Derrida and Economics analyses two essays of Jacques Derrida on the Public and Democracy, alongside other essays reflecting these political works. However, Derrida's political thought will be taken seriously by emphasising Economics before Politics. Economics will be viewed as a detour, a detour inflecting every attempt to present a meaningful political position or stable political realm. For Derrida, economics has the force of an oblique ruse. Derrida ADd BconoDdcs aligns Derrida's view of economics with the Eighteenth Century realisation that a stable SOciety, analogous to the Antique ideal of the Polis, is neither a common goal nor a proper object for Political philosophy. Here, Classical economics emerges as an oblique attempt to construct the conditions for the possibility of a political body through economic relations. This epistemological 'en passant' is familiar, in Britain, as Adam Smith's' Invisible Hand'. For Derrida, the equi valent Continental ruse is distinguished by a faith in 'dialectical idealisation'; a process bent upon securing an idealised po 11 tical space, but unable to limit its more speculati ve drifts. If Classical economics represents an attempt to construct the possibility of the Body Politic, Derrida's political essays deconstruct this possibility. His emphasiS upon the 'possible' highlights the effects of risk and competition in an economy that could never comfortably be identified wi th a stable Polt tical realm. For Derrida, economics is not simply an attempt to secure or rewrite more direct Political discourses. As he argues, its every detour is haunted by the possibility of speculative failure. Derrida argues an enthusiasm for economics can also imply a preoccupation with the finitude of the Body Politic. This observation allows him to comment upon the valorisation of death or redundancy in certain poli tical discourses; i. e. those analyses that, in the throes of Depression, remain devoted to the idea of redundancy as though to the object of a renewed political will.

This thesis develops three new classes of Bayesian graphical models to forecast multivariate time series. Although these models were originally motivated by the need for flexible and tractable forecasting models appropriate for modelling competitive business markets, they are of theoretical interest in their own right. Multiregression dynamic models are defined to preserve certain conditional independence structures over time. Although these models are typically very non-Gaussian, it is proved that they are simple to update, amenable to practical implementation and promise more efficient identification of causal structures in a time series than has been possible in the past. Dynamic graphical models are defined for multivariate time series for which there is believed to be symmetry between certain subsets of variables and a causal driving mechanism between these subsets. They are a specific type of graphical chain model (Wermuth & Lauritzen, 1990) which are once again typically non- Gaussian. Dynamic graphical models are a combination of multiregression dynamic models and multivariate regression models (Quintana, 1985,87, Quintana & West, 1987,88) and as such, they inherit the simplicity of both these models. Partial segmentation models extend the work of Dickey et al. (1987) to the study of models with latent conditional independence structures. Conjugate Bayesian anaylses are developed for processes whose probability parameters are hypothesised to be dependent, using the fact that a certain likelihood separates given a matrix of likelihood ratios. It is shown how these processes can be represented by undirected graphs and how these help in its reparameterisation into conjugate form.

In this dissertation I address the question, how does power operate in day-today consuming in a consumer society? My theoretical framework has two bases. One base is Foucault's theories of power, including but not limited to his work on normalization, surveillance, examination, confession, and identity. The other base is narrative theory, including the relevance of narratives to personal and social identities, the role of narratives in creating social order, the impact of narratives on such things as the organization of space and time, and the effect of narratives in creating coherence and directionality across operants of power. I suggest that many of the mechanisms of power identified by Foucault have unmistakable narrative features, and that by combining narrative and Foucauldian perspectives a more comprehensive understanding of the operation of power in day-to-day life is attainable. I apply my theoretical framework to data collected using autoethnographic methods. Specifically, I spent one year keeping a detailed journal of my and my family's experiences relating in the broadest sense to consuming. During this period we lived in a middle-sized Canadian city. To heighten my awareness of the taken-for-granted aspects of power and consuming we alternated lifestyles each month, living months 1,3,5,7,9, and 11 as conventional Canadian consumers, and months 2,4,6,8,10, and 12 as committed environmentally-mindful consumers. In addition, I conducted - interviews of small samples of conventional and environmentally-committed consumers; I undertook a content analysis of print advertising delivered to our house; and I conducted background research on various issues relating to consumerism. My research indicates that Foucauldian operants of power are used extensively to support consuming, and that; in addition, many narrative structures are also employed as operants of power, including charms and stories. These operants of power are aligned with one another to form coherent patterns through the effects of metanarratives. I argue that, despite claims by Lyotard (1984) and others, modern consumer societies are highly narrative, and have defining metanarratives. In addition, environmentally-based opposition to the dominant metanarrative of consuming has a metanarrative of its own, but is distinctly lacking in operants of power.

The history of analyses of scale and the conventional reductionist methodology are briefly recounted in the first chapter of the thesis. A detailed examination is then made of the theory of economies of scale and its development since the days of Adam Smith. A comprehensive survey shows that the description provided by conventional economic theory is quite unrealistic, and has been dictated by the demands of Neoclassical ideas of equilibrium. It is shown that the available empirical evidence does not easily allow conclusions to be drawn about the optimal scale of plants or enterprises. A simple simulation model then demonstrates that static economies of scale alone are insufficient to determine "optimal" scale - dynamic diseconomies depend upon environmental context and uncertainties of forecasting future demand. The question of technological change is closely bound up with issues of scale. The principle of bounded rationality is applied to deduce some conditions about the nature of technical change using Heiner's "Reliability Condition". The existence of "technological heuristics" (such as a bias in favour of scale-augmenting innovations) is predicted. The argument is illustrated with the use of a computer simulation of successive process innovations in a stylised chenical plant. Conflicting ideas about "optimal" scale in electricity generation, papermaking, brewing and cement manufacture are examined. These views are found to be explicable by borrowing the theory of fourfold cultural bias from the field of social anthropolgy. An Evolutionary Model of Increasing Returns (EMIR) is developed as a computer simulation. This model demonstrates that the restrictions imposed by conventional economic theory can be overcome in a dynamic economic model; economies of scale and technical change are married with plural rationalities to provide a range of findings on industry structure. Market share is found to be a more important determinant of industrial success than economies of scale. EMIR is used to demonstrate the phenomenon of technological "Lock-In"; important policy choices may be determined by small random events as critical points. Market selection mechanisms cannot be relied upon to optimise, whether in scale decisions or other important policy choices. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the use of plural models to go with plural rationalities in the analysis of policy issues.

The thesis critically appropriates the collaborative philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to argue that the general tendency of capitalism is towards the disintegration of high-level control structures (for instance, the nation-state). This disintegration does not entail a movement towards total chaos or anarchy. I argue that capital generates its own guidance mechanisms, but ones that act at a low-level, and respond flexibly to changing conditions (an instance of micro-politics). One of the difficulties of this project stems from the fact that the canon of philosophical discourse itself operates as a high-level control structure. In Marx, the development of capital is controlled by a secularized Hegelian dialectic that determines the outcome of capital in socialism. For Freud, the low level organization of the unconscious is subjected to high-level control through the universality of the Oedipus complex. By addressing the need for new philosophical instruments to understand capitalism, the thesis produces critiques of Marx and Freud, and advances a philosophy of economics by examining the function of axiomatics. Moreover, in critiquing presupposed structures (for example, the unconscious as a theatre of representation), the thesis argues for an immanent system (mulliplicity) of interaction within capitalism. The research undertaken to complete the thesis has consisted of contemporary experiments in complexity theory, and current socio/economic analyses of labour markets. Of particular interest has been the current deindustrialization that has taken place in the west coast of the United States. With the influx of a periphery into the core area of Los Angeles, the current role of urban politics and minor literatures (most notably Shakur's autobiography) unleash desire into the circuit of the city. I conclude with a re-examination of micro political/economic movements that have manifested themselves into the economy of Los Angeles. By decoding locally impoverished economic and cultural sectors, emergent properties have sprouted by realigning subversive activity onto the apex of capital (an immanence to capitalist processes).

This thesis undertakes a Monte Carlo study to investigate the finite sample properties of several panel unit root and cointegration tests. To this end, we consider a number of different experiments which potentially affect the properties of the tests. We first consider panel unit root tests in heterogenous panels. Application of the panel tests of Im, Pesaran and Shin (2003) (IPS), and Maddala and Wu (1999) (MW) increases their power over the standard ADF test. However, the power of the tests is significantly diminished when the panel is dominated by the non-stationary series. Neglecting the presence of cross-sectional dependence results in serious size distortions. In view of this, a variety of methods are applied to correct the size distortions. However, the power of all tests is diminished as the cross-correlations reduce the amount of independent information in the panel. The simulation results from the panel cointegration tests extend the findings of the unit root tests to multivariate cases. The likelihood-based panel rank test of Larsson, Lyhagen and Lothgren (2001) is found to be more powerful than the residual-based panel tests of IPS and MW, but slightly oversized in moderate sample sizes (Z). The effects of a mixed panel and of cross-correlations in the errors are similar to those of panel unit root tests. Therefore, we again, use the bootstrap method and the Cross-sectionally augmented IPS test (CIPS) ofPesaran (2003) to correct the size distortions. The presence of structural breaks affects the size and power properties of any panel unit root tests which fail to cope with it. When the break dates are known, the exogenous break panel LM test is applied, to control the effect of structural shifts. In addition, the endogenous break selection procedures are used to estimate the break points. The endogenous break panel LM test also performs considerably well in terms of the size, power and accuracy with which the true break points are estimated. Finally, application of the panel unit root and cointegration tests provide some evidence in support of the existence of long-run PPP and the monetary model in Asia Pacific countries. In addition, the presence of structural breaks as the impact of the currency crisis is also detected. However, evidence is found to be sensitive to the choice of deterministic terms (intercepts, trends), the methods used to estimate the panel test statistic (e.g. SUR and CIPS) and the break-point selection criteria.

This thesis comprises three chapters centered on two common themes. The first theme is the application of non-cooperative game theory to economic questions; the second is the study of the kind of arrangements that can arise in the labour market as a response to asymmetric information. The first chapter surveys recent developments in non-cooperative game theory, and then attempts an extension of the recent results characterising perfect equilibrium payoffs in repeated games without discounting to more general games. We choose the dynamic game framework for the generalisation, and shows that there are two jointly, but not indi vidually sufficient condi tions for the generalisation to go through. We then turn to an application of these ideas to the theory of longterm contracts. The main motivation for this is that the view that wages and employment are determined by risk-sharing implicit contracts is now a well established alternative to fixed-price and marketclearing theories. In general, long-term arrangements may mitigate inefficiencies in the short-term contract that arise from various sorts of asymmetric information which are likely to be prevalent in worker-firm relationships. In this chapter two things are attempted; first, we try to integrate the game-theoretic approach to contractinq of Radner with the work of Townshend, Rogerson, Roberts and Manning among others, and second, we characterise the optimal contract, and obtain some new results. The labour market is also the topic of the third chapter. Here, we attempt to extend a well-known model of "frictional" labour market equilibrium to the case where onr or both sides of the market differ in inherent characteristics (e.g. skills) which may be observable or unobservable. We show first that the equilibrium may be inefficient even in the absence of externalities which work through the matching technology. Also, the model with unobservable characteristics provides a framework for a theoretical anal;Tsis of the practice of firms of screening workers by unemployment duration. We show that in our model, there are screening equilibria, and also investigate in some detail the impact of exogenous variables on the equilibrium.

The empirical literature in international macroeconomics and finance reveals a growing interest in the use of nonlinear models. Their attractiveness is clear, as these models allow capturing discontinuity in the data-generating process and, by estimating endogenously transition probabilities and variables, avoid the a priori identification of regimes and their timing, thereby enhancing the extent of flexibility in the analysis. This thesis makes use of nonlinear techniques in order to model two different economic issues, which have been at the centre of the economic debate in the last years. The first analysis refers to the issue of debt sustainability and, in particular, tries to test empirically some of the leading interpretations that have been advanced to account for the financial turmoil that characterised the run-up to the Brazilian presidential elections in 2002. We test for financial contagion from the Argentine crisis and the impact of factors including IMF intervention and political uncertainty in raising the probability of crisis. The empirical investigation employs a Markovswitching model with endogenous transition probabilities. The second part of the thesis is devoted to the analysis of current account imbalances in G7 countries. We find evidence of threshold behaviour in current account adjustment, such that the dynamics of adjustment towards equilibrium depend upon whether the current-account/ net-output ratio breaches estimated country specific current account surplus or deficit thresholds. Both the speeds of adjustment and the size of the thresholds are found to differ significantly across countries. We complement the univariate analysis by disentangling the domestic components of the current account according to the national income identity with a view to shed light on the role of savings (both public and private) and investment. Evidence of shifts in means and variances of exchange rate changes - that coincide with the current account adjustment regimes identified by the model - suggest scope for further research on the role of the real exchange rate in determining the nonlinear behaviour of the current account. We extend the threshold methodology to a bivariate context and find evidence of a strict link between current account adjustments and deviations of a country real exchange rate from its long run equilibrium, such that beyond a certain appreciation/depreciation of the real exchange rate, a country CA imbalance would start reverting towards its mean value. Finally, we run a nonlinear test of the present value model of the current account, encouraged by the evidence of nonlinear adjustment in the current account. However, in line with the literature, we reject the test for all countries also in this new nonlinear framework.

This study examines the use of principal component techniques in analysing term structures of interest rates. It employs original methods of estimating B-Spline models with endogenous knot positions and applies the method of Dierckx (1981) to generate new data sets for the study. The variability of the knots suggests that natural market boundaries do not exist in the UK gilts market. Few, if any, of the previous studies of term structures using principal components have subjected the components to statistical testing. This is remedied in this thesis. The results suggest that only two components, a level and a slope component, are required to describe most of the variability in the term structures irrespective of the data used, but these components are not stable over time. The thesis extends the method to include partial common principal components, and using this method demonstrated the difference in the major components of selected data sets. The thesis found that changes in the principal component scores could not be accounted for by regularly published economic news, including news about the PSBR. A macromodel was estimated. This showed that the term structures in the sample were altered by changes in government spending but the movement in interest rates would depend upon how this was funded and what maturity of interest rates was studied. The model also showed that significant changes would take a long time to manifest themselves and that there was evidence that some forms of funding had unstable effects. These results provide an explanation of why news effects are difficult to discern and why there is no consensus on whether or not fiscal variables affect the term structure.

This thesis contains four papers in the area of Public Economics. Chapter 1 looks at producers' taxation in a model of vertically related oligopolies. Both ad valorem and specific taxes are considered and formulae expressing their effects on prices and profits are derived, showing how these depend on factors such as demand conditions, technology and market structure. Conditions for taxation to cause price overshifting and to raise profits are given. Also, tax instruments are compared in terms of the amount of revenue collected and the effect on the price for the final good. Chapter 2 applies the results of the previous paper to the analysis of tax reforms. Vertically related oligopolies result in welfare loss for two reasons. Firstly, upstream oligopolists set the price of the intermediate good above marginal cost and this causes aggregate production inefficiency. Secondly, downstream oligopolists introduce an additional price-cost margin. The analysis focuses on tax reforms, where the government aims at reducing the welfare loss by levying taxes and subsidies on producers while raising no revenue. Chapter 3 focuses on the design of income tax enforcement policies in a principalagent framework. The existing literature assumes risk neutral taxpayers while this chapter considers the case of risk averse agents by assuming a kinked linear utility function. When individuals have the same attitude towards risk, it is shown that the optimal policy is such that income reports below a given threshold are audited at the probability level just sufficient to induce truthful reporting, whereas those above it are not audited. This makes the effective tax schedule to be quite regressive. Instead, if attitudes towards risk vary across taxpayers, the numerical results show that the optimal audit policy causes only a limited regressive bias, for income reports above the threshold meet a positive probability of audit. Chapter 4 examines the Presumptive Income Coefficients (PIC) audit policy, a scheme recently introduced in the Italian tax code and aimed at reducing tax evasion in the non-corporate sector. The tax agency applies the PIC to observable production costs to get an estimate of taxpayer's income, or presumptive income. The probability of audit is then dependent on the gap between presumptive and reported income. This issue is examined in a setting where the game between the taxing authority and taxpayers is modelled in a principal-agent framework.