This study focuses on the property-derived cash flows that a REIT investor earns. We observe that, in the short run, REIT investors are only exposed to the income cash flows of a REIT's underlying portfolio and not to its property price fluctuations. Specifically, investors miss out on the component of appreciation returns not contained in income. Chapter 3 observes this phenomenon and argues, without proof, that this is due to the trading restrictions that REITs face in order to operate tax free, which impose minimum holding periods on properties in REITs' portfolios. Chapters 4 and 5 show that the trading-restrictions explanation is indeed the reason for this phenomenon. Specifically, chapter 4 tests how REITs with different firm characteristics are differently affected by the trading constraints. Firstly, we test for size effects and find that medium-sized and large firms offer investors better exposure to short-term fluctuations in property appreciation than small firms. This supports the trading restrictions hypothesis, as large firms are less affected by these. Secondly, we test for the effects of the degree of diversification in a REIT's portfolio and find that, while investing in a REIT which is diversified by property type gives an investor better exposure to appreciation cash flows, investing in one whose portfolio is merely geographically diversified does not. Finally, we test whether UPREITs give an investor better exposure to property appreciation cash flows and find strongly that this is so. Since the partnership that holds the property in an UPREIT is not subject to selling constraints, we find our hypothesis strongly supported. Chapter 5 analyzes holding periods and selling decisions. We firstly simulate a possible filter-based market timing strategy which significantly outperforms a simple buy-and-hold strategy, and demonstrate to what extent holding periods shorter than what is allowed are required. We then analyze actual holding periods of properties in REITs' portfolios and model the decision to hold a property beyond four years, finding strong evidence that there is an incentive to do so in a rising market. This gives strong support to the trading-restrictions explanation.

This thesis explores topics in Agricultural Economics and is composed of five papers. In the first paper (Chapter 2), a latent-class stochastic frontier model is used to estimate efficiency scores of farmers in Ethiopia. Compared to conventional models, which assume a unique frontier, much lower inefficiencies are found, suggesting that part of the inefficiencies uncovered in the literature could be an artefact of the methods used. The second paper (Chapter 3) revisits the link between cereal diversity and productivity using a panel dataset in Ethiopia. The results suggest that the positive effect between cereal diversity and productivity becomes much smaller when households who produce teff (a low-productivity and high-value crop) are excluded from the sample, hinting at the possibility that results could be driven by yield differentials between cereals, rather than diversity. The third paper (Chapter 4) estimates the labour impacts of the adoption of Soil and Water Conservation technologies (SWC) in Ethiopia. The results suggest that adopting SWC technologies leads to an increase in adult and child labour. Understanding the labour impacts is important in itself, but it also raises concerns about using impact evaluation methods that require no change in inputs as an identifying assumption of impacts. Paper 4 (Chapter 5), assesses the pertinence of a drought index that has recently been proposed in the literature by Yu and Babcock (2010) and argues that it defines drought too narrowly. An extension to this index is proposed and we show, using a dataset of Indian districts, that the original index is likely to underestimate the impacts of drought. In Paper 5 (Chapter 6), we identify data-driven ranges of rainfall for which the marginal effects of a rainfall-temperature index (RTI) are different and then we discuss how the impacts of drought have changed over the 1966-2009 period in India. Finally, Chapter 7 concludes.

This thesis is about a workforce in the midst of regional economic fragmentation. It is an ethnographic study of a commercial farm on South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe, where farmer-landowners are white Afrikaners, and workers black and overwhelmingly Zimbabwean. Fleeing the hyperinflation and violent state oppression of the ‘Zimbabwean crisis’, farm workers encounter South Africa’s neoliberal restructuring, contraction of labour-intensive industry, and land reform. Economic informalisation in both countries – a shift to short-term strategies of ‘making do’ – seems to hail the disappearance of southern Africa’s longer-term patterns of racialised migrant labour systems. This thesis, however, argues for a labour relations or ‘productivist’ perspective on current trends. Agricultural workforces on the Zimbabwean-South African border, with their established forms of everyday organisation and on-site residence, profoundly shape the local setting. Their highly structured arrangements bear the mark of the region’s labour history, yet also reflect the forms of fragmentation currently characterising southern Africa. The thesis begins by exploring white border farmers’ self-understandings through their notions of success. It then offers a wider historical account of the border’s settler capitalists, their struggles for control of land and labour, and the role played by their enterprises as hubs of settlement. Focusing on one border farm today, the study turns to the black workforce itself. It investigates how permanent workers consolidate their powerful positions in diverse areas of life, blurring spheres of work and non-work; how seasonal workers, many displaced from Zimbabwe, with diverse socio-economic backgrounds, engage with the hierarchies built around their permanent counterparts; and how, in the midst of all this, senior black workers struggle over status by means of contrasting models of authority, pitting established paternalism against idioms of corporate management. Together, these perspectives reveal how a workforce’s internal arrangements both reflect and refract the wider dynamics of the border and of Zimbabwean displacement. The thesis finally develops this central theme by addressing the position of farm work in a wider economy of trade and services on the farms and across the border. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on one border farm, and in the border area more generally (November 2006-April 2008), and supported by archival research, this thesis contributes to the anthropology of work. It shows how workplace dynamics act as a prism, refracting the meanings of work, movement and upheaval in an era of informalisation, and embed displaced migrant workers in dense webs of dependence and obligation.