In this thesis we investigate the effects of real exchange rate (RER) uncertainty on output in the context of Southern Cone economies. The first chapter provides a framework to analyze the output effects of RER uncertainty when firms contract dollar-debt and no hedging instruments are available, by focusing on the channel uncertainty-output operating through the firms financial strategy. An increase in uncertainty increases the probability of bankruptcy, raising expected marginal bankruptcy costs, and reducing optimal output of a risk-neutral firm. We find the output response to uncertainty shocks to depend on firms' liquidity balances, trade orientation and perceptions about government assistance if large exchange rate movements occur. The second chapter examines empirically RER uncertainty effects on sectoral output for 28 manufacturing sectors in the Southern Cone over 1970-2002. We use alternative uncertainty measures allowing different degrees of sophistication in agents' expectation mechanisms to estimate a supply function. We use instrumental variable techniques to address potential simultaneity problems. Results suggest a negative non-negligible effect of uncertainty on output, threshold effects, and sectoral heterogeneity, explained by trade orientation, the intensity with which sectors trade within Mercosur and by sectoral productivity. The fourth chapter investigates the importance of past exchange rate behaviour when forming expectations and tests for the uncovered interest parity (UIP) hypothesis in Uruguay. Using interest rate differentials over 1980-2010 we identify a strong extrapolative component in expectations, following an inverted-U pattern over time. Agents internalise announcements and shocks that may affect fundamentals. Deviations from UIP are low for high-inflation periods, and highfor low-inflation periods and freely floating regimes. As long as what it takes to predict well is simple (look backwards, follow announcements), interest rate differentials perform well. Once exchange rate determination becomes intricate, agents fail at predicting. This finding remains unchanged when survey data are used for the period 2005-2010.

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%.

Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system the integration of national financial markets grew steadily, to reach unprecedented levels. At the same time, episodes of extreme financial instability became more frequent. The latter were often extremely contagious, in the sense that country-specific episodes had hugely disruptive effects on financial markets across the globe. The literature on Financial Contagion investigates the channels through which that instability is propagated. This thesis deals with the two most recurring questions in the literature: 1) What are the channels of macroeconomic instability propagation? A theoretical model of instability propagation in presence of currency mismatches is presented. The model shows that when domestic agents' liabilities are denominated in foreign currency, exchange rate volatility raises credit costs, with negative real effects. Currency mismatches therefore create a channel through which external disturbances causing exchange rate volatility affect negatively the domestic supply. Several reasons why currency mismatches might magnify the effect of foreign disturbances have been identified by the theoretical literature on the issue. The empirical relevance of the magnification hypothesis is tested by investigating whether the degree of domestic output's sensitivity to foreign output fluctuations is higher in countries where currency mismatches are widespread than in countries able to borrow abroad in domestic currency. The analysis gives strong support to the hypothesis: currency mismatches magnify the real effects of foreign disturbances. The analysis also highlights the presence of asymmetry of propagation: negative shocks have proportionally stronger real effects than positive ones in currency-mismatches-prone countries. 2) Is the financial shocks propagation mechanism altered by major events such as banking or currency crises? The intensity of propagation of the crises in the ‘90s led researchers to ask whether the linkages between countries grew stronger during these turbulent times or were instead as strong before. Various tests of the instability of the propagation mechanism have been proposed since. These can be divided in two families: correlation-based and extreme-event-based tests. I propose a new approach, based on the Quantile Regression technique. It is argued that this approach retains the appealing features of the two families of test while avoiding some of their limitations. The new approach is then applied to stock market returns, finding strong evidence of instability of the propagation mechanism.

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.

This thesis mainly analyzes the effects of Turkish Grameen Microcredit Program (TGMP) on income levels of the program participants in Eskisehir. The studies found in the literature which examine the effects of TGMP on participants concentrate on Diyarbakir in 2007 whereas this thesis provides evidence for a province which has different socio-economic characteristics, Eskisehir, in 2011. The methodology used is sample survey on participants through interviews and results are evaluated with non-parametric statistical tests. Poverty levels of program participants, characteristics of microbusinesses conducted by them, effect of the program on profit levels of microbusinesses and relation between profit levels of microbusinesses and other variables are analyzed in detail. The main findings of the study reveal that TGMP Eskisehir branch does not discriminate in favor of or against poorest women, microbusinesses conducted by participants concentrates on traditional and low profit ones, the program positively affects the profit levels of some microbusinesses but not for all of the participants and the effect of the program on profit levels is positively related with the microcredit amount spent for these businesses. It is concluded from the findings that TGMP cannot be the solution for poverty by itself and recommendations for improving the program and its effects are provided accordingly.

This thesis investigates the EU policy-making process concerning the external dimension of migration focusing on the EU's eastern neighbourhood. In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on integrating a comprehensive migration dimension into the broader external policies of the EU. In 2004, the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was developed as an overarching foreign policy tool integrating the EU's existing policies towards its southern and eastern neighbourhood under a single framework with the objective of ensuring security and stability in the EU's neighbourhood. The management of cross-border movements along the EU's new eastern frontiers in particular has moved up on the EU agenda with the eastern shift of the EU borders following the 2004/2007 eastern enlargements. With the increasing integration of migration policy objectives into the EU's broader neighbourhood policy, the EU has progressively established a more streamlined form of cooperation with its immediate eastern neighbours concerning different dimensions of migration policy. The thesis examines the EU policy-making process with the aim of answering the question of how the EU policy has been shaped in the view of diverging national preferences and institutional roles and influence concerning the external dimension of migration policy. As a salient policy area central to national sovereignty and interest, the EU member states traditionally seek to control the impact of institutional constraints in the area of migration policy and support mechanisms by which they could exert national control over the policy outcomes. On the other hand, the increasing ‘communitarisation' of the policy area since the Amsterdam Treaty has enhanced the role of the EU institutions. Drawing on the new-institututionalist approaches to EU policy-making, the thesis questions a purely intergovernmental understanding of policy-making dominated by the preferences of the member states in the external dimension of EU migration policy.

This thesis explores the construction of identity amongst the second generation of South- Korean migrants to Germany in Frankfurt am Main, focussing mainly on women. Overwhelmingly, when talking about migrants the German media focus on the Turkish minority. Literature follows a similar pattern. However, West Germany recruited South Korean nurses and miners during the 1970s as labour migrants. Today, they and their children constitute the largest South Korean minority in Europe. In this thesis I examine the second generation of the Korean minority in relation to broader discourses on migrants and integration in Germany, and trace the dynamics of identification and self-understanding. Central to these are narratives of shared experiences, of having Korean parents and of living in German society, particularly in relation to discourses in which they are identified as foreigners. Korean parents impart a sense of “Korea” as a source of timeless tradition and practices; whereas “Germany” is a setting for their everyday lives. These shared experiences are mobilised as a framework for negotiating identities. In contrast to the essentialist understanding of identity invoked by Germany society, the second generation describe themselves as kyopo, a Korean term meaning “Korean living in a foreign country” and which, in the German context, means “Second-generation German-Korean living in Germany”. This thesis looks at the ways Korean-Germans articulate the possibilities and limits of kyopo identity in relation to narratives and discourses on ‘Koreanness' and ‘Germanness', and in the context of social interactions. I focus especially on the ways in which this occurs for women, whose experiences are often marginalised in the process of kyopo identity negotiation. They are caught between the need to expose the problems of male privilege and the desire to unite with Korean-German men to contest the German discourse on integration and foreigners that confines them both.

This thesis develops a conceptual and methodological approach to understanding how future climate change is likely to affect migration, and then applies this approach to explore the likely effects of climate change on different migration flows in and from Mexico. Scientific and policy interest in the climate change-migration nexus has been growing over the last decade, yet empirical results remain inconclusive. Existing approaches are often conceptually and methodologically unconvincing as they assume a linear relationship between climate change and migration, or try to separate climate stressors from other factors involved in migration decisions. Furthermore, most current research into the climate-migration nexus has focused on a relatively simple framing of localised environmental pressures forcing people to migrate. In contrast, this thesis acknowledges the complexity of migration and suggests that climate change is likely to affect factors involved in migration decisions at the local and the global level. It develops a more realistic understanding of the potential effect of climate change on migration by examining the impact of the local and global consequences of climate change on livelihood stressors and other factors involved in migration decisions. This thesis adopts a qualitative and comparative approach to illustrate this concept, based on fieldwork in Zacatecas and Veracruz, two Mexican states with different migration profiles and different local climate stressors. It analyses the factors involved in migration decisions, which include livelihood stressors but also networks, recruiters and individual agency. A risk matrix is then developed to explore the climate sensitivity of the various factors that influence internal and international migration flows. It analyses the extent to which each factor is likely to be affected by climate change in combination with the relevance of this factor for the migration decision-making process. This approach allows identifying those factors that, affected by future climate change, have the highest potential to impact on existing migration patterns. It also allows a comparison between different migration flows. Results suggest that climate change is likely to have moderate effects on migration, mainly on internal rural flows. Alarmist predictions of large numbers of 'climate change refugees' are thus inappropriate and policies should instead focus on the factors projected to impact most on migration under scenarios of future climate change. Policies should also aim at mitigating the negative effects of climate change on people's livelihoods and at protecting migrants and non-migrants.