Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: Rodney Anderson, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of History. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 9, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 251 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2006. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 168-174) and index.

Thesis (M.S.Eco.)--Baylor University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-46).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 236-248). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (MScFor (Forest and Wood Science))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / This study sought to examine the effects of soil fertility replenishment (SFR) adoption on household security and poverty reduction in smallholder farming households of central and southern Malawi by assessing food security, asset status, and household income generating activities in Kasungu and Machinga Districts during 2007. The results showed that households had been able to significantly increase maize production by an extra 382 kg per year in Kasungu and 242 kg per year in Machinga Districts, which constitutes approximately 35% and 22% of average household maize requirements for the year for each district, respectively. This reduced the critical annual hunger periods from 3.46 months to 2.80 months per year in Kasungu and from 4.31 months to 3.75 months in Machinga. Respondents also reported a significant increase in assets and an increase in income. Despite these positive changes, households were found to still be living in extreme poverty. Selling physical assets was the most common response to shocks and any increase in income was allocated to the purchase of food, household supplies, and other items necessary to immediate survival. This study revealed that while food security is paramount to the sustainable livelihoods of smallholder farmers, livelihood security and poverty reduction depend on more than increased food production. SFR technologies are fulfilling their primary role as a means to food security, but their adoption does not lead to significant livelihood improvements. Achieving lasting impacts requires that initiatives take an integrated approach and address not only household food production, but the multifaceted dynamics of social institutions, markets/economy, and policy. The long-term impacts of the current agroforestry programs in the study areas will emerge only with time. Livelihood improvements will depend on several factors. First, market inefficiencies must be remedied and economic barriers must be broken down. Second, the challenges identified by the respondents, especially access to resources and training, need to be addressed in a participatory way that promotes education and empowerment. As these two issues are tackled, households will become better equipped to manage the complexities that arise from SFR adoption and livelihood diversification. It is recommended that future research and initiatives should focus on identifying and removing economic barriers to markets, addressing farmeridentified challenges such as access to seed, water, and education and training, supporting households in managing multiple livelihood strategies, and continuing research to identify appropriate agroforestry species and technologies.

Existing gender inequality is believed to be heightened as a result of weather events and climate-related disasters that are likely to become more common in the future. We show that an already marginalized group-female-headed households in South Africa-is differentially affected by relatively modest levels of variation in rainfall, which households experience on a year-to-year basis. Data from three waves of the National Income Dynamics Survey in South Africa allow us to follow incomes of 4,162 households from 2006 to 2012. By observing how household income is affected by variation in rainfall relative to what is normally experienced during the rainy season in each district, our study employs a series of naturally occurring experiments that allow us to identify causal effects. We find that households where a single head can be identified based on residency or work status are more vulnerable to climate variability than households headed by two adults. Single male-headed households are more vulnerable because of lower initial earnings and, to a lesser extent, other household characteristics that contribute to economic disadvantages. However, this can only explain some of the differential vulnerability of female-headed households. This suggests that there are traits specific to female-headed households, such as limited access to protective social networks or other coping strategies, which makes this an important dimension of marginalization to consider for further research and policy in South Africa and other national contexts. Households headed by widows, never-married women, and women with a non-resident spouse (e.g., "left-behind" migrant households) are particularly vulnerable. We find vulnerable households only in districts where rainfall has a large effect on agricultural yields, and female-headed households remain vulnerable when accounting for dynamic impacts of rainfall on income.

The environmental goal “God bebyggd miljö” states that 50 percent of the food waste should be collected, and 40 percent of it should go through biological treatment. This goal together with the prohibition on organic waste to landfill is a mean of control to get municipalities toimplement waste treatment systems for food waste. This study focused on what the localwaste treatment company in Halmstad municipality is doing to tackle the environmentalgoals and the system they’ve implemented, which is an optical sorting system. By talking to the local waste treatment company HEM (Halmstad Energi och Miljö AB) to get an idea of the current situation regarding what can be improved, the idea of communication aspects were brought up by the company as an area which could be developed and improved upon to increase the collection of food waste in the municipality. The study was conducted in mainly two ways. First a literature study and secondly interviews were conducted. The following questions were asked: Which communication factors areimportant and affect the result for a successful degree of sorting for the optical sorting system? What’s important to communicate to get customers to sort their waste correctly? How can the communication between the municipal waste treatment company and theinhabitants change over time to ensure a successful collection of food waste? The study resulted in an identification of different central components which are importantand affect the result for a successful waste collection - these are (1) audience targeting, (2) simplicity, (3) incentive, (4) continued communication (after the implementation of thesystem) and lastly (5) positive morale. To get customers to sort their waste correctly thestudy suggests that several of the central factors are included in the communication betweenthe municipality and the inhabitants. To also ensure a successful waste collection over timethe study also concluded that a continued communication is also needed. The conclusions drawn from the study is that the central factors gave good results for the interviewed municipalities and therefore would probably work for other municipalities.

The goal of this thesis is to explore how household heterogeneity propagates and amplifies macroeconomic shocks within the economy using both economic theory and empirical data. The assumption of a single "representative" household has been a mainstay of macroeconomic research over the past half-century. However recent work suggests that not only is there a considerable degree of heterogeneity among households, but that these differences have a significant impact on a range of macroeconomic issues such as the e?ectiveness of fiscal stimulus (Kaplan et al., 2014; Broda and Parker, 2014), monetary policy (Auclert, 2017; Kaplan et al., 2016), the housing market (Attanasio et al., 2012; Blundell et al., 2008; Guerrieri and Iacoviello, 2017; Ngai et al., 2016; Mian et al., 2013), consumption (Ahn et al., 2017a; Blundell and Preston, 1998; Campbell and Cocco, 2007; Engelhardt, 1996) and employment (Ravn and Sterk, 2016; McKay and Reis, 2016; Abo-Zaid, 2013a) among many others. This literature has highlighted how households respond differently to aggregate shocks or changes in policy and how simply aggregating or averaging across them can obscure important truths about the economy. However, relaxing this assumption poses several challenges. The first is choosing the degree and manner in which households di?er. While in reality households can differ along many dimensions, in practice it is only feasible to include a small number of these in any given model. Thus one must choose the most salient dimensions along which households differ and the structural reasons behind such differences. For example, when examining the dynamics behind the housing market is it important to model differences in income, wealth, age, tastes or composition? No single model will be able to incorporate all these differences and so it is incumbent on researchers to proritise and justify their choices. In this thesis I will show why household heterogeneity in the housing and labour markets is both empirically relevant and an important consideration when considering the problem of optimal policy. The second challenge is a computational one. While models can be structured such that differentiated households make identical decisions, in general these differences will cause choices, and thus outcomes, across households to diverge. This produces a non-degenerate distribution of households across their specific state variables. This raises the problem of how this potentially infinite-dimension distribution is incorporated within the model. Previous literature has developed a range of options for handling this problem including approximating the distribution with a small handful of moments (Krusell and Smith, 1998) and approximating it with projection and perturbation methods (Reiter, 2009). In this thesis I will outline two different methods for dealing with this computational problem. The first, set out in Chapter 1, shows how market clearing prices can be feasibly calculated by aggregating over the distribution of households. The second approach involves simulating the model with aggregate uncertainty using numerical derivatives based on impulse response functions. The first chapter of this thesis will examine how heterogeneity in wealth and income affects households' decision to purchase housing and the implications for their consumption of non-durable goods. It constructs an Aiyagari-Bewley-Huggett model in which households are subject to an idiosyncratic income shock and thus hold different amounts of liquid wealth and illiquid housing. I then evaluate how the anticipated changes in household debt associated with the leveraged purchase of housing affect the consumption of non-durable goods. I show that the differences in income and wealth lead to significant variance in marginal propensities to consume among households. I show that households that are saving for a house deposit can have negative marginal propensities to consume as they lower their consumption in anticipation of being credit constrained as the probability that they will buy a house increases. This result has important implications for the design of fiscal policy, as it shows that payments to first time home buyers, which was a common policy response to the Global Financial Crisis, can lead to falls in aggregate consumption rather than stimulating growth. The second and third chapters examine how the combination of heterogeneity in workers' wages and downward nominal wage rigidity affects the transmission and design of different aspects of monetary policy. In Chapter 2 I show that in this environment there is a trade-off between a higher rate of inflation which gives workers more flexibility when setting real wages, at the cost of greater price dispersion in the goods market. After outlining a numerical algorithm to solve the model I use micro-data on the distribution of workers' change in wages to calibrate the nominal wage rigidity. I show that downward nominal wage rigidities bend the Phillips curve constraining the inflation rate from falling in times of low demand. This indicates that an inflation rate that is only moderately below its target can mask large falls in the output gap. Finally, I find that the monetary policy rule can be implemented by placing a higher weight on wage inflation, relative to a symmetric nominal wage rigidity. In Chapter 3 I discuss how downwardly rigid wages can amplify or mitigate the welfare loss caused by the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates and how this varies with the parameterisation of the model. I find that the optimal rate of inflation is increased by the presence of both nominal interest rate and wage rigidities, when modeled either separately or in tandem, and is 3 per cent in the baseline calibration of the model.

The research attempted to demystify the Zimbabwean land reform that was spear headed by war veterans’ in Zimbabwe. This research investigated the impact of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in 2000 on Household Food Security. It was generally assumed that the programme did not improve Household Food Security. To verify that assertion the research used questionnaires in a survey research design. The questionnaires were administered to 322 household heads that had been selected by the random stratified sampling method in Mutare District. The results established that Household Food Security in Mutare District improved after the implementation of the FTLRP. The national grain storage however was depleted because the new farmers reduced the production levels set by the former white farmers. The research therefore recommends an orderly and sustainable transition of Land Reform in future programmes to enhance national grain reserves. This also further improves the Household Food Security.

The thesis deals with the comparison and assessment of the dependence of Czech Republic household income on the job held by the head of a household. It also deals with determining the poverty line and the subsequent identification of households that are below this line. The source of data was the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) carried out by the Czech Statistical Office for the years 2008 and 2010. Households were divided into groups according to the occupation of the head of the household. Net yearly income per consumption unit and the gross yearly income of households were monitored during the assessment of income. Household income during both periods is characterised by high kurtosis and is skewed to the right. There exists the premise that there are similarities with log-normal distribution.