This thesis aims to broaden the spectrum of brand extension acceptance literature, largely defined by categorisation theory, and bring to light alternative and complementary criteria for predicting brand extension success. To achieve this, the theoretical framework of this study replicates the principal model in brand extension acceptance (Aaker and Keller 1990) and extends it by introducing the concepts of virtual brand tribal communities, consumer-brand relationships, and co-creation of value, which originate in relationship marketing and service-dominant (S-D) logic. The thesis considers brand extension acceptance criteria within the increasingly important paradigm of S-D logic (Vargo and Lusch 2004). The present study uses a mixed method research design in order to address the research objectives of this study, enhance the robustness of the study and improve the level of reliability of the research findings. The qualitative data from the study served to deepen understanding of the research concepts and to construct the research instrument. The quantitative data were analysed to test the research hypotheses, and provide measurable results that can be projected to a larger population; the data were collected through an online survey with European consumers in the entertainment goods sector (specifically, video games). The present study found that the factors introduced by relationship marketing and the S-D logic explain a high proportion of variance on extension acceptance of joint co-creation and high consumer-low company co-creation products. Major contributions of the study include the development of a more holistic framework of brand extension acceptance; along with the adoption of the S-D logic which establishes the existence of relational and co-creative parameters in the evaluation of brand extension products. In terms of theory, the thesis contributes to the conceptual development of the virtual brand tribal community and consumer-brand relationship concept; and provides empirical support for their dimensionality and impact on brand extension acceptance. Similarly, at a theoretical level the thesis brings together two dimensions of the co-creation of value concept which were previously found dispersed in the literature, and thus provides empirical support for the effects of the level of co-creation construct. Concluding remarks acknowledge the limitations of the thesis and propose avenues for future research.

Few historians have written in any detailed form about the widespread development of employers' organisations which took place from the later decades of the nineteenth century, and formed the basis of those which exist in all British industries today. The work which has been done on them has largely focused upon industrial or governmental relations. None of the studies has addressed the phenomenon of employer organisation itself, or explored the more general question of what precisely it is that employers' organisations do. Nevertheless, some far-reaching conclusions have been made about them. This thesis seeks to clarify the purpose and circumstances of employer organisation growth, function, and mode of operation. It assesses how employers responded in an organised manner to quite radical changes in the world market and the nature of British society c.1914-1945. It provides a base of information which covers the range of activities which employers' organisations (broadly conceived) concerned themselves, using the archives of wool textile organisations in Bradford. Lastly, it assesses the significance of employers' organisation in view of some of the claims which have been made about them, and offers some observations on its political and sociological implications. The phenomenon of employer organisation was not simply a 'response' to the greater organisation of labour or government encouragement. Organisation (evident in other industrialised countries also) articulated a transformation in business strategies, away from traditional laissez-faire notions of individual enterprise towards an increasingly centralised, collective strategy. This functioned on many different levels - local, national, international, political, intellectual etc, and by the nineteen thirties marked a maturity in collective action which contrasts sharply with the individualism of just forty years earlier. The broad range of employers' policies extended far beyond the workplace, and expressed a distinct politics. This had implications for the nature and conduct of trade, the form and quality of life, and understanding of the way in which British society was governed.

The long-standing controversy over working class standards of living during the early nineteenth century is demonstraably one of the most intractable in our historiography. To a large extent the controversy exists because much of the statistical evidence used to measure changes in the standard of living is of dubious value and is open to wide interpretation. In view of the paucity of a reliable body of statistical evidence one of the main tasks of this thesis has been to meet this deficiency by providing a substantial quantity of new statistical evidence on agricultural labourers' wages and the cost of living in seven English counties; Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Dorset, and Hampshire. A further important aim has been to utilise this evidence to test the generalisation put forward by J. H. Clapham that the English agricultural labourer experienced an improvement in his material standard of living between 1190 and 1840. The thesis is divided into three parts. Part I is primarily concerned with providing the necessary background material to the subject. The first chapter begins by surveying the history of the standard of living controversy and the various approaches economic historians have adopted in seeking a solution to the problem. In reviewing the different methods used to measure the standard of living particular attention is focussed upon the usefulness of existing statistical series and the kinds of hazards which are involved in using macro-economic techniques to measure changes in living standards. Chapters 2 and 3 examine in some detail the main strengths and weaknesses of the empirical evidence used in this study and the kinds of practical and methodological problems that were encountered in processing the raw data into final index numbers. The approach adopted in Part II, which constitutes the major part of the original research, is primarily one of a series of exercises in quantitative data processing. Two chapters are devoted to each of the seven counties and these are basically concerned with the construction and analysis of two statistical variables - the wage earnings of male agricultural labourers and the cost of living - in order to determine the long-run trend of real wages. In view of the local nature of the evidence, and in the interests of avoiding unnecessary confusion and maintaining a consistent approach to the standard of living question, all the counties have been investigated independently of one another. In Part III, the final section, the conclusions obtained on the standard of living in each county are assembled together and considered on a comparative basis. It has also been the policy of this thesis to relate the variations in the purchasing power of wages to the economic and social background of each county. In particular, attention has been paid to the role of short-run exigencies, such as a run of abundant or deficient harvests, the outbreak of the Napoleonic war or the post-war economic depression, in order to assess their influence upon the economic welfare of the rural labouring classes. Although the main emphasis has been placed upon statistical material, this material has been generously supplemented by a large quantity of qualitative literary evidence. The main importance of this evidence, which covers such topics as unemployment and the practical operation of the Poor Law, dietary standards and household expenditure patterns, and the incidence of social disorder, is that it gives a vital insight into some of the more obscure aspects of early nineteenth century rural life as well as serving to confirm the conclusions indicated by the statistical evidence. Finally, it is hoped that this thesis will provide a model for future research into the standard of living controversy. The methodological approach used in this study could, if the evidence were found, be readily applied to agricultural labourers in other counties as well as to other industries and occupational groups. Until this labour intensive exercise is carried out on a large enough scale the standard of living controversy is doomed to remain an unresolved issue.

The economic environment in which a firm operates is constantly changing. This thesis contains three essays to examine how firms adapt their innovation and international activities to a variety of external changes. The first paper, “Information Frictions and the Law of One Price: ‘When the States and the Kingdom became United’”, shows how information frictions affect the exporting behavior of merchants, exploiting a unique historical experiment: the transatlantic telegraph, established in 1866. Using a newly collected data set on cotton trade based on historical newspapers, I find that information frictions result in large and volatile deviations from the Law of One Price. There are also real effects, because exports respond to information about foreign demand shocks, and average exports increase after the telegraph and become more volatile. I provide a model in which exporters use the latest news about a foreign market to forecast expected selling prices when their exports arrive at the destination. Their forecast error is smaller and less volatile the more recent the available information. The welfare gains from the telegraph are estimated to be around 8% of annual export value. The second paper, “Survive another day: Using changes in the composition of investments to measure the cost of credit constraints” is joint work with Luis Garicano. We introduce a novel empirical strategy to measure the credit shocks that were triggered by the recent financial crisis: Theoretically, we show that credit shocks affect long term investments by more than short term ones. Credit shocks can then be measured within firms by the relative drop of long run relative to short run investments; using firm-times-year fixed effects to absorb idiosyncratic demand shocks. Using data on Spanish manufacturing firms we find that credit constraints are equivalent to an additional tax rate of around 11% on the longest lived investment. While the trade literature has established a positive impact of globalization on the productivity of firms, there is lacking consensus about the underlying mechanism at work: Trade theory focuses on a market access mechanism, but empirical papers point out that import competition matters as well. The third paper, “The roles of import competition and export opportunities for technical change”, conducts a “horse race” between the two mechanisms. Using Spanish firm level data, I find robust evidence that access to export markets leads to productivity increases, but only for firms that were already highly productive before. The evidence on import competition is weaker and very heterogeneous, pointing towards an omitted variable bias in earlier papers.

The diffusion of the neoliberal Silicon Valley venture capital (“VC”) model seems to be another case of convergence on neoliberal orthodoxy as the spread of Silicon Valley replication ambitions is ubiquitous. But, when looking under the veneer of the Silicon Valley VC policy diffusion trend, I find that VC policy diffusion is not a story of “universal convergence.” Though more than 40 states deployed VC policies in an attempt to create local Silicon Valleys, the policies they implemented took different, and interventionist, forms. This thesis seeks explain why variance, rather than convergence, characterizes the diffusion of this clear, successful model. Diffusion scholarship has made initial attempts at theorizing why and how diffusion does not lead to complete convergence. This thesis contributes to this growing body of work by conceptualizing and investigating how bounded rationality drives incomplete convergence. To do this, the thesis extends Kurt Weyland’s work on cognitive biases to by testing how five economic management norms shape the Silicon Valley VC policy diffusion: (1) pre-existing norms guiding state intervention, (2) private sector financing norms, (3) preferences for supporting large or small companies, (4) international versus local company support preferences and (5) bank or capital market preferences. The five economic management norms are drawn on to develop East Asian comparative typologies (Nightwatch-man State, Private Sector Promoter, Financier and Director and Command Economy) to test the impact of the norms in specific cases. This thesis also tests state-of-the-art diffusion literature’s hypotheses about the sources of variance in the diffusion process, namely: the impact of multiple diffusion items, diffusion items’ levels of specificity and diffusion mechanisms. Empirically, this thesis provides a large-N dataset of forty-six countries' VC policies and four East Asian case study analyses (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam). The case studies reveal how, in the face of competitive pressures, three of the five economic management norms propelled policymakers to choose unique policy formula. As a result, this thesis concludes that Tip O’Neill’s presumption that “all politics is local” rings true in policy diffusion.

The thesis consists of three independent chapters. In Chapter 1 (page 7) - Counter-cyclical defaults in “costly state verification” models - I argue that a pro-cyclical risk-free rate can solve the problem of pro-cyclical defaults in “costly state verification” models. Using a partial equilibrium framework, I compute numerically the coefficient of a Taylor rule that delivers pro-cyclical output, pro-cyclical capital and counter-cyclical defaults. This parametrization is consistent with the empirical evidence on Taylor rules. In Chapter 2 (page 67) - Monetary Policy, Leverage, and Default - I use the Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) model to study the effect of monetary policy on the probability that firms default on loans. I argue that a monetary expansion affects defaults through two opposing partial equilibrium effects. It increases defaults because it leads firms to take on more debt and leverage up net worth, and it decreases defaults because the cost of borrowing decreases and aggregate demand shifts out, increasing firms’ profits and net worth. I argue that the leverage effect could explain the empirical partial equilibrium finding by Jimenez et al. (2008) that defaults on new loans increase after a monetary expansion. I then argue that this effect does not hold in general equilibrium due to an increase in firms’ profits. In the full model, defaults decrease after a monetary expansion, although the effect equals only few basis points. In Chapter 3 (page 131) - Monetary Policy and Defaults in the US - I study empirically the effect of an unexpected monetary expansion on the delinquency rate on US business loans, residential mortgages and consumer credit. I consider several identification strategies and use Granger-causality tests to assess the exogeneity of the time series of monetary shocks to the Fed’s forecast of defaults on loans. I then compute impulse responses using a variant of the Local Projection method by Jorda (2005). I find that the delinquency rates do not respond to monetary shocks in a statistically significant way. The paper suggests that the risk-taking incentives analyzed in partial equilibrium by several existing contributions might not be strong enough to prevail and increase aggregate defaults, although they could explain why defaults do not significantly decrease.

This thesis consists of three chapters that fall under the broad banner of applied microeconomics, with a particular focus on the study of conflict and its social cost. The importance of social security systems, providing a safety net for individuals to cope with shocks is well understood in developed countries. Less developed countries struggle with implementing social security schemes, due to a lack of state capacity, which often render these schemes less effective than designed. However, social insurance schemes may have far greater benefits in societies, where there is latent conflict. In the first chapter of this thesis, I study the Indian employment guarantee act and its effect on rural labour markets, mitigating adverse shocks by providing safe outside options. I show that this scheme has a significant effect on the dynamics of intra-state conflict: it moderates the cyclical nature of conflict triggered by adverse shocks and thus, helps to contribute to substantially lower levels of overall violence. The importance of technologies to smooth adverse shocks, in particular, shocks due to bad weather, will become increasingly important due to climate change. The second chapter analyses a dimension along which conflict is costly. We estimate the impact of Somali piracy on the costs of trade. In spite of general agreement that establishing the rule of law is central to properly functioning economies, little is known about the cost of law and order breakdowns. We study shipping routes whose shortest path exposes them to the risk of piracy and find that the increase in attacks in 2008 lead to an 8 to 12 percent increase in shipping costs. We estimate the welfare loss due to piracy based on these estimates and arrive at a fairly conservative estimate: generating around 120 USD million of revenue for Somali pirates led to a welfare loss in excess of 630 USD million, highlighting that the welfare losses from trade disruptions are substantial and piracy capture only a small share relative to the loss in welfare. The third chapter is reflecting my earlier research interest in the economics of micro finance. The chapter provides a theoretical model contrasting individual liability lending with and without groups to joint liability lending. This research is motivated by an apparent shift away from joint liability lending, while still retaining the group structure. We show under what conditions individual liability can deliver welfare improvements over joint liability, conditions that depend on the joint income distribution and social capital. We then show that lower transaction costs that mechanically favour group lending may also encourage the creation of social capital. In the last section, we draw on estimated parameters to simulate the model and to quantify our welfare conclusions.

This thesis delves into the nature and effects of financial and monetary policy design. It comprises three chapters, each of which studies this topic from a different perspective and with a focus on different frictions. The first chapter derives theoretically the optimal monetary policy for a small open economy characterized by the incompleteness of the domestic financial market. In the model, a tight relationship between the consumption of different agents and the aggregate debtto-GDP ratio emerges in equilibrium. Optimal monetary policy is the result of a tradeoff between the stabilization of this ratio (risk-sharing) and the traditional policy objectives of price and output gap stabilization. Quantitative simulations suggest that price and output stabilization dominate debt-to-GDP stabilization in the optimal policy rule. Unlike the case of a closed economy, the policy objective of improving on risk-sharing is excessively costly from the point of view of the policymaker when the economy is open. The second chapter studies theoretical issues related to the unsecured consumer credit market, normally characterized by incompleteness and poor protection of property rights. The chapter describes a theoretical mechanism by which the interest rate to a given borrower is affected by the default choices of other agents. Individual agents ignore the effect of their own default choices on aggregate credit conditions, and thus the volume of unsecured credit in a decentralized market will be generally inefficient. The chapter employs simulations of the model to conclude that recently observed credit booms in Latin America may be inefficient. The third chapter analyzes empirically the relationship between information sharing and credit outcomes in the unsecured consumer credit market, focusing on the potential expost disciplinary effect and the ex-ante informational hold-up of long-lived negative information about borrowers. The chapter exploits a natural experiment in Colombia created by Law 1266/2008, whereby detailed information about past defaults that were exogenously “sufficiently old” was erased from Private Credit Bureaus (in what follows, PCB). Using a Differences-in-Differences (DD) specification, it is found that after old negative information is erased, there is a significant increase in the size and maturity of new loans, no significant changes in interest rates, and an increase in subsequent default rates for the treatment group, relative to the control group. Overall, these results are consistent with both ex-post disciplinary effects, and ex-ante information hold-up from long-lived negative information in PCB. Specifically, consistent with the hold-up theories, the chapter finds that most of the increase in the value of loans comes from outside banks. In addition, consistent with the disciplinary role of information sharing, the chapter finds evidence of a relative increase in the frequency of default for new loans after negative information is erased.

This thesis contains three chapters, each concerning the social welfare effects of fiscal policy. The first chapter examines the changes to government spending and tax rates that achieve a potentially substantial reduction in government debt at least cost to social welfare. The consequences of altering the speed of debt reduction are also examined. The second chapter considers how differences in monetary policy regime and stance may alter the optimal mix of spending and tax rate changes for government debt reduction. These two chapters make use of the representative agent theoretical framework. By contrast, the third chapter uses a framework of heterogeneous agents, in which there is a non-trivial distribution of wealth and income. The framework includes both aggregate and idiosyncratic uncertainty. The third chapter characterises a constrained efficient outcome in this framework. This outcome is treated as a welfare benchmark. The competitive equilibrium outcome is compared to this benchmark and shown to be constrained inefficient in certain circumstances. The sign and magnitude of constrained inefficiency in competitive equilibrium depends critically on the way in which aggregate shocks affect the distribution of idiosyncratic shocks. The extent of wealth inequality is also an important determining factor. Competitive equilibria under different fiscal policies are then considered as potential welfare improvements.

This thesis is a collection of essays on the important problems in developing countries and aims to contribute to the empirical literature on the i) financial services sector expansion and its implications on formal employment, i) impact of early retirement incentives on labour force participation rates and finally on the iii) effectiveness of stabilization funds on reducing the boom and bust cycles in light of fluctuating international commodity prices. Chapter 1 investigates the role of financial services expansion, especially the impact of increase in consumer credits on the reduction of informal employment. I argue that liberalization should naturally lead to a decline in the share of informal employment due to the fact that international firms are less likely to employ informally and consumers whose borrowing constraints are relaxed due to more credit availability are more likely to prefer goods that are paid with consumer credits. I test this hypothesis by exploiting the regional variation in Turkey. Due to the possible endogeneity problem, I employ several instruments and find positive impact of consumer services expansion on formal employment. Two unique datasets that I explore for for possible instruments are i) the religiosity and political tendencies surveys of 2011 and 2013, and ii) regional Armenian population loss data between 1914-1917 in the former Ottoman Empire that preceded the Turkish Republic. The exogenous variation that I seek to explore accordingly are; i) Islam bans all sorts of interest charges in financial transactions and therefore residents of more conservative regions are on average less likely to demand consumer credits, and ii) Armenians were the trading and artisan class of the Empire and therefore the main users of the financial instruments and when they perished. Chapter 2 is about the impact of a Social Security System that allowed women and men to retire as early as 38 and 44 years old on labour supply decisions in Turkey. Before the pension reform of 1999, the Law 3774, dated 1992 brought incentives to those individuals who several conditions to retire at a much earlier age than the conventional 60-65 years window. Using the Statistics on Income and Living Condition (SILC) panel dataset between 2007-2010 in a Fuzzy Regression Continuity Design, we find that these incentives let to an average decline of about 16.9 hours in weekly hours worked by men aged 44-52 and 20.6 hours decline in weekly hours worked by women who are aged between 39-49 in a bandwidth of three years around the eligible age for retirement. Moreover, we find that the entitlement for retirement after 44 years old reduced the probability of labour force participation of men by about 28% to 37% while we did not find a statistically meaningful impact on the participation decisions of women. Chapter 3 explores whether sovereign wealth or stabilization funds created by governments in oil rich countries are effective in reducing volatility and ensuring a counter-cyclical or acyclical fiscal policy in line with the optimal fiscal policy literature or whether they are just another government account in practise. The existing literature on the effectiveness of stabilization funds suffers from endogeneity problems, namely i) the endogeneity between gdp and government expenditures and ii) the endogenity of the decision to establish stabilization funds. In this paper, I contribute to the literature by addressing both of these problems by using a series of Two Stage Least Square Estimations and find positive evidence in favour of stabilization funds in reducing volatility and pro-cyclicality of the fiscal policy in oil rich countries. The findings are relevant for the wider discussion of the procyclicality in developing countries, as one third of the countries which are documented to improve fiscal policy cyclicality seem to be the ones that are resource rich and have a stabilization fund in place.