educated at the expense of the middle educated, with little effect on low-educated workers. Using data on the US, Japan, and nine European countries from 1980-2004, we find that industries with faster ICT growth shifted demand from middle educated workers to highly educated workers, consistent with ICT-based polarization. Trade openness is also associated with polarization, but this is not robust to controlling for Research and Development. Technologies account for up to a quarter of the growth in demand for highly educated workers.

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the importance of access to information for individuals in developing countries. In the first chapter, I describe an important channel through which improved access to market information could increase the prices that producers receive from middlemen. I develop a theoretical model of trade between a farmer and a middleman which allows for the existence of different types of middlemen and I provide an empirical test of the theory from an original framed field experiment carried out with farmers and middlemen in India. In chapter 2, I investigate the relationship between the decision to produce high-quality goods and two important characteristics of the product: the degree of observability of quality and the level of intermediation in the supply chain. I present a model which demonstrates that if quality is not perfectly observable, there will be a range of values of the price difference between high-quality and low-quality goods for which production of high-quality goods will occur with vertical integration but will not occur if the stages of production are carried out by separate agents. This chapter also presents some case studies of supply chains for various products in a number of developing countries that have characteristics which are consistent with the predictions of the model. In the final chapter, I try to understand how access to information could be improved for individuals in developing countries. I investigate the relationship between rates of mobile phone and Internet use and a number of geographic, institutional and economic variables in a sample of 164 countries from 1990 to 2009. The aim of this chapter is to identify the main characteristics of countries that have had success in adopting these new technologies in order to gain some insight into the barriers which may be faced by those countries that have been less successful.

This thesis consists of three independent chapters. The first chapter examines the strategic choices of the targets and the intensity of violence by rebel groups. The chapter presents a theoretical framework that links a rebel group’s targeting decisions to income shocks. It highlights that this relationship depends on the structure of the rebels’ tax base. The hypotheses from the model are tested in the context of India’s Naxalite conflict. The second chapter estimates the impact of military recruitment on human capital accumulation in colonial Punjab. In this context, I find that higher military recruitment was associated with increased literacy at the district-religion level. The final chapter presents a model that describes the optimal design of civil-military institutions in a setting where some control of the military over domestic politics is deemed desirable.