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A case study of acquisition of Russian brewery Bravo, by Heineken. An example of how foriegn investment could be attracted, prospects, opportunities.

The thesis consists of two parts. Part I investigates the interactive nature of the relationship between financial intermediation and economic growth. The main theoretical results are: a) financial intermediaries emerging as a consequence of agents' maximising behaviour at some critical level of economic development could have a negative impact on economic growth; b) the growth impact of financial institutions, i.e. financial intermediaries and stock markets, changes positively along the process of economic development; c) excessive financial intermediation might occur as a consequence of economic development; d) the co-evolution of credit markets, where financial intermediaries operate, and stock markets does not imply complementariness between the two elements of the financial sector; e) the emergence of a stock market might have an immediate detrimental effect on growth; f) the growth impact of the overall financial sector depends crucially upon the complementarity/substitutability relationship between stock markets and credit markets as sources of external finance. Part II, consists of two models which can be thought of as extensions of the material presented in Part 1. In the first, the impact of financial deepening in the context of a growth model where growth is driven by human capital accumulation is analysed. The result of this model is that, since financial transactions and training are substitutes as devices for intertemporal substitution of consumption, the availability of a technology for financial transactions might induce a negative growth effect. The second model deals with interregional trade in financial services. The outcome of this model is that, because of asymmetries in the incentives to trade in deposits and loans, free trade might have detrimental consequences for the regions whose financial sector is less efficient since local investment can be crowded out. The thesis establishes those propositions by theoretical reasoning and appropriate formal proofs.

This thesis investigates investing in pyramid schemes. Study 1 explored the relationships between people s perceptions of investment options and their investment decisions. These options included a bank, a pyramid scheme, stock market and a safe. In this study, participants imagined they could invest money in any of the options and rated their perceptions of each option on various scales. When investing money, participants invested larger amounts in the options that they rated more positively. Compared to other investors, pyramid investors had higher positive correlations between their ratings of the pyramid scheme and how much money they invested. In Study 2 participants indicated how much money they would invest in each option and how risky they perceived the investment. As the perceived risk of an investment option increased, people invested less money. However, participants did not identify the pyramid scheme as the most risky option and rated it as being no more or less risky than the stock market. In both Studies 1 and 2 about half of the participants were willing to invest in the pyramid scheme. In Studies 3 and 4, participants imagined they had invested money in a pyramid scheme and were recruiting new target investors. Two experimental conditions were devised. In the first condition, participants were not informed of the potential for monetary loss, whereas in the second condition, monetary loss was made explicit. Potential target investors varied in the closeness of their rated relationship to the participant. When in the early non-loss condition, participants selected targets that were close to themselves, but in the loss condition they favoured targets that were less close. Furthermore, when in the non-loss condition, participants persuaded those targets they were closer to invest, whereas in the loss condition they persuaded them not to invest. Studies 5 and 6 found that there was no difference in sensation seeking propensities or intellect between pyramid scheme investors and non-investors. One clear finding for the research is that many people did not select the pyramid scheme as the poor investment that it is, a result which indicates its present illegal status is justified.

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