This thesis seeks to examine contemporary factors that prevent an orderly resolution to a sovereign debt crisis. It comprises of five chapters. The first chapter introduces the research and highlights its main contributions. The second chapter narrates the background and motivation for the study. The third chapter studies a related paper on holdouts in sovereign debt restructuring and finds that, under a discrete time version with two creditors, asymmetric pure strategy Nash equilibria exists. This result, overlooked by the original paper, implies immediate agreement as the time between successive periods tends to zero. The fourth chapter investigates the impact of heterogeneous beliefs on delays in sovereign debt restructuring and finds that parties inefficiently delay settlement when their combined beliefs of court-outcomes are sufficiently heterogeneous. The chapter also explores other model expositions and establishes delay conditions. The fifth chapter studies the implied duty on the debtor to act in good faith in sovereign debt restructuring and is divided into two parts. The first part theoretically examines the efficiency and distributional impacts from enforcing a good faith duty on the debtor when bargaining with heterogeneous creditors. Here, good faith is defined as the non-violation of the court interpretation of the pari passu clause. The second part identifies judicial attempts made to enforce the good faith debtor duty to negotiate and proposes a doctrinal threshold that restricts judicial intervention to situations in which there is clear evidence of a failure, on the part of the debtor, to negotiate in good faith.

This thesis examines the possibility of establishing an affordable housing Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) in major Chinese cities in order to address the financial problem faced by the country's affordable housing sector. This thesis builds, for the first time, a robust link between the affordable housing sector and REITs in China based on real world scenarios. The link is supported by real data from the affordable housing sector of Nanjing, as well as well-established international practices from Hong Kong and the United States. In order to establish the link between the affordable housing sector and REITs in China, this thesis uses qualitative methods to address three guiding questions: 1) how affordable housing is financed in Nanjing, what the current problems are in this financing system, and why REITs might be useful; 2) if REITs are useful and necessary in China, what insights can be learned from overseas affordable housing REITs and 3) how an affordable housing REIT can be established in Nanjing based on the Hong Kong and US models and experiences, and what barriers currently exist that prevent Chinese REITs from being created in the affordable housing sector. This thesis finds that current affordable housing finance in China heavily relies on government borrowings, and public rental housing serves as a source of governmental financial burden as this form of housing cannot be sold to repay the debt. Thus, the Chinese government has considered the vehicle of REITs as the best option to liquidate the existing stock and free resources to fund further investment and repay the debt. In addition, overseas insights suggest that the Hong Kong model could provide the strategic framework, while the US model can provide specific tactics to be adopted in the proposed Chinese REIT in order to avoid some of the difficulties experienced in Hong Kong. This thesis ultimately suggests that a purely affordable housing REIT (containing housing only) would be impossible to establish in Nanjing, or in similar major cities, under current conditions. However, an REIT holding commercial real estate within affordable housing estates would be a workable solution to the affordable housing sector, although it would face barriers of law, taxation and a lack of skilled workers.

This thesis aims to examine the long-run determinants of the real exchange rate, and to identify the sources of real exchange rate and relative stock price short-run fluctuations. In chapter 1, I incorporate the relative stock prices into the Dornbusch's Mundell-Fleming Real Exchange Rate Model in order to investigate the long-run relationship between the money, goods and stock markets. In chapter 2, I build on the work of Dornbusch (1976), Clarida and Gali (1994), Malliaropulos (1998) and Hoffmann and MacDonald (2000) in order to form the sticky-price equilibrium solution for identifying the source of real exchange rate fluctuation. In chapter 3, I empirically investigate whether the financial crises, the US monetary policy and the exchange rate regime switching of a country affect the real exchange rate co-moment. In addition to the cross-country real exchange rates correlation, the evolution of the equilibrium real exchange rates equicorrelation and temporary real exchange rates equicorrelation are also examined. In chapter 4, I present a model which builds on the stochastic rational expectations open macro model presented by Obstfeld (1985) and Clarida and Gali (1994) and incorporates Malliaropulos's (1998) theoretical relationship between the real exchange rate and the relative stock differential. The model provides both the short- and long-run flexible price solution for identifying the source of relative stock prices. In chapter 5, I attempt to investigate whether the exchange rate can predict future changes in the stock market return and in the economic performance of a country. I present a model that can be used for analysing whether the real exchange rate or the real exchange rate misalignment would contain an economically significant predictable component on forecasting the future stock price movement and the real output.

Chapter 1 develops a specification test for a single index binary outcome model in semi-parametric estimation. The semiparametric estimator examined does not rely on any distributional assumption, but it still relies on the single-index assumption. The violation of this assumption creates a source of heteroscedasticity. I extend a set of attractive LM statistics, constructed using auxiliary regressions for the case of logit and probit models, to the semiparametric environment. I derive its asymptotic distribution and show that is has well-behaved finite properties in a Monte Carlo experiment. An empirical example is also provided. Chapter 2 proposes a novel estimation strategy that accounts for asynchronous fieldwork, often found in multi-country surveys. The resulting biases are substantial and this is likely to provide misleading cross-country comparisons. I highlight the importance of accounting for the heterogeneity induced by seasonality in the context of regression modelling in order to obtain unbiased comparisons. This is illustrated with a comparison between a synchronous national survey and an asynchronous cross-national one. Chapter 3, joint work with Thomas Crossley and Peter Levell, proposes a novel estimator useful for data combination. Researchers are often interested in the relationship between two variables, with no available data set containing both. For example, surveys on income and wealth are often missing consumption data. A common strategy is to use proxies for the dependent variable that are common to both surveys to impute the dependent variable into the data set containing the independent variable. We consider the consequences of estimating a regression with an imputed dependent variable, and how those consequences depend on the imputation procedure adopted. We show that an often used procedure is biased, and offer both a correction and refinements that improve precision. We illustrate these with a Monte Carlo study and an empirical application.

This thesis focuses on three vulnerable groups in Europe that have recently been highlighted both in media and in the economics literature; and that are policy priorities. Chapter 1 is a joint work with Giovanni Mastrobuoni which focuses on prisoners and peer effects in prison. Studies that estimate criminal peer effects need to define the reference group. Researchers usually use the amount of time inmates overlap in prison, sometimes in combination with nationality to define such groups. Yet, there is often little discussion about such assumptions, which could potentially have important effects on the estimates of peer effects. We show that the date of rearrest of inmates who spend time together in prison signals with some error co-offending, and can thus be used to measure reference groups. Exploiting recidivism data on inmates released after a mass pardon with a simple econometric model which adjusts the estimates for the misclassification errors, we document homophily in peer group formation with regards to age, nationality, and degrees of deterrence. There is no evidence of homophily with respect to education and employment status. Chapter 2 evaluates a policy in the English county of Essex that aims to reduce domestic abuse through informing high-risk suspects that they will be put under higher surveillance, hence increasing their probability of being caught in case of recidivism, and encouraging their victims to report. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD), it underlines that suspects that are targeted by the policy are more 9% more likely to be reported again for domestic abuse. Although increasing reporting is widely seen as essential to identify and protect victims, this paper shows that policies to increase reporting will deter crime only if they give rise to a legal response. Moreover, results highlight that increasing the reporting of events of that do not lead to criminal charges may create escalation and be more detrimental to the victim in the long run. Chapter 3 investigates how migrants in the United Kingdom respond to natural disasters in their home countries. Combining a household panel survey of migrants in the United Kingdom and natural disasters data, this paper first shows, in the UK context, that male migrants are more likely to remit in the wake of natural disasters. Then, it underlines that to fund remittances male migrants also increase labour supply, decrease monthly savings and leisure. By showing how migrants in the UK adjust their economic behaviours in response to an unexpected shocks i.e. natural disasters, this paper demonstrates both how UK migrants may fund remittances and that they have the capacity to adjust their economic behaviours to increase remittances.

This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 aims to understand how performance-based ranking affect productivity of workers. While providing such ranking may induce workers to increase effort because of status concerns, such information may also demotivate them or make them wary of outperforming peers. This chapter disentangles the effects of demotivation, social conformity, and status associated with ranking. I implement a randomized experiment at a Bangladeshi sweater factory that pays employees on piece rates. Treated workers receive monthly information on their relative performance either in private or in public. A simple theoretical framework shows that intrinsic status concerns induce Private Treatment workers to increase or decrease effort depending on the feedback they receive from the intervention. Workers in Public Treatment respond similarly but face two additional incentives - social status (positive effect) and social conformity (negative effect). Empirical evidence shows that Private Treatment workers increased (decreased) effort upon receiving positive (negative) feedback. Public ranking led to lower net effort relative to Private Treatment because of a strong preference not to outperform friends. The negative effects from demotivation and social conformity may explain why the existing literature finds mixed evidence of impact of ranking workers. In Chapter 2, we look at how firing of workers in an organization affect the productivity of the surviving co-workers. We take advantage of detailed individual-level production records from, and extensive fieldwork conducted at, a large Bangladeshi sweater factory before, during, and after several episodes of labour unrest that eventually led the management to fire approximately 25 percent of the labour force on the relevant production floor. Exploiting across-worker variation in exposure to colleagues' terminations, we document a negative impact of the firings on productivity of surviving workers. Fired co-workers' spatial proximity drives the results. Additional evidence rules out a number of competing mechanisms such as subsequent targeted punishments from management, loss of productive peers, or attention diverted to help recently hired and inexperienced co-workers. We argue that the effects are likely driven by workers' feelings of loss or anger towards the management. Chapter 3 studies the relationship between external shocks, such as political strikes and labour unrest, and productivity in the ready-made garment sector in Bangladesh. Using data from 33 ready-made garment factories in Bangladesh and adopting an event-study approach, we document very little change in productivity or worker absenteeism during political strikes lasting two days or less. Productivity falls when strikes last five days or more. The main channel for such fall appears to be supply-chain disruptions rather than worker absenteeism. However, absenteeism and quality defect rates increase immediately during labour unrest, resulting in a decrease in output. As a benchmark comparison, we show that the drop in productivity from sustained strikes or labour unrest is equivalent to a fall in productivity due to an increase of about 7 degrees centigrade in temperature.

This thesis provides a systematic study of currency crash risk and funding liquidity risk in carry trade strategy in the foreign exchange (FX) market. Carry trade, which involves longing currencies with high interest rate and shorting currencies with low interest rate, is a popular currency trading strategy in the FX market for obtaining annualized excess return as high as 12%. This thesis studies exchange rates of 9 currencies over 13 years from a microstructure perspective. We identify a global skewness factor and use it to measure the currency crash risk. Applying a portfolio approach in cross-sectional asset pricing, we find that global skewness factor explains more than 80% of carry trade excess returns. On the other hand, funding liquidity is effective in predicting the future currency crash risk. Funding liquidity explains more than 70% of carry trade excess returns. We also use the coefficient of price impact from customer order flows to measure the liquidity, which reveals heterogeneous information content possessed by different types of customers. We find that the order flow implied liquidity risk factor can explain a fraction of carry trade excess returns but with small risk premium on quarterly basis. We provide empirical evidence to show that the excess return and crash risk in carry trade is endogenous; i.e., the crash risk premium is inherent in carry trade process. As the natural condition widely affects all investors, we argue that funding constraints are effective in explaining the excess returns of carry trade. When capital moves smoothly in a liquid condition and investor have sufficient funding supply, carry trade is prosperous in the FX market. When investors hit their funding constraints, market-wide liquidity drop, which force the carry trade positions diminishing. The exchange rates respond as that the low interest rate currencies appreciate and high interest rate currencies depreciate, which exacerbates currency crash risk and induces large loss to carry traders. Our cross-sectional analysis provides empirical evidence to show that funding constraints helps to explain the forward premium puzzle and push the exchange rate shift back to the direction the UIP expects.

This thesis presents three papers in the field of banking. The first paper considers ‘asset encumbrance’ which refers to the existence of bank balance sheet assets being subject to arrangements that restrict the bank’s ability to freely transfer or realise them. Asset encumbrance has recently become a much discussed subject and policymakers have been actively addressing what some consider to be excessive levels of asset encumbrance. Despite its importance, the phenomenon of asset encumbrance remains poorly understood. I build a novel dataset of asset encumbrance metrics based on information provided in the banks’ public disclosures for the very first time throughout 2015. The study then provides descriptive evidence of asset encumbrance levels by country, credit quality, and business model using different encumbrance metrics. The empirical results point to the existence of an association between CDS premia and asset encumbrance that is negative, not positive. That is, on average encumbrance is perceived to be beneficial. Still, certain bank-level variables play a mediating role in this relationship. For banks that have high exposures to the central bank, high leverage ratio, and/or are located in southern Europe, asset encumbrance is less beneficial and could even be detrimental in absolute terms. The second paper investigates the size distribution of the whole population of Spanish commercial, savings and cooperative banks from a dynamic perspective over the 1970-2006 period. To investigate the evolution of the size distribution, the study determines whether the data is in line with the Law of Proportionate Effect (LPE) using panel unit root tests. A key finding is that the size-growth relationship is not stable over time but changes depending on the competitive environment of banks (liberalization, deregulation and integration). When Spanish banking was highly regulated we find that smaller banks grew faster than their larger counterparts. In recent years, however, we find that larger banks grow at the same rate or faster than smaller banks, a result that lend towards LPE acceptance. Thus, the study corroborates the conditioned nature of the size-growth relationship and the size distribution of banks, as emphasized by studies of the US banking system. Finally, the third paper investigates, from a theoretical perspective, the roles of banks and markets when both are active, there is limited participation in markets, and there exists liquidity and technology risk in the economy. In a model where banks and markets co-exist and banks are subject to runs, we show that the levels of aggregate risk and limited participation jointly determine the superiority of the mixed (market and bank deposits) economy over pure equity contracts. The study finds that if aggregate risk exceeds a certain threshold then markets may perform better than banks even for low or null levels of market participation, and it is shown that markets may perform better than banks the lower the market participation under some circumstances. The results imply that the level of bank risk taking cannot be considered in isolation, but in conjunction with the availability and access of banking and non-banking options.

The migration of graduates is one of the main characteristics of the current phase of Italian emigration. This thesis investigates why Italian graduates are migrating both within and outside Italy. The main research questions this thesis gravitates around are: why do Italian graduates migrate? What is the difference, if any, in terms of motivations, between graduates who decide to migrate internally within Italy as compared to the ones who decide to migrate to the UK? Why do some graduates stay in their home town despite regional and national differentials in terms of employment and lifestyle opportunities? Namely, this thesis examines and compares the motivations that drove three samples of Italian graduates to migrate. Firstly, those who migrated to the UK; secondly, those who from the southern Italy moved internally to the Italian cities of Rome (centre) and Milan (north); and thirdly, those who decided to stay in the Italian cities of Palermo (south), Rome (centre), and Milan (north). The analysis proposed is qualitative and exploratory in nature and is based on 87 in-depth interviews conducted with Italian graduates in 2008-2009. The study provides an integrated view of different migratory patterns. In particular, the comparison between internal and international flows indicates that Italian graduates are generally oriented towards the UK and particularly towards London because of the many professional, educational and cultural opportunities that London as a global city has to offer. Meanwhile, internal migration within Italy (south to north) is generally experienced as constrained by deep regional differences in terms of employment opportunities between southern and northern Italy. Finally, staying in one's home town emerged as a decision based, among other factors, on the lack of interest in experiencing mobility vs. the importance a person attributes to social, emotional and cultural ties to his or her own family, friends, partners and the local area.

This thesis explores the dialectical relationship between gender and international student mobility (ISM). The focus is on the experiences of Indian students across three space-time locations: before the students left India; while abroad in Toronto; and their return to New Delhi. The value of this research is two-fold. Firstly, my research helps to fill the lacuna in ISM research that examines the phenomenon through a gender optic. Secondly, there is increasing interest in Canada and other countries – evident in the media and government policy – in international students from India. The study is located at the nexus of gender and mobility scholarship; it adopts Gendered Geographies of Power as a foundational framework. The research employed a multi-sited, mixed-methods approach to data collection. The data collection in the field sites of Toronto, Canada and New Delhi, India consisted of in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observations. An online survey was mounted for the duration of the fieldwork to gather data on the broader population of Indian students abroad. The results of this survey provide context for the discussion in three empirical chapters. The first of the three empirical chapters explores the impact of gender relations in shaping motivations to study abroad. The second chapter examines how relations of power in and across multiple spaces (re)shape the students‟ performances of gender identities in everyday life in Toronto. The final empirical chapter examines the students‟ experience of return mobility as they attempt to adapt to a different (but familiar) gender context again. My research contributes to the growing body of scholarship on ISM as well as that on gender and migration. By employing a gendered perspective, the indepth interviews as well as ethnographic research reveals the shifting subjectivities of the migrants as they simultaneously negotiate multiple ethnic and kinship interactions in their everyday lived experiences. Secondly, the online survey presents the gendered class configurations of the socio-economic background of the Indian international students. Lastly, the „return‟ experiences of the students are differentiated by gender: more women than men found it harder to (re)negotiate their gender-expected performances in New Delhi. Furthermore, the „return mobility‟ of men appears to be more permanent than the return mobility of women.