Health problems of the human beings in a society are one of the main components of the social security systems due to the dimension of the financial burden it might bring on individuals, employers, insurance companies and governments. Morbidity measures, such as incidence and prevalence of a specific disease in a certain population enable researchers to estimate for individuals the probability of being diagnosed or being prone to the diseases. This information is usually not tractable because of the non-availability of the convenient data or recordings for many countries as well as Turkey. Even if it is available, it is commonly limited with largely varying characteristics about the type and coverage of the diseases. In this regard, the pattern that a population follows for an acute disease may not be the same for chronic diseases. Having those indicators determined for a group of insureds will enable underwriters to have more profitable and economical premium calculation and precision on required reserve estimation. v Based on their characteristics such as acute or chronic behaviour, the gender, and the location of residency of people, the diseases show different behaviour on their occurrences. From the insurer

In this thesis I present three essays that explore various economic situations on strategic choices from different perspectives: the individuals’ strategic decision to work on the informal/formal sector, the US strategic decision on the provision of foreign aid, and the firm’s strategic decision to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The first essay presents an analysis on the effect of income taxes and its effect on worker’s transitions towards informality. We find that an increase in average tax rate leads to a statistically significant increase in transitions towards informality for women and those with low incomes. The second essay offers evidence of how patterns of US foreign aid to Latin America differ from aid allocation observed elsewhere. We find that while political institutions and events in recipient countries greatly influence US aid allocations, the ideological orientation of US administrations can explain part of the divergent patters of aid towards Latin America. Finally, the third essay studies two possible mechanisms that affect the decision of a firm to engage in CSR: the role of growth in value added and workers’ preferences. The results suggest that firms engage in CSR in times of economic prosperity; peer effects are increasingly important in a firm’s decision to engage in CSR when the proportion of firms within an industry increases. And finally, I find a weak link between workers’ preferences and a firm’s decision to engage in CSR activities related with diversity.

The acquisition and maintenance of human capital are considered key drivers of productivity and economic growth. However, recent literature shows that in the case of Russia, this relationship is not obvious, which raises a question concerning the nature of human capital accumulation, despite the significant expansion of tertiary education in this country. The existing literature, much of it relying on a theory of market imperfections, tends to explain low incidences of training by the lack of employer incentives to invest in the human capital of their employees. This dissertation adds to this view confirming the negative role of ‘bad’ jobs and social origins in obstructing employees from skills development in BRIC-like countries. Skills training in Russia is constrained by stratifying occupational forces comprising jobs with low requirements to skills development, which conserves the working population in generic labour. This reveals the phenomenon of skills polarisation ‘at the bottom’ in a late-industrial country, thus, contributing to the growing critique of the knowledge society theory. For those few workers who occupy ‘good’ jobs, skills training is strongly linked to personal-specific traits, such as qualifications and computer and language skills; and this is common in both Russia and India. However, in contrast to Russia, India is still forming their knowledge society. This is confirmed by the statistically significant impact of socio-demographic origins (e.g. age, household size, marital status, and religion) on the incidence of training, which reveals a crucial role of ascription in human capital acquisition in contemporary India. The present thesis contributes to the growing literature on structural prerequisites for successful advancement and the contradictory development of the BRIC countries.

This study is concerned with the sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls by white men in the antebellum South. Interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s are studied alongside nineteenth-century narratives of the formerly enslaved in order to make calculations of the scale of abuse in the South, but also to discover which conditions, social spaces and situations were, and possibly still are, most conducive to the sexual abuse of women and girls. This thesis is separated into two parts. Part One establishes a methodology for working with testimony of the formerly enslaved and determines the scale of sexual abuse using all available 1930s interviews with people who had lived in Louisiana and Texas under slavery. This systematic quantitative analysis is a key foundation from which to interpret the testimony of abuse that is explored according to different forms of sexual violence in Part Two. It is argued that abuse was endemic in the South, and occurred on a scale that was much higher than has been argued in previous studies. Enslaved people could experience a range of white male sexually abusive behaviours: rape, sexual slavery and forced breeding receive particular attention in this study due to the frequency with which they were mentioned by the formerly enslaved. These abuses are conceptualised as existing on a continuum of sexual violence that, alongside other less frequently mentioned practices, pervaded the lives of all enslaved people. Common features existed along the continuum. Abuse was intergenerational in nature for both the abusers and the abused. Light-skinned enslaved children born of rape were far more likely to become victims of abuse themselves and young enslaved girls were prematurely sexualised. Sexual abuse was brought into the white domestic space through the institution of sexual slavery, white children were thus unconsciously schooled in the abusive sexual mores of southern society from an early age. Abuse was quite open among white male family members. Other institutions existed that normalised and legitimised abuse, such as the fancy-girl trade and sexual interference through forced breeding practices that included eugenic manipulation and the use of ‘studs’. Despite this, enslaved women showed remarkable levels of emotional survival and initial reflections are made on the ways in which women could resist and cope with sexual abuse. Testimony suggests that abuse was discussed amongst the black community, support was rarely denied to victims, and there was no stigma was attached to children born of rape. With recent revelations on the scale of the institutionalised sexual abuse of women and children, as well as vast modern sex-trafficking networks, there are special opportunities presented through the current cultural climate in order to understand the southern experience. The South is reframed as a ‘culture of abuse’ where sexual violence against enslaved people was naturalised and culturally reproduced.