In the 1980s, the narrative of international migration was significantly altered in Europe. This thesis examines how this new narrative was brought about by policy-makers and shows how the narrative re-configured our understanding of international migration. Empirically, the focus of the thesis is the Inter-Governmental Consultations on Asylum, Refugee and Migration Policies in Europe, North America and Australia (IGC). These consultations are situated in the context of debates in the 1970s and 80s concerning ‘free-market conservatism'. The thesis argues that these debates comprised the conditions of possibility for the emergence of an 'informal plurilateralism'. Through thus far confidential memos between high ranking public servants, summaries distributed across embassies, background papers, minutes of meetings and personal letters, I trace the development of an altered discourse and the construction of a new figure: the ‘illegal migrant'. ‘Migration Management', I argue, is best seen as a hegemonic paradigm which embodies a tool-box of mechanisms for governments to deal with international migration; introduces a distinctive way of treating human mobility; prescribes specific ways of constructing migrants, including a minority of illegal migrants who remain just outside of the European external boundaries, stripped of their juridico-political status. As such, these migrants are suspended from the community of those with a place and function. The figure of the suspended migrant points to the disappearance of the political, understood as a space where public encounter of the heterogeneous is possible. This raises crucial questions about what democracy is, how it works and how the political can be realised in a climate where the logic of necessity and efficiency has filled the space previously occupied by bipolar grand-narratives. Most urgently, it raises questions about the way in which the value of a human being is established, granted or denied. Arendt and Rancière help me to start addressing these questions.

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays. It examines the impact of institutions and cross-border policies on socio-economic outcomes. The first essay focuses on the impact of religiosity, general and political trust, local participation, and welfare metrics on well-being in rural areas using the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey. Ordered probit methods reveal distinctive determinants of overall life satisfaction and momentary happiness. Broader socio-economic factors such as religiosity and political governance strongly predict life satisfaction, while largely welfare metrics drive momentary happiness. The second essay studies the determinants of cross-border flows of people for tourism, personal, or business purposes with a particular emphasis on the role of visa policies using instrumental variable estimation for outbound travel to a cross-section of countries for 2005 and 2010. We adopt the UN General Assembly Affinity Index, a measure of the quality of bilateral relations between nations, to instrument for bilateral visa policy. The affinity index explains 22% of the variation in visa policies in both 2005 and 2010. We find that, ceteris paribus, imposing visa reduces travel by about 80% and 73% in 2005 and 2010 respectively implying restrictive visa policies discourage cross-border travel significantly. We also find an adverse impact of restrictive visa policies on travel and tourism-related revenues and employment. The third essay addresses the role of the United States Visa Waiver Program (VWP) on inbound travel. We employ Difference-in-Difference (Diff-in-Diff) estimation on panel data in respect of US inbound travel from eight countries newly admitted to the program in 2008, versus several comparison (control) groups including ten aspirant - so-called `roadmap' - countries in the process of negotiation at the same time. We also restrict the treatment and comparison groups to Europe to reduce potential bias arising from heterogeneity and unobserved country characteristics. Treating the policy as a quasi-natural experiment allows a neater identification of the impact of visa policies on travel. We conclude, ceteris paribus, admitting a country to the program increases inbound travel from that country to the US by 29% to 44%.

Ever since the United Nations declared 2005 the year of micro-credit and linked it to the Millennium Development Goals, and especially on poverty reduction, there has been a series of studies looking at factors affecting the flow of credit down the poverty line. This is of particular importance because in spite of the success of Microfinance Institutions such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and BancoSol in Mexico, evidence shows that many Microfinance Institutions do not reach down the poverty line but tend to cluster at the top. Developing several hypotheses using the elements of the neo-institutional theory, this study looks at how geographic location affects how Microfinance Institutions target their clients and the moderating effect that their regional context has on other factors. This is analysed using an unbalanced panel of 6, 645 observations drawn from 443 MFI institutions in 81 countries divided into 5 regions for the time period 2000-2014. An ordered logit regression was run using the target markets as the ordinal dependable variables. Based on the arguments of the neo-institutional theory, this study builds on previous ones by using a larger sample size (and number of years) to examine how the regional context affects the relationship between institutional quality and the selective lending behaviour of MFIs in 81 developing countries. An ordered logit regression was carried out using an unbalanced panel of 6645 observations from 443 MFI institutions across six regions from 2000-2014 against a broad range of company, country, regional and global specific variables. The results indicate that the geographic locations affects how MFIs lend down the poverty line with MFIs in and those in Eastern Europe and Central America less likely to lend to down the poverty line. The study found that the regional context also plays a big role in how institutional factors affect MFI lending practises with certain factors being more relevant in some regions than in others. This study also makes a case for using target markets as a better measure for depth of outreach as opposed to the more popular loan sizes and identifies the role that rural population growth and mobile phone penetration play in increasing depth of outreach of microfinance.

This thesis has developed alternative approaches for inflation forecasting and analysed the inflation risk premium in the context of commodity futures and options markets. Chapter 1 proposes an approach to tackle the non-availability of exchange-traded inflation futures price data. The composition of the consumer price index enables us to recognise the commodities which correspond to the consumption goods in the CPI. By averaging the commodity futures prices in the same way as the CPI is composed, we construct a synthetic futures contract written on the consumer price index, i.e. a futures on the CPI proxy, based on which we derive a ‘point’ forecast of inflation rate. Chapter 2 analyses the term structures of futures on the CPI proxy using the Schwartz (1997) method. Inspired by the Schwartz (1997)’s framework, we develop a two-factor valuation model filtering the spot consumer price index and the instantaneous real interest rate. The Kalman filter is applied to estimate the two-factor valuation model parameters. The filtered spot consumer price index may help alleviate the publication lag in the U.S. CPI-U index. What’s more, the two-factor valuation model is capable of forecasting the downward trend in the U.S. CPI inflation rate during May 2014 to December 2014. Chapter 3 forecasts the inflation rate from the perspective of commodity futures option market. We construct a synthetic option contract written on the futures on the CPI proxy. Based on a synthetic option implied volatility surface, we derive an interval estimate for the one-year ahead expected inflation rate. Moreover, the fact that commodity futures option market data is high-frequency enables our method of inflation forecasting to theoretically capture the market expectation of price level evolution in the real time. Chapter 4 estimates the inflation risk premium using commodity market data. We derive a link between the inflation risk premium and the risk premium associated with the futures on the CPI proxy. The negative inflation risk premium estimates in our result are consistent with the recent inflation risk premium estimates in the macroeconomic inflation risk premium literature.

This research advances an integrative approach to examining the complex interplays between various internal and external determinants to the firm, in order to provide a fuller understanding of the international performance of firms. Specifically, this research aims to enrich our understanding of the role of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in driving the international performance of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). For this purpose, the research integrates the resource-based view (RBV) with the institutional perspective to explicate the dynamic interactions among EO - a core firm-specific resource - and two institutional factors, i.e. cultural dimensions and government regulations in explaining the international performance of SMEs. The research conceptualises and examines four core sets of associations that relate to: i) EO and international performance of firms; ii) cultural dimensions and EO; iii) government regulations on the association between EO and international performance; and iv) government regulations on the association between cultural dimensions and EO. The study employed a quantitative research method and conducted a large-scale, self-administered questionnaire survey in Malaysia. The statistical analysis of data of 203 internationalised SMEs confirms the positive impact of EO on the firms’ international performance. Moreover, analyses provide evidence of the association of cultural dimensions of high individualism, high masculinity and low uncertainty avoidance with EO; and of the premise that government regulations positively moderate the individualism-EO and masculinity-EO relationships. The incorporation of the RBV and the institutional perspective offers a fuller explanation of the international performance of SMEs. Specifically, it advances understanding of the importance of EO - a critical resource for firms, whose manifestation and strength are influenced by institutional factors - in the internationalisation of firms. The research also contributes to the institutional perspective in two ways. First, the focus on the macro institutional factors based on a micro perspective reflected through the perception of the key decision-maker advances the understanding of the entrepreneurship phenomenon. It explains that how firms perceive and respond to the institutional context within which they are embedded will, in turn, prompt the responding entrepreneurial behaviours and subsequently affect international performance. Second, it explicates the interacting and reinforcing effect of cultural dimensions and government regulations, which are an informal and a formal component of institutions, on the genesis of EO. Significant practical implications are derived accordingly for business practitioners and policy makers to promote SMEs’ international business development and growth.

This thesis contains of four chapters. The first chapter presents the introduction and all other three chapters look at different aspects of monetary policy in an economy with financial frictions. The second chapter studies the conditions under which a modest financial shock can trigger a deep recession with a prolonged period of slow recovery. We suggest that two factors can generate such a profile. The first is that the economy has accumulated a moderately high level of private debt by the time the adverse shock occurs. The second factor is when monetary policy is restricted by the zero lower bound. When present, these factors can result in a sharp contraction in output followed by a slow recovery. Perhaps surprisingly, we use a standard DSGE model with financial frictions along the lines of Jermann and Quadrini (2012) to demonstrate this result and so do not need to rely on dysfunctional interbank markets. The third chapter studies international transmission of financial shocks between two economies under flexible exchange rate regime. We consider different degrees of financial integration and demonstrate that welfare is maximised for an intermediate value of degree of it. Under perfect risk sharing there is large volatility of output during the period of adjustment, while the deleveraging is performed faster. With greater restrictions on international financial flows, the deleveraging is substantially slowed down which leads to longer periods of adjustment and greater costs. We demonstrate that in such world the effect of one country's credit shock has very limited effect on another country. When monetary policymakers cooperate and choose interest rate optimally, the unaffected country can nearly eliminate all aftereffects of the shock to the other country. To some extent, limited financial integration prevents the spread of volatility across the border, however, unconstrained monetary policy is the key to these results. In the fourth chapter we use two-country model and assume that both countries are locked into a permanently fixed exchange rate regime within a currency union. We demonstrate that the centralised monetary policy alone is unable to stabilise the economy. National fiscal policies must be activated to counteract asymmetric shocks. We demonstrate, however, that the effectiveness of fiscal policy is limited. Even if it is chosen optimally, fiscal policy does not eliminate cyclical patterns in economic adjustment, which is welfare-reducing volatility of economic variables. This model reveals that shocks hitting one economy, result in sharp contraction of consumption in both countries.

Nominal exchange rate stability has long been considered as a policy choice for many oil-exporting economies, including the GCC countries. The main motives for such policy choices include the desire to import credibility to domestic currencies, stabilize oil revenues and in turn government revenues (given their role in fiscal budget of these oil-based economies) and to avoid Dutch disease, particularly for those countries which have been trying to promote their non-oil exports. Recently however, with respect to the GCC countries, the advantages of exchange rate stability/peg have been overshadowed by adverse domestic and global developments. The recent surge in the GCC countries’ inflation rates that coincided with depreciation of the currencies of these countries due to the depreciation of the US dollar, has led to increasing public pressure for an upward revaluation or even a de-peg from the US dollar to an exchange rate regime that will ensure higher price stability. Accordingly, this thesis was put forth to provide a scientific opinion of the viability of the existing US dollar peg in the GCC countries, by focusing on the link between changes in exchange rate and inflation. To this end, the study attempted to assess the risk to the domestic inflation rates of the GCC countries arising from fluctuations of the US dollar against the currencies of the major trading partners of these economies. Based on a thorough review of the relevant literature, some empirical estimations were carried out using some econometric methods, and it was discovered that the amount of pass-through or impact from changes in exchange rates to inflation rates in the GCC economies is incomplete and moderate, with an average of around 23% in the long-run. Furthermore, an average long-run pass-through of around 23% does not signify a high risk from fluctuations in the foreign exchange market for domestic prices in the GCC countries. In other words, the volatility of exchange rates of the currencies of the GCC countries does not necessitate the adjustment of the money supply in these economies. These findings lent further support to the relevancy of the existing fixed exchange rate regime for maintaining stable inflation in the economies of the GCC countries. The findings were also supported by the performance of the GCC economies over the past two decades, despite some periods of dollar fluctuations. A retrospective analysis indicates that on average, inflation has been stable in the region over the past two decades. The study provided evidence for the important role of the fiscal policies of the GCC countries in affecting the recent impact from exchange rate to inflation rate in these economies, which suggests that these policies form a key macroeconomic tool in these countries, particularly ii given the lost independence of the monetary policy under the existing pegged exchange rate regimes. Moreover, the study suggests lowering the influence of fiscal policies on the link between exchange rate and domestic prices, or inflation in general, in the GCC countries by pursuing gradual steps toward domestic development in the economy, particularly given the limited absorptive capacity of these economies due to the shortage in supply bottleneck. The study was also extended to identify the potential alternative exchange rate regime if the GCC changed their focus from inflation to other, evolving, national objectives like international competitiveness. Based on the existing literature and the optimum currency theory, the study suggests that the GCC countries should consider moving gradually from their current single peg toward a more flexible exchange rate in order to avoid abrupt change that would disturb the existing market credibility. As an initial step, the study recommends moving toward a basket peg of two currencies, namely the US dollar and the Euro, that account for a large share of the GCC economies’ international trade and non-trade financial transactions. Finally, the study also concluded that an upward revaluation as a remedy for the recent inflationary development is an unsatisfactory solution, particularly if the same set of circumstances continued into the future. If this was the case, then the process would have to be repeated again, thus triggering the possibility of speculation attack.

The breakdown of the Bretton Woods system and the adoption of generalized floating exchange rates ushered in a new era of exchange rate volatility and uncertainty. This increased volatility led economists to search for economic models able to describe observed exchange rate behaviour. In chapter 2 we propose more general STAR transition functions which encompass both threshold non-linearity and asymmetric effects. Our framework allows for a gradual adjustment from one regime to another, and considers threshold effects by encompassing other existing models, such as TAR models. We apply our methodology to three different exchange rate data-sets, one for developing countries, and official nominal exchange rates, the second emerging market economies using black market exchange rates and the third for OECD economies. The large appreciation and depreciation of the dollar in the 1980s stimulate an exciting academic debate on using unit root tests for structural break. We propose a model which is the natural extension of the behavioural equilibrium exchange rate (BEER) model. We then propose more general smooth transition (STR) functions, which are able to capture structural changes along the equilibrium path, and are consistent with our economic model. Our framework allows for a gradual adjustment between regimes and considers under- and/or over-valued exchange rate adjustment. We apply our methodology to the monthly and quarterly nominal exchange rates for seventeen and twenty OECD economies and construct bilateral CPI-based real exchange rates against the U.S. dollar and the German mark. The investigation of chapter 4 focuses on non-linear forecasts to testing exchange rate models by examining microstructure - order flow. The basic hypothesis is that if order flow includes heterogeneous beliefs and the information contained in them, heterogenous customer order flow can have forecasting power for exchange rates. Using statistical and economic evaluation, we quantify the role that, when the information is lagged or simultaneously released to all market participants, the key micro level price determinants - order flows is impounded into price. The results indicate: 1) order flow with non-linear consideration lead to considerable and statistically significant improvements compared to the random walk model; and 2) order flow is a powerful predictor of the exchange rate movement in an out-of-sample exercise, on the basis of economic value criteria such as Sharpe ratio and performance fees implied by utility calculations.

This thesis is about the measurement of health care output and the relationship between health care outcomes, physician practice patterns and individual physician characteristics within a very specific and particular health care sector, the health care sector on the Islands of Malta. Chapter 2 focuses on the appropriateness of introducing a Diagnosis Related Group (DRG) casemix classification system on Maltese data. A number of tests are applied to gauge the ability of Grouper software to capture the heterogeneity between the obtained DRG groups and the degree of homogeneity gained in explaining resource use from the grouping of cases by DRG categories. This serves to provide a measure of health care ‘output’ whilst providing a tool to help describe and manage resource use. Chapter 3 of this thesis explores differences in the expected relationship between volume and competing risk outcomes and whether this relationship varies in view of different consultant job contract conditions. Finally, Chapter 4 of this thesis studies the behaviour of individual consultants working in the context of the specific incentives and work practices of the Maltese health care system. The role of the specific consultant job contract type is investigated to explain heterogeneity arising among treatment practice patterns over two specific periods related to the patients’ stay at the hospital: the first two days of hospital stay and their remaining stay.

Notwithstanding the proven achievements of the New-Keynesian research programme, the models currently used for monetary policy analysis rely on two assumptions that are often taken for granted. One is the balanced growth path property, which has generally been an accurate description of the US and other advanced economies. The other assumption concerns the small volatility of shocks that enables the researcher to approximate the solution of the original model locally. In the past decade, however, emerging economies such as China, Brazil, the Czech Republic or Poland have experienced persistent growth rates of GDP per capita that have been well above the corresponding levels in the euro area or the US. But how should monetary policy respond to an ongoing real convergence process which precisely differentiates emerging from advanced economies? The first part of the thesis aims to answer this question in the context of economies also bound to become future members of the euro area. Owing to the long-term institutional commitment to satisfy the Maastricht convergence criteria during the ERM-II mechanism, policy makers in Central Europe face the additional responsibility of managing the tension between nominal and real convergence. For instance, the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis postulates an empirically relevant reason as to why countries engaged in a catching-up process might experience a higher inflation rate brought about by the increase in the relative price of services. Motivated by the stylised facts of macroeconomic dynamics in the Czech Republic, a country we take as representative for the whole region, Chapter 1 develops a stylised SOE model with nominal rigidities that is subject to asymmetric productivity growth shocks affecting the traded and nontraded sectors. Relative to the existing literature analysing optimal monetary policy under commitment in Balassa-Samuelson type of macroeconomic environments, the model we propose differentiates itself in that it allows for endogenous current account fluctuations and uncorrected steady state distortions. These modifications result in richer dynamics, which are shaped by the possibility to influence the terms of trade in one’s favour and the presence of monopoly power in product markets. In setting up the welfare maximising interest rate responses, the optimal plan trades off conflicting inflationary and deflationary incentives stemming from the existence of the above externalities. Whereas the first chapter focuses on the methods and assumptions needed to detrend the nonstationary model, the second chapter examines the optimal monetary policy stance under real convergence in two different market structures. The simulations reveal that the specific policy recommendations depend on the degree of substitutability between domestic and foreign goods, a parameter which also alters the strength of the wealth effects driving consumption responses. When monopolistic competition in the traded sector is assumed, the Ramsey interest rate plan is countercyclical. Owing to a cancellation of the terms of trade externality, the predictions are however reversed under perfect competition. This is because the incentive to stimulate production away from the inefficient steady state level becomes dominant. Additionally, the study conducts an extensive welfare analysis through which the effectiveness of inflation targeting and exchange rate peg regimes is assessed relative to the Ramsey plan. It is shown that policies achieving appropriate measures of price stability robustly deliver higher conditional welfare during a catching-up process. The analysis is suggestively complemented with policy experiments that are relevant to the ERM-II period, such as the Maastricht constrained optimal plan, its welfare costs and the welfare-maximising choice of a central parity at which the nominal exchange rate should be fixed. The final part of the thesis examines the macroeconomic costs of euro adoption in Emerging Europe, conditional on the EMU membership eventuality. Inspired from the Optimum Currency Areas literature, the research conducted in the third chapter investigates the circumstances when the decisions made by the ECB would correspond to the domestic optimal interest rate responses. The empirical work looks at the structural alignment and the degree of business cycle synchronisation between prospective and current members of the single currency area, modelled suggestively as the Czech and Austrian economies. A rich SOE model with incomplete markets and trade in intermediate inputs is developed in this sense, whose core structure is similar to Kollmann (2001). Relative to the original framework, we augment its shock structure and enrich the dynamics by incorporating external habit formation and partial indexation in the Calvo adjustment rules for prices and wages. The state-space representation of the DSGE model is taken to data and the set of random parameters is estimated using Bayesian techniques. The comparative analysis reveals that most structural parameters are not very far from each other, suggesting that a moderate degree of structural convergence has been achieved by the emerging economy. The costs of losing monetary policy sovereignty are further assessed by employing a battery of tests, which include impulse response analyses and historical decompositions of output and inflation. While confirming previous SVAR evidence, the results suggest that the propagation mechanisms of monetary policy, productivity and demand shocks are remarkably similar across the two economies. In contrast, the analysis also indicates considerable asymmetries of the sources of fluctuations, which were more volatile and largely idiosyncratic in the Czech Republic. The low degree of business cycle synchronisation suggests that coping with euro area interest rates on a permanent basis is likely to be painful.