Drawing mainly from the Tazanian experience this study attempts to review the principal issues in the legal regulation of prices, by identifying both the general and specific importance of law in this respect. The position I shall present is that legal control is both necessary and desirable for the welfare and social development of the people. The key issue is whether the market-place will perform its function satisfactory: Will it produce socially desirable results? If it will not, why will it not? And will legal regulation help to do the job a little better? In an attempt to answer some of these questions, first of all, outline the basic issues raised by the study in the first Chapter. Then I examine the general case for price controls - the theory about the controls, the motives and reasons for their imposition and the manner in which they are effected in different economic systems. This is done in Chapter Two. Relying most on the available literature on the regulatory process, this Chapter also looks at the relationship between law and economic regulation and concludes that the effectiveness of law depends on the existence of a conducive socio-economic environment. In Chapter Three I describe the past record of price control laws in Tanzania. I conclude that despite the failure in the past, the controls still constitute an important policy instrument in the transition to socialism. In Chapters Four and Five I describe the manner in which the current regulations are implemented and the problems encountered. I conclude that the operational performance of the controls is constrained by internal and external influences on the economic and political life of the country. In the concluding Chapter I assess the impact of the controls: Do the controls work? Do people buy goods at the controlled prices? Why today the controls are almost popularly accepted as worthwhile? I conclude that while there may be no measurable economic gains derived by consumers, the controls have a stabilising effect on the social and political front. In the final section I argue that the future success of the legislation depends on creating a correspondence between the economic structures and the control system. What makes the controls ineffective is not so much defects in the law but the contradictions between the orientation of and functioning of the economic system and the ideological commitment.

The objective of this work is to theoretically evaluate an important aspect of a Newly Industrializing Country (NICs): Korea. Namely, the behaviour of firms in Korea competing with firms in an industrialized country after all Government intervention of the former is withdrawn. This aspect is considered in the main part while a descriptive introductory part introduces the Korean economy as a NIC. We construct a simple asymmetric duopoly model where firms conjectures play an important role in deriving the Perfect Equilibrium for a two stage game. Different costs of production and first mover advantage form the basis of the asymmetry. We find that under Cournot conjectures assumption for the marketing stage and certain cost conditions, it is profitable for the incumbent firm to stay a leader and the follower to remain a follower. For some cost conditions and a credible threat at the disposal of the follower, the incumbent firm may be forced to stay a leader even though it is more profitable to became a follower. We examine possible licensing rules the leader may propose to the follower. The dominant strategy, we find, is a licence fee that is a function of the quality difference between the top quality of the market leader and the level of quality it is selling to the follower. There will be a cost to the leader in terms of a lower licence fee to prevent possible leap forgging. Once we allow for free copying, we find that the follower will copy closely the new product of the leadership. Under Bertrand conjectures assumption, we find that unless the firm with higher production cost remains the leader offering a higher quality product, it will be driven out of the market, i. e., either it has to innovate or-die.

This work aims to provide an alternative analysis of the regional economic integration and development projects of two peripheral capitalist spaces – Mexico and Turkey – within the specific spatiotemporal conditions in which their modern peripheral capitalist spatiality has been conditioned and re-structured. Both Mexico and Turkey undertook very similar regional integration projects that emerged almost simultaneously and, more significantly, in conjunction with the neoliberal restructuring processes that unfurled during the early 1980s. In the Central American region, Mexico initiated the ‘Plan Puebla-Panamá’ which subsequently evolved to the ‘Proyecto Mesoamérica’, now including Colombia, aiming to ‘create’ an integrated region with a high level of economic development on the basis of procuring sustainable and orderly functioning free market economies. With strikingly similar objectives, Turkey planned and materialised regional integration projects such as the organisation of the ‘Black Sea Economic Cooperation’ in the Black Sea and Trans-Caucasus region and other sub-regional projects such as the ‘Levant Project’ in the East Mediterranean. This work argues that these regional integration projects have to be defined and analysed within the multiscalar neoliberal restructuring processes, in which the global capitalist spatiality has been re-territorialised – and resisted – on different socio-spatial scales. The uneven geographical development and its constant reproduction is recognised as the determinant factor of these regional integration projects, in which the Mexican and Turkish peripheral capitalist spatiality was first reconfigured and integrated into the centre through their incorporation into the NAFTA and European Customs Union. Subsequently, conditioned by the current neoliberal rescaling of the peripheral capitalist spatiality, the peripheral capitalism extended towards the ‘marginal’ spaces in their immediate geographies in the form of sub-regional integration and development projects. Therefore, this work presents the examination of the specific spatiotemporal processes as the only meaningful theoretical framework to analyse these regional integration projects, in which the uneven development of the peripheral capitalist social relations in Mexico and Turkey have been formed, reconfigured and extended.

This thesis explores the asset pricing implication of higher moments of return distributions on the UK stock market. It is found that in a market populated by risk-averse, prudent and temperate investors, firms whose returns exhibit negative coskewness (CSK) or positive cokurtosis (CKT) yield higher premia relative to counterpart firms with positive coskewness and negative cokurtosis respectively. Furthermore, results show that CSK and CKT are genuinely priced in the UK stock markets and outperform the covariance risk, size, value, and momentum factors in explaining the expected cross-sectional variation in asset returns. It is further found that a theoretically motivated, higher co-moment asset pricing model has a significant explanatory ability over the cross-section of CSK and CKT portfolio returns. A CSK- and CKT-augmented CAPM performed better in explaining the cross-sectional variation in expected returns as compared to empirically-motivated asset pricing models, such as the three-factor model (Fama-French 1996) and the four-factor model (Carhart 1997). In particular, a unit factor loading of CSK risk yields a statistically significant monthly premium of 0.22% (2.64% p.a.) across CSK portfolios and a unit factor of CKT risk 0.15% (1.8% p.a.) across the CKT portfolios. Motivated by the significance of CSK and CKT, this thesis also explores whether higher co-moments of asset returns can explain the profitability of a number of investment strategies; size, value, asset growth, accruals, dividend yield, net stock issue and momentum. In particular, this study shows that in the UK stock market, firms with low asset growth and net-stock issue have higher subsequent stock returns compared to counterpart firms with high asset growth and net-stock issue. Furthermore, the performance of the above investment strategies continues even if their portfolio returns are adjusted for risk factors such as size, value, and momentum of the Fama-French three-factor (1993) and Carhart four-factor (1997) models. The introduction of CSK and CKT factor loadings into commonly used asset pricing models shows a slight decrease in the profitability of size, value, asset growth and net-stock issue but returns remain significantly positive. However, CSK and CKT factor loadings have no impact on the profitability of momentum, dividend yield and accruals strategies. Overall, risk-adjusted performance of the above investment strategies remains intact in the UK stock markets during 1990 to 2008. The use of higher moments is suggested when exploring risk-adjusted returns.

This thesis explores the way economic behaviour responds to taxation both theoretically and empirically. Chapter 1 studies the impact of transation taxes on the housing market, using UK administrative data and quasi-experimental variation created by notches, tax reforms, and stimulus. Transaction taxes have large effects on house prices and purchases, and adjustments to tax changes are fast. A temporary elimination of transaction taxes stimulated housing market activity by 20% in the short run (timing and extensive responses) followed by a smaller slump in activity after the policy was withdrawn (timing response). The success of this stimulus program stems from the large distortions created by the tax in the first place. Chapter 2 presents evidence on three ways in which firms affect workers’ earnings responses in Pakistan. First, third-party reporting of salaries by employers reduces evasion. Second, firms’ equilibrium salary-hours offers are tailored to aggregate worker preferences in response to adjustment costs in the labour market. Third, workers learn about the tax schedule from firms and become more responsive to taxation both contemporaneously (by 130%) and in subsequent years (by 100%). Third-party reporting does not eliminate misreporting: 19% of workers underreport their salaries, creating a loss of 5% of tax revenue, and indicating high returns to investments in improving enforcement. Chapter 3 develops a theory of optimal income taxation allowing for career effects of current work effort on future wages. Such effects are empirically important, but have been ignored by the optimal tax literature. We provide analytical characterizations that depend on estimable entities, including the elasticity of future wages to current work effort. We explore the magnitude of this “career elasticity” in a meta-analysis of the empirical literature on the returns to work experience and tenure, and provide numerical simulations calibrated to US micro-data. Our results show that career effects have important qualitative and quantitative implications for optimal tax design.

What is effort and why do we value it? This thesis examines various ways in which effort has been used to answer questions of distributive justice. I begin with effort’s role as the unique legitimate basis for justifying differences in the deserts people receive. This role focuses on either the burdens associated with effort, so that it is only when we try hard and suffer disutility that we deserve anything; or else it is because our effort is the only part of our person for which we can be held responsible. I then discuss the legitimacy of the demand for specifically productive reciprocal effort in light of a society’s institutional structure meeting certain thresholds of justice. I find problems with all three of these approaches because they miss important ways in which we use and understand effort in the course of our lives. I examine the uses to which we put effort, developing a more inductive approach which draws on a particular reading of the concept of burden developed in the first half of the thesis. What are the costs associated with trying hard to do something and why are they important to how our lives go? I then frame this by a particular account of a character I call the ‘craftsman’. This is someone who enjoys a particularly ‘costly’ way of living. The craftsman desires to achieve a depth in her life that is negatively affected by contemporary social and economic demands. Finally, I propose an unconditional basic income as a means to protect the craftsman and the agitator, an additional character identified in response to the discussion on reciprocity, who helps us collectively approach the thresholds identified in the third chapter.

The emergence between 1965 and 1973 of a crisis of over-accumulation and over-capacity, rooted in international manufacturing yet affecting the overall private business economies of the advanced capitalist countries, inaugurated a developmental context whose profound contradictions were brought home by the Great Recession of 2008-9 and the continuing Long Depression. The intervening period has seen profound economic, political and social crisis in the advanced capitalist world and has simultaneously been treacherous for under-developed economies forced to navigate rocketing energy costs and international commodity price and currency exchange rate turbulence under the continual threat of debt-levered expropriation. The struggle to locate the causes – proximate and ultimate – of the present crisis is at the same time a battle to map the basic economic and political coordinates of the continuing long downturn. In this connection it is contended that efforts have been undermined by the epistemological underdevelopment conditioned by a crisis of knowledge-formation which has unfolded in parallel with the long downturn. The dominance of neoclassical economics (‘unworldly’ since the marginal revolution) on the right and the displacement of Marxism on a structurally weakened and autodidactic left in the context of the ascent of postmodernism as an intellectual and cultural dominant has opened a space between the material and discursive realities of global capitalist development. This work is an attempt to deploy the method developed by the classical Marxist tradition to approach the significance of the state and law in the historically-conditioned reproduction of capitalist social relations. It is contended in the first place that the dualism which obtains between national and global spheres in much theorisation of neoliberal ‘globalisation’ obscures the dialectical interrerelation of state and world market – the institutional and regulatory environment of international trade, money and finance being both the creation of states and the developing context which frames their – necessarily path-dependent and reflexive – projects of domestic economy making. As against popular notions of state decline, following Gowan the state-political content of the centring of private financial markets in the mediation of international monetary relations is recalled, while the embeddedness of the state in circuits of capital accumulation is emphasised (Tony Smith), the concept of ‘regime of accumulation’ being deployed to capture the nexus of monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy which articulates historically-conditioned development strategies. In this respect, we depart from the work of the Bolshevik jurist Pashukanis, who despite significantly advancing the materialist analysis of the juridical form, identified in his most significant work a largely derivative role for the state. It is argued that the methodological weakness represented by Pashukanis’ disproportionate emphasis on commodity exchange – his failure to proceed from the basis of the capitalist economy as a contradictory unity of production and circulation – prevents him from fully apprehending the role of the state in the production and reproduction of capitalist social relations. As the discussion unfolds, there is developed in conversation principally with Gramsci an understanding of the state as the specific material condensation of a relationship of forces among classes and class fractions. Upholding the notion of the ‘integral state’ as a differentiated unity of civil society and political society upon which terrains the capitalist class forms alliances with proximate classes as the prerequisite for and correlate of its domination of labour, the developmental context represented by neoliberalism is conceived in terms of the transition of interest-bearing capital from leading to dominant fraction of the capitalist class in parallel with its tendential contradictory disaggregation from productive capital. Such a process has necessitated a transformation in the character of bourgeois political supremacy involving a dismantling of the civil rights and social protections accumulated during the period bookended by Americanism and the welfare state and increasing dependence upon an expanded machinery of coercion. Proceeding from this basis, it is considered how in specific developmental contexts the state by way of the legal form maps the social totality, achieving distinctive couplings (and de-couplings) of wealth production and social reproduction. There is asserted the second-order integration of public and private spheres in terms of the fundamental unity of capitalist reproduction, the first-order public/private metabolism being evaluated in view of the facilitation and rationalisation of social reproduction in the context of a productive economy structured around dissociated private producers. The legal form is further interrogated in view of its role in structuring the productive antagonism between capital and labour, a relation which on the basis of its form comes to expresses various contents – from consensual integration to casuistic assimilation – as domestic social relations are (in-)validated by the operation of the law of value at the level of the world market. In this connection, the unproductive theoretical polarisation obtaining between approaches which consider law to be epiphenomenal and those which pursue its relative autonomy is enriched by a historicised conception in terms of which law, concretising specific relationships of forces within particular regimes of accumulation, appears as ‘sword’, as ‘shield’ and as ‘fetter’. This framework is particularly useful for evaluating the opportunities for the deployment of legal strategies by labour and groups oppressed under capitalism – a question in relation to which Pashukanis, following Lenin, demonstrated a remarkable political astuteness.

This thesis suggests that the pension systems in the advanced capitalist countries of Canada, Britain and the United States are on the verge of a crisis and that the problems associated with the marginalization and immiseration of the elderly, the universal and specific limitations of employer-based occupational pension plans and the underdevelopment of the state pension system are inherently and organically linked to the structure of private pension fund power. The impending pension crisis in these countries is explained by four converging structural considerations: first, the inadequate level of retirement income of the elderly; second, the increasing proportion of elderly in the population and the costs associated with an aging population; third, the general and particular limitations of the private pension system; fourth, under conditions of advanced capitalism, the corporate sector and state appropriating the occupational and state pension systems as a source of investment and social capital respectively to meet their finance requirements. The pension system now occupies a strategic position in advanced capitalist economies. The increasing economic power of pension funds is based on their role as financial intermediaries and institutional investors, with significant control over the economic surplus and reserve capital. The structure of pension fund power exhibits itself through formal and informal linkages to financial capital. The private pension system's investment and capital accumulation function has been transformed from a latent to a manifest function to supply the investment requirements of the economy and private sector. The private pension industry, characterized by a high degree of concentration and centralization of capital, increasingly facilitates the systemic fusion of the finance and industrial sectors of advanced capitalist economies. The symbiotic relationship between the corporate sector and private pension industry is identified as the primary economic and political obstacle to reforming and expanding the state pension system in the countries studied. It is concluded that the dynamic of the conflicting structural interests underlying the pension crisis may generate a heightened awareness of power and politics in capitalist countries by transcending the traditional limitations of economism and welfarism. The pension issue, both in the short and long-term, may generate increased social tension manifesting itself through intergenerational, sectoral, political and industrial relations conflict. This may result in increased politicization and progressive alternative economic strategies based on the pension system's investment and capital accumulation function. Public policy towards aging and pensions identifies personal problems and structural issues which may have significance in terms of power, politics, and social change in the future.

The present thesis is focused on the examination of the relationship between specific variables with the application of asset pricing models as well as the employment of (G)ARCH models, unit root and cointegration analysis. A theoretical and empirical review on the models is presented and, more specifically, there is an empirical examination of the validity of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the two main forms of the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) in the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) during the period 1989-2006. Furthermore, there is an empirical application of specific (G)ARCH models on the variables under examination and an investigation of whether there are long-run relationships between different sets of financial and macroeconomic variables – whether the variables are cointegrated. The results of the tests show the inability of the CAPM to explain the behaviour of stocks for the period under examination, as well as for the sub-periods (1984-1994, 1995-2000, and 2001-2006 respectively). This means that the (optimal) market portfolio used in the CAPM presents a poor explanatory power on the returns of stocks. On the contrary, the results of the statistical APT model show that there may be factors other than the market portfolio that can explain the behaviour of stocks. Similarly, the results from the application of the macroeconomic APT model show that specific macroeconomic variables can partially explain stocks’ behaviour. Finally, the existence of long-run relationships between macroeconomic and financial variables, based on a series of cointegration tests, is evidence that there are different factors that can affect stocks, leading to a possible weak-form inefficiency of the Greek market.

This thesis contributes to the literature that analyses the term structure of interest rates from a macro-finance perspective. Chapter 1 of this thesis provides a structural interpretation behind the decline in the US term spread's predictive power with regards to future real output growth. Our analysis is conducted through use of a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium New-Keynesian model that is estimated on both macroeconomic and financial data. Our findings indicate that it is changes to the composition of shocks hitting the US economy that has caused the term spread, through the endogenous monetary policy response, to cease being a useful indicator of future output growth. Chapter 2 examines the importance of shifts in the expectations of agents in the form of "news shocks" in explaining the variation in the slope of the term structure of interest rates. The methodology employed in this chapter is a medium-scale Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model that has been augmented to permit a role for both anticipated and unanticipated components in the usual array of structural shocks. In order to quantify the relative importance of each structural shock, the model is estimated via Bayesian methods on US data. We find the anticipated Total Factor Productivity shock to be quantitatively unimportant in driving US term spread fluctuations since, conditional on this shock, our model is unable to generate the observed leading procyclical movement of the spread found in the data. We do, however, find a limited role for the anticipated wage mark-up shock in that it accounts for a small share of the variation in consumption, hours and real wages. However, it is the unanticipated shocks that account for the major share of variation in the term spread as well as other key macro aggregates. The third and final chapter of this thesis examines the ability of the industry-standard Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model to jointly explain both macroeconomic and financial data. We compute a second-order solution to our model in order to derive predic- tions for risk premia on equities and real, nominal and corporate bonds. Our central result is that by appending the Smets and Wouters (2007) model with Epstein-Zin preferences, long-run nominal risk and a credit market friction, we are able to generate realistic moments for the financial series under consideration without distorting the fit of our business cycle statistics.