As progress has been made on tariff reduction by recent trade agreements, barriers to freer international trade arising from nontariff sources have become more prominent. Regulation of product quality and in particular food safety can be a major source of such barriers. Lowering them requires that trading partners develop methods of cooperation, termed rapprochement, in setting and reforming national-level quality regulation. A better understanding of the effects of such rapprochement efforts on trade in food products requires a melding of economic theory and empirical work on regulation, international trade, industrial organization, product quality, rent-seeking, and competitiveness. The immediate importance of this understanding is due to the new treatment of food quality regulation under trade pacts such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. These agreements recommend the increased use by countries of guidelines adopted by international standards organizations such as Codex Alimentarius. Contracting parties have the ability to set stricter standards if they have sufficient scientific evidence that such measures are justified. This dissertation examines the language on sanitary and phytosanitary regulation included in recent trade agreements in order to analyze how they attempt to manage potential nontariff barriers to trade. A conceptual model outlines how the welfare impacts of these trade barriers may be characterized and the joint determination of the scientific and policy merit of food safety regimes in light of the level of rapprochement attained by the trade agreement. Case studies of a particular trading relationship (U.S.-New Zealand) and quality management systems for food producers and processors (HACCP and ISO 9000) illustrate the application of this model. These case studies show that, far from creating a close harmonious trading environment, national-level regulations currently allow for the maintenance and possible development of trade barriers.

This dissertation studies the volume, nature, direction and determinants of capital flight and FDI in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in relation to certain structural and institutional characteristics. The results show that the resource-based economies of region have experienced large amounts of capital flight in the form of unrecorded foreign exchange outflows and are among the least recipients of FDI relative to market size in comparison to other developing countries. In contrast, the resource-poor countries of the region have experienced large net unrecorded foreign exchange inflows, driven mostly by import underinvoicing, and receive less FDI than their potentiality suggests empirically and in comparison to other developing countries. However, they receive more FDI as a percentage of GDP than the resource-based countries of MENA. In addition, the determinants of each type of capital differ according to whether a MENA country is a resource-based or not. For example, higher level of development increases capital flight but reduces FDI in the resource-rich countries. In contrast, it increases unrecorded foreign exchange inflows but is insignificant to FDI in the resource-poor countries of the region. Interestingly, capital flight is shown to be an outcome of increasing control of domestic authorities in the resource-rich countries, while increasing control of domestic authorities in the resource-poor economies induces unrecorded inflows to foreign exchange. The welfare analysis for the resource-rich countries suggest that both capital flight and FDI reduce economic growth, while for the resource-poor countries neither variable has a significant effect on economic growth. Based on the empirical findings, the dissertation provides brief policy implications regarding capital flight, unrecorded foreign exchange inflows and FDI in the MENA region.

In this dissertation, I explore the origins and consequences of the dramatic rise in the size and importance of financial markets in the U.S. economy since the late 1970s. I focus on the impacts of this process of 'financialization' on the operations of the non-financial corporate sector. Specifically, I investigate the consequences for non-financial firms of increasing financial investment and incomes on the one hand and rising financial market pressure on their management on the other. I document the stylized facts about financialization in Chapter 2 and then move to provide a historical perspective on the evolution of financialization and its proximate causes, including financial liberalization and innovation, changes in financial institutions and low profitability in the non-financial sector, in the third chapter. This chapter also presents a brief discussion of the previous finance capital era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the regulated financial markets era of the post-World War II period. Next, I compare various theoretical and empirical perspectives on financialization in an attempt to clarify the limits of our knowledge of financialization and outline what we know about the phenomenon and what we do not. In chapters 5 to 7, I further explore the relationship between the financial and non-financial sectors of the economy and focus on the effects of financialization on capital accumulation. Financialization can have two negative impacts on capital accumulation. Increased financial investment and financial profit opportunities can crowd out real investment by directing funds away from real investment and contributing to managerial short-termism, and the increase in financial payments can decrease real investment by decreasing the amount of available funds for real investment, shortening the planning horizons of firm management, and increasing uncertainty. Chapter 5 provides the theoretical framework for analyzing the relationship between financialization and capital accumulation, Chapter 6 presents an aggregate time-series analysis, and Chapter 7 carries the analysis to the firm-level. Through aggregate and firm-level data analyses, I provide econometric evidence that the increase in non-financial corporations' (NFCs) financial investment rates and payments to financial markets has had negative effects on the real investment rates of NFCs.

The last thirty years in the US have been characterized by rising financial profits as a share of total profits and the growth of banking activities yielding non-interest income. These developments pose two questions. First, what are the social relations enabling and sustaining financial profits and what are their macroeconomic sources? Second, what do these trends imply for the nature of banking and what kind of theory of banking can capture them? This study addresses these questions and makes four contributions. First, a Marxist theory of banking is developed to capture the transformation of banking drawing on two characteristics: first, emphasis on liquidity provision through exchange of promises to pay among credit participants and, second, explicit connection between bank revenues and macroeconomic aggregates (wages, profits, assets). It is shown that a Marxist theory of banking can be a more general theory of banking retaining strengths of other approaches and overcoming their limitations. Second, it is shown that the corporate form of business organization and the attendant capital markets create opportunities to extract a range of profits with similar characteristics, i.e., capital gain-like revenues. The key features of their simplest form—founder’s profit—are shown also to hold for securitization revenues and, partly, for profit from mergers and acquisitions. These revenues hinge on wealth transfers across the society and, therefore, differ from profits from production. Third, by bringing together the Marxist theory of banking and the analysis of capital gain-like revenues, liquidity provision is shown to form the basis for banks’ sharing in capital gain-like income. The core functions of banking can, therefore, co-exist with, and even form the basis, for a significant transformation of bank revenues. Examination of the multiplicity of forms of capital gain-like revenues shows that their extraction is the common driving force behind the apparently heterogeneous activities associated with the transformation of banking. Fourth, empirical analysis of the US bank holding companies confirms that capital gain-like revenues were a significant part of bank revenues in 2001–2010. Given the rising household vulnerability toward wealth transfers, this trend suggests a reinstatement of predatory aspects of finance in contemporary capitalism.

The first essay explores the impact of gender norms on time allocation to housework by asking whether individual attitudes towards the gendered division of labor between paid employment and family care mediate the relationship between wives' income share and time spent on housework. I hypothesize that patriarchal attitudes can impose a "psychic transactions cost" on individuals that impedes efficient allocation of time and introduces frictions into household bargaining. Regression analysis of the 2004 Korean Time Use Survey which collected data on both attitudes and time allocation of married couples shows that husbands' egalitarian attitudes play a particularly important role in increasing their own housework and decreasing their wives' level and share of housework, particularly within households where wives also reveal egalitarian attitudes. The second essay develops and compares input and output-based replacement-cost estimates of the value of parental child care services in the U.S. in 2003-2006. My estimates build on the previous literature on the value of child care in the U.S. in the following ways: (1) I define child care broadly to include supervisory and on-call responsibilities and (2) I explore the sensitivity of valuation to assumptions regarding the effect of adult/child ratios that are likely to affect labor intensity and care quality. The results suggest that the input approach is likely to underestimate productivities of child care time for mothers relative to fathers, multiple-child families relative to one-child families. They also show the significant impact of the indirect child care time and labor intensity/care quality on values of child care time, calling careful attention to this issue in valuing unpaid parental child care time. The third essay develops an "output consumption" approach, illustrating the effect of different assumptions regarding the degree of rivalry in the time devoted to household production. With an analysis of the 2003-2006 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS), the findings suggest that prior empirical studies on the "time costs" of children, which focused on time inputs only and ignore the degree of rivalry in household consumption in concluding significant economies of scale in raising children, have overestimated the extent of economies of scale in childrearing. Keywords. Time allocation, gender norm, housework, valuation of parental child care, input versus output approach, household production, time costs of children, Korean Time Use Survey, American Time Use Survey.

This dissertation consists of two theoretical papers on market-based environmental policy. The first paper exploits the correlation between the environmental performance of firms and their economic performance to show that financial markets can be used to help enforce environmental policy and to design more efficient regulations. The results indicate that when markets punish firms for not complying with environmental standards, environmental regulators can exploit this by setting stricter standards. In fact, it is possible for the regulator to use market-driven enforcement to reduce a firm’s emissions and monitoring of the firm simultaneously. The second paper provides a theoretical analysis of the nature of an optimal emissions tax when firms’ emissions are not perfectly observable. The purpose is to examine how the optimal tax is affected by enforcement costs and the market structure. We obtain the result that market imperfections and enforcement costs push the optimal tax lower than the marginal damage when the number of firms in the market is exogenous. However, when the number of firms is determined endogenously enforcement costs generate two countervailing effects on the optimal tax. The overall effect of enforcement costs on the optimal tax depends on the strength of direct relative to indirect effects when there is free entry and exit.

This dissertation investigates the effect of the worker's fallback position on the wage determination process, specifically, on the wage slowdown in the 1980s. It is argued that the failure of the traditional wage models to account for the wage slowdown in the 1980s and some other unusual wage developments is attributable to the neglect of an important dimension in the wage determination process, namely, the worker's fallback position. The dissertation also reexamines the role of the worker's fallback position on the changing cyclical variability of wages in the postwar period. It is argued in chapter 2 that the worker's fallback position occupies a central position in the labor discipline model (and in models of bargaining). The theoretical model developed is subjected to econometric estimation with the estimates of the worker's fallback position in chapter 3. It is shown that the wage change equation, when supplemented by the fallback position, provides a superior empirical explanation for the wage slowdown in the 1980s to the traditional wage equations, which are obviously under-specified. It is argued in chapter 4 that the theoretical framework of labor discipline model is inconsistent with some hypotheses that ascribe the decline in the cyclical variability of wages to the increase in the worker's fallback position. They are not empirically confirmed, either. An alternative hypothesis which links the changes in the cyclical variability of wages to the degree of cyclicity of the fallback position is proposed and it is roughly consistent with the postwar experiences. The dissertation concludes by discussing limitations with this study and normative issues as to the worker's fallback position.

In an international economy lacking any overarching institution with the ability to enforce contracts costlessly, how can a firm obtain an agreement governing the future behavior of a firm or government in another country that may not later be broken? This dissertation applies a view of economic rents stemming from the literature on transaction costs and principal-agent problems, to examine the role they can play as an international enforcement mechanism. The dissertation models two different cases of a firm persuading its government to grant rents to a foreign firm, contingent on the foreign firm behaving in specified ways. The first model illustrates the use of enforcement rents to strengthen free trade forces in another country. In the model a firm in a small country is unsure whether to specialize in production for export to a large country, since the production will require transaction-specific investment and the government of the foreign country might impose an optimal quota at any point in the future. I demonstrate that the government of the small country can intervene indirectly in the policymaking process of the foreign government by giving a rent to a politically influential firm or industry in the foreign country, with the understanding that this rent will be taken away if the firm does not lobby its government against protection. I prove not only that such an interventionary policy enhances trade but that it may be Pareto-superior to the outcome without enforcement rents. In the second model firms in two different countries face a Prisoner's Dilemma arising from positive international externalities to R&D. Again, the government in one of the two countries grants a rent contingent on the foreign firm's cooperation, enabling the two firms to reach a Pareto-optimal level of R&D expenditure. The literature review contrasts the productive role of rents modelled in this dissertation, with the view of rents prevailing in the literature on rent seeking. It argues that the latter view of rents, and the associated distinction between purely economic forces and political intrusion into markets does not allow for transaction costs, moral hazard, and other contracting problems.

This dissertation undertakes a methodological critique of several of the predominant modern business cycle and crisis theories, including contributions to neo-Marxian, new Keynesian and new classical macroeconomics. The dissertation uncovers a shared metaphysical foundation underlying these otherwise diverse accounts. This foundation is identified as the necessity/contingency dualism; it entails the inaugural presumption that economic science must begin with an ontological judgement about which forces are primarily responsible for determining the source of economic events. This designation of "necessity" entails by the same stroke the demotion of all other economic forces to the status of "contingency." The dissertation investigates the strategies by which the different paradigms under review--monopoly capital theory, long wave theory, social structures of accumulation theory, and new classical and new Keynesian macroeconomics--handle the difficult problems that attend the necessity/contingency dualism in the context of their respective models of the business cycle and/or crisis. These strategies are identified as the "contingent context" and the "temporal bifurcation" resolutions. The dissertation traces both the philosophical bases of these resolutions and the irresolvable dilemmas which attend the dualism but which are largely unrecognized in modern economics. In the case of each paradigm, the specific effects of the dualism are uncovered and examined. Finally, the dissertation undertakes a detailed examination of one school of Marxian thought that has attempted to found economic explanation on an alternative metaphysical basis. This school, centered around the Association for Economic and Social analysis (AESA), develops an explicitly anti-essentialist framework which denies the categories of necessity and contingency. The dissertation concludes with s sketch of new approaches to anti-essentialist economic explanation that extend the AESA framework while overcoming certain debilitating errors in the work of the AESA school.

Information (or knowledge) is an essential aspect of any exchange and any economy; yet, a mutually acceptable definition of information (or knowledge) does not exist among economists. Even a modest survey of post-Keynesian, neo-Austrian, Marxist, and neoclassical literatures show the profession to be in disagreement. Various definitions of both information and knowledge have been and still are proposed, criticized, accepted, and rejected. An economist has many different definitions of information (and therefore knowledge) to consider. And because information is an essential aspect of any exchange and any economy, any economist should be aware that one's choice of definition, to a great extent, determines her subject of inquiry. What information and knowledge are, largely shape what economics is. Thus, my dissertation is my entry into the debate, "How should we define information and knowledge in economics?" Particularly I am concerned with how we define the information and knowledge processes. Therefore, my entry point is a neoclassical theory of the information process: Spence's market signaling theory. Within its three essays my dissertation (1) extends and strengthens the post-Keynesian, neo-Austrian, and Marxist critiques of the probabilistic definition of information (and knowledge), (2) extends the critiques of the equilibrium concept, (3) extends and strengthens the critiques of the statistical model of information process, (4) develops a new subjectivist model of knowledge as process, (5) contributes to discussions of adaptability and biological models of economic behavior, and (6) contributes to post-Keynesian, neo-Austrian, Marxist, and other discussions of economic methodology and "the individual."