The opacity and riskiness of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) make them an interesting area for the study of banks’ lending practices and procedures. SMEs in Nigeria, like in many low and middle-income economies, face financing difficulties because they are relatively young, inexperienced and informationally opaque. Since the consolidation of the Nigerian banking industry in 2006, the share of commercial bank loans to SMEs has declined markedly despite the fact that Nigerian banks are well capitalized and are among the largest players in Sub-Saharan Africa. The researcher conducted a questionnaire survey to investigate the microstructure of SME lending decisions, policies and practices in Nigerian banks. Using a sample of 121 Nigerian bank lending officers, this study specifically investigates three research questions: (1) the demand and supply side constraints to bank involvement with SMEs (2) the determinants of loan contract terms (i.e. risk premium and collateralisation), and (3) the economic value to banks from investing in customer relationships. Results from analysis of survey responses reveal that the high incidence of loan diversion, weak management capacity and the inability of SMEs to service debts are chief contributory factors to the riskiness of SME loans in Nigeria. On the supply side, the high transaction costs associated with processing and monitoring small loans impact negatively on lending profitability. There are also constraints posed by regulation and the business environment. Most notably, the recent rise in yield on competing assets, such as government treasury bills, has led to the crowding out of private sector lending as Nigerian banks hold a sizeable proportion of their assets in relatively safer government securities, which tends to lower their appetite for lending to SMEs. The risk profile of the SME sector is further enhanced by poor information economics, infrastructural deficiencies, the inefficient credit referencing on business loans as well as the inability to enforce loans contracts due to legal and judicial constraints. The econometric results show that the determinants of risk premium on SME loans are largely connected with factors that underline the opacity and riskiness of SMEs in Nigeria. Customers with longer relationships with their bank tend to benefit from lower interest rates. What determines the likelihood of requesting collateral from SMEs varies significantly from bank to bank and is likely to be connected to the lenders’ specialization as well as differences in the business model and lending technologies used. Loan size, borrowing firm’s age and credit rating also determine the amount of collateral pledged. There is also evidence to suggest that the predominantly centralised lending strategy in Nigerian banks impacts negatively on the accumulation of soft information by loan officers, implying that not all information collected by the loan officers is utilised in taking lending decisions. However, the proprietary information (or knowledge) loan officers gather through frequent communication and interaction with their customers is likely to yield some potential benefits for Nigerian banks. The most dominant is the high probability that customer satisfaction from bank relationships will generate repeat business for the banks.

This thesis examines how the disruptive innovation of e-commerce took hold among small retailers in the South of England in the first decade of the 21st century. It describes empirically how a regional business-to-business market—providing e-commerce business services (EBS) to retail start-ups and small firms—emerged and operated, and how the goods traded in this market were evaluated. This market can be defined as an entrepreneurial market for an innovation because the market goods (EBS) constitute an innovation to be adopted by micro-enterprises as means of production to enable them to retail their own goods online to consumers. The study investigates two practical problems that concern the construction and operation of entrepreneurial markets for innovations: 1) how small firms as buyers of productive means evaluate complex, intangible market goods (such as EBS), given their lack of resources for conducting such evaluations; and 2) how policy makers and market makers address the market failure that is perceived to hinder the emergence of entrepreneurial markets. At the same time, this research also addresses the theoretical issues of how to define entrepreneurship, innovation, and markets and how to conceptualise the relationships between them, by empirically tracing and articulating the connections between the activities, objects, and places that constitute these phenomena. Actor-network theory (ANT) was utilised as a research approach to study an ecommerce community across two English counties, using ethnographic methods to collect data via participant observation, interviews, and documents between 2006 and 2010. ANT's material-semiotic method was deployed to trace the emergence, transformations, and workings of the socio-material network of institutions, policies, and technical artefacts that have enabled the functioning of this regional entrepreneurial market for EBS. Industry events such seminars, workshops, and conferences emerged as important marketplaces for establishing—through various trials—the qualities of buyers, sellers, and the EBS.

The electricity market in the UK is undergoing dramatic changes and requires a transformation of existing practices to meet the current and forthcoming challenges. One aspect of the solution is the deployment of demand side management (DSM) programmes to influence domestic behaviour patterns for the benefit of the overall network. Effective deployment of DSM requires segmentation of the population into a small number of groupings. Using a database of electricity meter data collected at a frequency of five minutes over a year from several hundred houses, households are clustered based on the shape of the average daily electricity usage profile. A novel method, incorporating evaluation criteria beyond compactness, of evaluating the resulting groupings is defined and tested. The results indicate the potentially most useful algorithms for use with load profile clustering. Patterns within the electricity meter data are approximated and symbolised to allow motifs (representing repeated behaviours) to be identified. Uninteresting motifs are automatically identified and discarded. The different possible parameters, including size of motif and number of symbols used in representing the data, are explored and the most appropriate values found for use with electricity meter data motif detection. The concept of variability of regular behaviour within a household is introduced and methods of representing the variability are considered. The novel method of using variability in timing of motifs is compared to other techniques and the results tested using the previously defined evaluation criteria. Combining the generated motif data with the meter data to produce a single set of archetypes does not produce more useful results for use with DSM. However, creating complementary sets of archetypes based on each set of data, provides a more complete understanding of the households and allows for better targeting of DSM initiatives.

The thesis aims to understand: what constitutes urban collaboration and its relationship with policy outcomes? The research develops a conceptual understanding of the public value (PV) (Bardach, 1998; Moore, 1995, Smith, 2004) of Urban Local Authority Collaboration (ULAC) as economic development policy, relative to three theoretical domains in the literature: economic collaboration (i.e. new/old institutional economics: Ostrom 1990, 2016; Williamson, 2000); spatial collaboration (i.e. institutional economic geography: Ostrom, 2010; Gerber, 2015; Tarko and Aligica, 2012), and governance collaboration (i.e. collective action theory: Hulst and van Monfort, 2012; Feiock, 2008, 2013). Theoretically, the ‘institution’ (Amin, 2001; Jessop, 2001; Williamson, 2000; Aligica and Boettke, 2009; Gertler, 2010) is a distinct conceptual dimension connecting the theoretical literature, bridging scholarly boundaries across compatible ontological insights (Bathelt and Gluckler, 2003; and Hay, 2011). A conceptual framework is developed to help understand: a) what ULAC looks like; b) how ULAC creates PV and, c) why institutions explain the PV of ULAC. A purposeful single case study of ULAC (i.e. the Scottish Cities Alliance (SCA): a formalised institutional policy network involving seven Urban Local Authorities (ULAs) and the Scottish Government) involved collecting data using semi-structured interviews, secondary data, policy documentation and non-participant observation. The emergence of the SCA as economic development policy in Scotland – conducive to an institutionally sensitive theoretical approach – presents a valuable opportunity to contribute towards an empirical and theoretical understanding of ULAC. Using template analysis, findings emerged through process-tracing, sense-making and thick narrative descriptions to reveal aggregate dimensions and second-order themes and first-order concepts. The thesis responds to calls for in-depth case study research of the way local government collaboration operates and performs (Hulst and Montfort, 2012), engaging with the ‘fuzzy’(Markhusen, 2003) concepts and processes of ‘urban collaboration’, ‘policy outcomes’ and ‘institutions’ to reveal a lack of empirical and conceptual understanding of how ULAC operates: particularly the role of ‘urban’ institutional context as a ‘key actor attribute’ (Hulst and van Monfort, 2012: 139). Using a critical realist ontology (Jessop, 2005), the research is best suited to Stake’s (2005) interpretive methodological approach to contextualised theorising, using the SCA in Scotland to investigate the ‘contextualised’ Institutional context, to help inductively conceptualise the PV of ULAC as economic development policy. Whilst conscious of the risks of methodological and conceptual ‘stretching’ (Stubbs, 2005: 71) , the research uses Scotland as a case study to conceptualise the more generic, abstract features of ULAC as a ‘theoretically vague’ term that may ‘travel’ (Stubbs, 2005: 71). The results validate a realist perspective of the theoretical role of formal and informal institutions shaping the contextual path dependant nature of the PV of ULAC. The methodological contribution of the thesis highlights how a new evolving model of economic and spatial governance in Scotland, presents potential challenges for the future delivery of urban policy and practice in Scotland, before closing with a discussion of research limitations and recommendations for areas of future academic research.

The purpose of this research is to explore the nature of an emerging practice known as ‘prosumption’, and interrogate its potential as a discursive practice which empowers consumers in an online community named Instructables. Prosumers combine the roles of consumers and producers to make their own products. A review of prosumption and closely-related practices (consumer co-creation) alongside discourses of consumer empowerment provides a guide to the research. A netnography-informed approach is used to collect data through a degree of participant observation and online depth interviews. Findings suggest that prosumption in Instructables is multidimensional in nature and benefits to prosumers. It suggests a typology of prosumers (assemblers, modifies, artists and inventors) to make a distinction between prosumer and co-creator roles. Findings also offer evidence of prosumption as a discursive practice of consumer empowerment through self-discipline and collective education in contrast to other exploitive practices such as consumer co-creation. This research finally contributes to the on-going evolution of consumer productivity and how consumers and producers participate as producers of value in market and society.

Due to the limitations of the extant literature on the impact of microfinance funding on performance, with particular regard to a cross-country analysis and case study of Vietnam, this thesis has been written in an effort to fill this major gap by conducting an empirical investigation into the link between funding and the performance of microfinance institutions. It also employs the most common indicators for microfinance performance and introduces new evidence and possible explanations from an explicit perspective that might be relevant in the context of scale of operation, profit status, regulated status and legal status. First, the link between funding and microfinance performance varies with the heterogeneity of microfinance institution’ characteristics. Second, profitable and regulated microfinance institutions which take on considerably more commercial funds are therefore shown to have higher sustainability, efficiency and outreach. Third, a large scale of operation helps microfinance institutions achieve higher efficiency, profitability, sustainability and outreach (breadth and depth). Fourth, there is no trade-off between the breadth of outreach and efficiency. Fifth, larger loan sizes are associated with higher loan costs. Sixth, the global financial crisis has had a minor impact on the performance of microfinance institutions since they have a low level of self-sufficiency, associated with a low degree of financial integration.

Researchers have developed investigations into both initial and seasoned equity offering (SEO) by obtaining data from developed markets (e.g. Denis, 1994; Kothari and Warner, 1997; Corwin, 2003; Eckbo et al., 2006), while the literature in emerging markets is relatively neglected. This thesis provides an overview examination of one specific emerging region, namely Thailand. Equity financing in Thailand has become more widespread in the aftermath of the last economic crisis in 1997. With a more recent data set and larger sample size than previous Thai studies, we examine the performance of SEO firms between 1999 and 2006. Our thesis findings contribute to the existing literature by: (1) examining the SEO samples which focus mainly on issuing new shares to existing shareholders, i.e. rights issuing and private placement, instead of the general aspect of public offering, (2) applying a different benchmark to measure post-issuing performance compared with existing studies and (3) examining the relationship between short-term and long-term abnormal returns. Our evidence reveals that the stock prices react negatively to SEO announcements. We also find that there is no relationship between short- and long-term abnormal returns. This is a consistent explanation of the characteristics of the Thai capital market in practice. In addition, our results from the determinants of SEO underpricing are mostly consistent with the previous literature (i.e. Corwin, 2003; Intintoli and Kahle, 2009). Lastly, our findings suggest that SEO firms underperform during the post-issuing period, particularly one year after issuing new shares.

The thesis focuses on empirical modelling and estimation of the role of exchange rate in international trade adjustment, trade prices and domestic inflation in the context of developing countries. Although the study‘s prime focus is to estimate empirically, using Bangladesh as the main case study, the theoretical assumptions about the effectiveness of exchange rates polices towards trade prices, domestic inflation and trade performance, we also examine the asymmetric behaviour of ‗large exchange rate shocks‘ in trade flows of other South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Estimated results demonstrate that the exchange rate has a significant positive impact on trade balance in the short- and long-run. However, the J-curve phenomenon can be explained as an appropriate response of trade balance to exchange rate shocks. Along with relative prices and domestic real income, the export demand is also found to be the significant determinant of import demand function. We find ‗complete‘ exchange rate pass-through to import price in both the short- and long-run. However, the ‗second stage pass-through‘ to consumer prices is found to be only ‗partial‘ in both the short- and long-run. Trade liberalization is a significant phenomenon for Bangladesh‘s trade and inflation. Hysteresis in international trade is found to be a ‗commodity and country specific‘ phenomenon. Sunk costs are not found to be significant for hysteresis.

This thesis mainly consists of three empirical chapters related to understanding the characteristics, economic impact and the demand for gambling in Thailand. Beginning with a review of the theoretical and empirical literature, this confirms that socio-economic and demographic data are important determinants of the level of gambling participation and gambling expenditure. A Logit model is then used to estimate the participation of gambling. The results suggest that the number games, such as the government lottery, the underground lottery, are popular among old gamblers whereas football betting is popular for adolescents. In the past, most casino customers were old gamblers, but at present the number of young gamblers who participate in casino has considerably increased. A Tobit model is employed to estimate the level of gambling frequency and gambling expenditure. The estimations reveal that there is a “supplementation effect” of casino on other gambling types and the effect also appears among the number games. The gambling expenditures on the number games are high in the group of gamblers who have undergraduate degree or lower while the expenditures on casino and football betting are high in the group of gamblers who have undergraduate degree. However, a higher education level leads to a lower level of gambling expenditures. The focus is then centred on the 2-3 digit lottery. The rational addiction model is tested for the case of the 2-3 digit lottery. In the addiction framework, the 2-3 digit lottery is found to be an addictive goods and the addiction is “myopic addiction”. This finding is confirmed by Instrumental Variable estimation.

ISO 9000 Quality Management Standards Series aims to improve the products and services regarding customer satisfaction. The main purpose is to increase quality. On the other hand, having a special importance to mining, OHSAS 18000 Occupational Health and Safety Assessment System Series aims to provide safer, more tranquil and more healthy working environment to the labors. Both of these management systems are continuously improved and increase their importance in the world. This study evaluates ISO 9000 and OHSAS 18000 series in a comparative and criticizing scope and complementariness of the standards to each other is examined. Existing conditions in our country are determined in mining perspective and some comments are given to improve existing condition. Literatural information is given about both of the series in the study and these information is supported by some case studies. Case studies covers not only, a leading company in Turkey namely MANGAN Marble &amp / Granite Inc. but also some other companies and establishments. Studies show that there are some problems observed in the implementation of both series. The main problem is commitment of the top management. Other problems are documentation and training of the personnel. These problems are more serious in small scale mining companies and quarries. Although existance of these problems is highly possible in the mining companies applying ISO 9000 and OHSAS 18000 series are very beneficial regarding the increase in the quality of products and therefore it&amp / #65533 / s advantages and in providing a healthy and safe working environment and become a necessity.