This dissertation proposes a social mechanism to explain consumer fraud from a crossnational perspective. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey and the European Values Study, the dissertation seeks to: (1) contribute to the understanding of consumer morality expressed by dishonest behaviour in diverse economic and cultural contexts; and (2) demonstrate the value of research based on social mechanisms towards the advancement and integration of theories from diverse social sciences. By addressing individual-, national- and cross-level variation, an analysis motivated by social mechanisms moves beyond description, helping to explain the processes underpinning this complex social and political phenomenon. The contribution of this dissertation is twofold. From a substantive point of view, the dissertation fills a gap in the literature by offering a multilevel theoretical and empirical account for consumer fraud. From a methodological perspective, the dissertation differs from other pieces of cross-national research, making sense of cross-national data by alluding to a social mechanism that helps to explain social phenomenon by integrating different levels of analysis. This dissertation begins with a general introduction followed by a theoretical chapter, a methodological chapter, and three empirical papers, finishing with a general conclusion. The introduction provides information that guides and sustains the subsequent chapters. The theoretical chapter covers the substantive foundations of the research hypotheses and empirical studies, examining the state of the art of economic morality and consumer dishonest behaviour. The methodological chapter discusses the potentialities and pitfalls of cross-national survey methods and analytical strategies. This discussion is enriched by the insights of a systematic literature review—carried out in the context of this dissertation—that inspects how social mechanisms are addressed in studies using ESS data. The empirical studies are presented in the form of self-contained papers motivated by different research questions addressed with cross-national data. The conclusion brings together the partial conclusions from the three papers to reflect on methodological implications and future directions for research.

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the role of information and career concerns in organizations. To that end, I submit three papers, each of which addresses a unique aspect of a firm’s organizational problem. In the first chapter I investigate the incentives of a firm to reveal strategic information to the market in order to make its leader more conservative as regards early decisions. The firm may do so to achieve coordination between different levels of the firm’s hierarchy or to improve adaptation to the firm’s environment. I give conditions on employees’ career concerns that make the firm voluntarily disclose information concerning its strategic decisions. In chapter 2 I ask why rational voters would knowingly re-elect a politician who has expropriated public funds. In this model, the presence of non-strategic (‘impressionable’) voters means that even welfare-minded politicians occasionally raid the public purse in order to increase their chances of re-election. Being aware of this dynamic, rational voters opt to reward politicians whose misbehavior is solely due to career concerns. Chapter 3 changes tack somewhat to analyze the optimal decision-making protocol for a committee when one member of the committee is overconfident. I show that overconfidence leads an uninformed committee member to respond to his private information, which causes a better-informed member to stop using her private information. This leads to a loss of efficiency under majority rule, and changes the optimal voting rule for the committee to unanimity.

The first paper of this thesis uses a unique data set to assess the determinants of inflows and outflows in the fund industry. The higher frequency of the data allows to examine whether recent past performance affects the flow-performance relation. I find that the latter is concave for the worst-performing funds and convex for the best-performing funds. This is in stark contrast to previous studies in the literature that document a strict convex relationship. The disaggregation by inflows and outflows further indicates that the concavity is mainly due to outflows, which react much quicker to bad performance than previously assumed, whereas the convexity is driven by inflows. Finally, I also compare how the type of client affects the flow- performance relationship. I show that investors deemed less sophisticated care more about short-term performance than other investors, and more about raw returns than risk-adjusted returns. The second paper investigates how funds shift risk as a function of past performance. In contrast to the literature, I manage to disentangle the implicit incentive generated by the flow-performance relationship from the direct incentive generated by the portfolio manager remuneration contract. Identification is only possible because I focus on funds that pay bonus every six months instead of every year. I show not only that contracts have an asymmetric effect on risk, but also that the tournament within the fund family is the main driver of risk shifting. This is consistent with families actively engaging in the tournament by transferring not only performance, as suggested by the literature, but also risk from their worst- to their best-performing funds. The last paper is joint with Pedro A. Saffi and uses a data set of Brazilian hedge funds holdings to examine the impact of long and short positions on performance. In particular, we test if changes in long/short positions and their risk can forecast future performance. While we find that funds with large increases in the risk of long-only positions risk relative to the previous 24 months underperform by about 3% per year on average, those that increase the risk of short-only positions overperform their peers by about 1% a year on average, net of fees. Neither monthly changes of long nor short positions can forecast next month’s abnormal returns.

A common theme running throughout the three chapters of this thesis is dynamic recurring group decision making. The first chapter sets up a model with endogenous status-quo (dynamic bargaining model) in which decision makers are uncertain about their own future preferences. The main focus of the chapter is on how different bargaining protocols influence equilibrium decisions. The two protocols considered are i) implicit status-quo bargaining protocol in which present period policy serves as the status-quo for the next period and ii) explicit status-quo bargaining protocol in which the current decision involves both current policy and a possibly different status-quo for the future. The main observation of the chapter is that the former bargaining protocol leads to decisions diverging from the preferences of the actors involved even in the periods in which their preferences coincide, this divergence being driven by the concerns to maintain a bargaining position for the future. The latter bargaining protocol, on the other hand, delivers decisions fully reflecting preferences of the actors involved in the periods when these coincide, but may lead to decisions re ecting only the proposer's preferences. The second chapter shows how to construct equilibria in a class of dy-namic bargaining models in which players have fixed preferences over all the dimensions of a policy space. The construction applies both to one-dimensional and multi-dimensional policy spaces and delivers equilibria with simple and intuitive structure. The chapter works out several examples to show i) the multiplicity of equilibria and ii) the non-monotonicity of the existence of the simple equilibria in the underlying model parameters. The third paper is a collaborative work with Roman Horvath and Katerina Smidkova from the Czech National Bank currently published as a CNB working paper). The chapter analyses decision making in monetary policy committees, the decision making bodies of central banks. On the empirical side, the chapter shows that voting records of monetary policy committees are informative about their own future decisions. On the theoretical side, the chapter shows that the voting records' predictive power can be generated through theoretical models used in the group decision making literature.

Balassa and Samuelson showed that as we move towards richer countries the measured price level becomes higher. Their proposed explanation was to appeal to the presence of a service element in most goods. In this thesis, I begin by introducing an exploring of an alternative candidate explanation for the B-S relationship. This explanation is based on an appeal to mismeasured quality. In the model developed in Chapter 2, the well-known difficulties surrounding the problem of making a full and appropriate adjustment for differing quality levels will mean that when the average quality level consumed is higher in richer countries, this will showup in the data as spurious difference in price levels, which will imply the B-S relationship. More interestingly, it also leads to a second testable prediction that is not a prediction of the classic B-S explanation. This second prediction is tested directly at the end of Chapter 2. In testing this prediction, we are led naturally to explore the foundation of the B-S relationship at a disaggregate level. In Chapter 3, we take a purely statistical approach in asking the question: what is the best statistical description of wealth versus price level relationship for individual products? We arrive at a characterization of the best statistical description which suggests a natural way of ordering products relative to the form of this relationship. A striking pattern emerges, according to which products at the one end of the spectrum are almost all manufactured goods (designated the ‘M-group’), while products at the other end of the spectrum are almost all pure services (designated the ‘S-group’). In Chapter 4 and 5, we return to theory. We propose a separate model for the S-group in Chapter 4. In Chapter 5 we return to the analysis of Chapter 2, but now we apply the analysis to the M-group only. Chapter 6 is devoted to exploring the macroeconomic implications of the B-S relationship. The key idea is that a (fast) growing economy will exhibit a (substantial) temporary episode of inflation, as measured by conventional price indices.

The possible presence of cross-sectional dependence in economic panel or cross-sectional data needs to be taken into consideration when developing econometric theory for data analysis. This thesis consists of three works that either allow for or estimate cross-sectional dependence in the disturbance terms of a regression model, each addressing different problems, models and methods in the areas of non- and semi-parametric estimation. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the motivations for, and contributions of, the three topics of this thesis. A review of relevant literature is given, followed by a sum- mary of main results obtained in order to help place the present thesis in perspective. Chapter 2 develops asymptotic theory for series estimation under a general setting of spatial dependence in regressors and error term, including cases analogous to those known as long-range dependence in the time series literature. A data-driven studentization, new to non-parametric and cross-sectional contexts, is theoretically justified, then used to develop asymptotically correct inference. Chapter 3 discusses identification and kernel estimation of a non-parametric common regression with additive individual fixed effects in panel data, with weak temporal dependence and arbitrarily strong cross-sectional dependence. An efficiency improvement is obtained by using estimated cross-sectional covariance matrix in a manner similar to generalised least squares, achieving a Gauss-Markov type efficiency bound. Feasible optimal bandwidths and feasible optimal non-parametric regression estimation are established and asymptotically justified. Chapter 4 deals with efficiency improvement in the estimation of pure Spatial Autoregressive model. We construct a two-stage estimator, which adapts to the unknown error distribution of non-parametric form and achieves the Cramer-Rao bound of the correctly specified maximum likelihood estimator. In establishing feasibility of such adaptive estimation, we find that the gain in efficiency from adaptive estimation is typically smaller than in the relevant time series context, but could be also greater under certain asymptotic behaviour of the weight matrix of the model.

This thesis provides three essays in macroeconomics. The first chapter analyzes trends in fertility and time allocation. Falling fertility rates have often been linked to rising female wages. However, over the last 30 years the US total fertility rate has been stable while female wages have continued to grow. Over the same period, women's hours spent on housework have declined, but men's have increased. A model with a shrinking gender wage gap is proposed capturing these trends. While rising relative wages increase women's labour supply, they also lead to a reallocation of home production from women to men, and a higher use of labour-saving inputs. Both are important in understanding why fertility did not decline further. The second chapter presents a life-cycle model with heterogeneous households and incomplete financial markets to study the implications of a reform that eliminates capital taxation. In the economy individuals differ in terms of their gender and marital status, and decision making within the couple is modelled as a contract under limited commitment. When capital taxes are set to zero, there is a strong increase in wealth accumulation that originates in dual earner households. Moreover, the policy change has important implications for the division of resources within the family and for households' insurance possibilities. The third chapter is motivated by the dramatic reshuffling in relative positions between East Asian and Latin American economies. It studies the dynamic response of a two- sector, manufacturing and agriculture, economy in the presence of import tariffs and export subsidies on manufacturing goods, similar to those that characterized government policy in these countries. It is shown that the response to these policies depends on the level of productivity in the agricultural sector. Quantitative work, however, finds that differences in agricultural productivities themselves are key in explaining the differential growth experiences.

My thesis combines three distinct papers in labor economics. The first chapter is a collaborative work with Bernd Fitzenberger and Karsten Kohn. In this chapter we scrutinize the effects of union density and of collective bargaining coverage on the distribution of wages both in the covered and the uncovered sector. Collective bargaining in Germany takes place at either the industry or firm level. Collective bargaining coverage is much greater than union density. The share of employees covered by collective bargaining in a single firm can vary between 0% and 100%. This institutional setup suggests that researchers should explicitly distinguish union density, coverage rate at the firm level, and coverage at the individual level. Using linked employer-employee data, we estimate OLS and quantile regressions of wages on these dimensions of union influence. A higher share of employees in a firm covered by industry-wide or firm-specific contracts is associated with higher wages, but there is no clear-cut effect on wage dispersion. Yet, holding coverage at the firm level constant, individual bargaining coverage is associated with a lower wage level and less wage dispersion. A greater union density reinforces the effects of coverage, but the effect of union density is negative at all points of the wage distribution for employees who work in firms without collective bargaining coverage. Greater union density thus compresses the wage distribution while moving the distribution in firms without coverage uniformly. The second chapter evaluates the impact of the UK Working Time Regulations 1998, which introduced mandatory paid holiday entitlement. The regulation gave(nearly) all workers the right to a minimum of 4 weeks of paid holiday per a year. With constant weekly pay this change amounts effectively to an increase in the real hourly wage of about 8.5% for someone going from 0 to 4 weeks paid holiday per year, which should lead to adjustments in employment. For employees I use complementary log-log regression to account for right-censoring of employment spells. I find no increase in the hazard to exit employment within a year after treatment. Adjustments in wages cannot explain this result as they are increasing for the treated groups relative to the control. I also evaluate the long run trend in aggregate employment, using the predicted treatment probabilities in a difference-in-differences framework. Here I find a small and statistically significant decrease in employment. This effect is driven by a trend reversal in employment, coinciding with the treatment. The third chapter considers how the availability of a personal computer at home changed employment for married women. I develop a theoretical model that motivates the empirical specifications. Using data from the U.S. CPS from 1984 to 2003, I find that employment is 1.5 to 7 percentage points higher for women in households with a computer. The model predicts that the increase in employment is driven by higher wages. I find having a computer at home is associated with higher wages, and employment in more computer intensive occupations, which is consistent with the model. Decomposing the changes by educational attainment shows that both women with low levels of education (high school diploma or less) and women with the highest levels of education (Master's degree or more) have high returns from home computers.

Bayesian nonparametric modelling has been widely applied to statistics and econometrics due to the various simulation methods that have been developed and in particular of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. This thesis develops novel Bayesian nonparametric ordinal-response models and proposes efficient MCMC algorithms to estimate them. In chapter 21, we set up a model for inference on panel ordered data and apply it to sovereign credit ratings. In chapter 3, a model for ordinal-valued time series data is considered and is used to examine contagion across stock markets. Using real and simulated data, we show that the proposed models provide a great deal of flexibility in modelling and overcome the standard weakness of Bayesian methods due to the usual parametric assumptions.

This thesis is a theoretical investigation into Marx’s theory of value through a close reading of the ‘systematic dialectical’ tendency in the area of value-form theory. It investigates theories, which emphasize the import of Hegel’s Logic on Marx’s Capital The main argument is that many of the arguments that are associated with ‘new’ Hegelian Marxism are sound and valid, but that they also require a closer look into Marx’s emphasis on the social concepts under investigation. In this context, the thesis compares and contrasts ‘systematic dialectics’ with core texts of Marx’s intellectual project. It is argued that the main exponents of ‘new dialectics’ and Hegelian Marxism have left unexamined such crucial topics as those of the critique of private property and class struggle. In this context, the thesis affirms that the ‘systematic dialectic’ can be utilized to conceptualize the transition to a different social order, with the latter being a by-product of the logic of capital itself.