The purpose of this study was to examine the budgeting behaviors of traditional-aged upper-division college students (juniors and seniors). Budgeting behaviors were operationally defined as students' spending and financial planning behaviors. These behaviors were studied by tracking participant expenditures and income of three weeks and administering electronic survey questions. The study was conducted at a large, public, research university, and was designed to answer the following research questions: 1. How do traditional-aged upper-division students spend their money? 2. What are the budgeting behaviors of traditional-aged upper-division students?> 3. Are there differences in budgeting behaviors between traditional-aged upper-division students who live off campus and those who live on campus? 4. Are there gender differences between budgeting behaviors of traditional-aged upper-division students? A sample of 32 college juniors and seniors who had moved directly from high school to college participated in the study. Participants tracked their expenses and income of a three-week period using computerized spreadsheets. These data were analyzed to determine participants' spending behaviors and to examine differences by gender and place of residence. Participants also responded to five electronic survey questions that investigated their budgeting behaviors. Responses from these questions were analyzed to identify themes about the budgeting behaviors of college juniors and seniors. The results of this study provided some interesting information about college students' budgeting behaviors. Several conclusions were drawn. First, students failed to budget effectively because they spent more than they earned. Across all groups, students' expenditures totaled more than their income. Second, students' comments regarding their budgeting behaviors were found to reflect either good or poor ratings. This suggests that while some students seem to have well-developed financial management skills, others do not. Third, off-campus students differ from on-campus students because they have more budgeting experience. Off-campus students seemed to have developed these budgeting skills by paying monthly bills associated with off-campus living. Finally, female students spent money on clothes and beauty items, relied on gifts as sources of income, and seemed more anxious about budgeting than male students. These kinds of behaviors may reinforce certain stereotypical beliefs about men and women. / Master of Arts

This thesis examines the entanglements and interactions between OMG – a Charismatic Pentecostal Church and the post-colonial Zimbabwean state through an ethnographic analysis of church members' everyday lives. I focus on money and consumption, and make several arguments in an attempt to explain the rapid expansion of OMG. Whilst the study adopts a political economy approach in framing the conditions under which the church emerged, I place Pentecostal Charismatic belief and experience at the centre of the analysis. Money and commodity consumption have been creatively incorporated into OMG belief systems and doctrines at a time when the Zimbabwean economy is performing poorly, and poverty is an everyday reality for most of the population. The consumption of commodities has religious significance inasmuch as it is a critique of the post- independence government that has largely failed to improve the lives of Zimbabweans. In consuming commodities, OMG congregants set themselves apart from non-members and construct themselves as ‘blessed’ and thriving. I argue that the mismanagement of the postcolonial state has provided crevices and clefts through which OMG has emerged and grown as a proxy to the state by appropriating aspects of state and chieftaincy rituals. Secondly, OMG offers alternative social spaces for citizens to be - or to appear to be - upwardly mobile and construct a sense of common identity based on religion, history and belonging. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria 2019. / Human Economy Programme / University of Pretoria for the Post-Graduate Doctoral Bursary – Humanities / FlyHigher@UP grant / Anthropology and Archaeology / PhD / Unrestricted

In two experiments, groups of children received interest money contingent upon their savings; yoked control subjects received identical interest irrespective of their savings. In the first experiment, interest was paid every 3 days by parents for the average savings of the period. In Experiment II, interest was paid on a daily basis and control subjects received instructions concerning the lack of a relationship between interest and their savings. In both experiments savings and magnitude of expenditures increased systematically across the research phases for contingent and non-contingent interest subjects alike. Neither interest nor subject wealth was found to relate to subject savings, or expenditures in Experiment I. Contingent-interest subjects' frequency of expenditures, during the interest and reversal phases was reduced relative to that of baseline and the expenditures of yoked controls. Additionally, an increase in the conditional probability of an expenditure at longer inter-expenditure intervals developed during the interest phase and was maintained into the reversal phase. The contingent interest procedures of Experiment II differentially reinforced longer times between expenditures without affecting savings. Control subjects who received instructions regarding the absence of a relation between savings and interest did not alter the time between their expenditures.

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This research addresses the paradoxical beliefs and conceptualizations about money and stewardship among young adult Mormons and its consequences for the Mormon identity. The findings for this paper are based on 12 in-depth interviews with Brigham Young University students, recently graduated students, and, when applicable, their spouses, totaling 20 interviewees between the ages of 20 and 31. The data suggest that unique beliefs surrounding money have emerged from the Mormon culture as remnants of their early Mormon values still lingering in contemporary Mormon culture clash with the individualistic and consumer culture surrounding the interviewees. Interviewees demonstrate cognitive dissonance as they attempt to combine the contradictory concepts of stewardship and consumerism into their financial attitudes and behaviors. The connection between money and their Mormon identity was articulated often as a need to stay out of debt and avoid extravagance.

My dissertation offers an advancement of the Marxian theory of money, motivated by a methodological critique of monetary theory in general. As such, my dissertation is located within the philosophy and methodology of economics and the history of monetary thought, in addition to Marxian political economy. This intermingling of fields reflects both my research interests and my argument with respect to the current state of scholarship on Marx and money. Despite increasing acceptance of the compatibility of non-commodity money and Marxian political economy, a dualist social ontology has stunted attempts to theorize the relationship between money, value, and class. I base my development of a Marxian theory of money in a rejection of this dualism. In other words, I contribute a theoretical analysis of the relationship between money, value, and class informed by a critique of these dualist notions of economic reality. Accepting criticism, leveled by Keynesians among others, of the tendency to reduce money to the status of a mere veil, I further argue that the ontological privileging of a real economy over its monetary moments is prevalent across time and paradigms. This dichotomy between real economy and less-real money, which I call the \emph{realist dualism}, is thus more general than the classical dichotomy. As such, even fervent opponents of the classical dichotomy may reproduce their own ontological dualism between the real and merely monetary. After outlining the basic features and theoretical consequences of the realist dualism, I present examples of how this philosophical tendency shapes monetary theory and debate, both ancient and modern. Within the Marxian tradition, dependence on such a dualism has impeded attempts to theorize money in its relation to both (1) the economy in general and (2) its own manifold forms and functions. The distinction between real and less-real on a macroeconomic scale is repeated within the conceptualization of money itself, privileging real commodity money over symbolic and imaginary forms. I provide an alternative to this tendency, based on an overdeterminist understanding of the relationships between so-called imaginary, symbolic, and real/material aspects of money. This alternative ontology informs a critical and deconstructive reading of money within the Marxian tradition and a reframing of the problem of non-commodity money. In lieu of deriving a theory of non-commodity money from a logically and historically privileged notion of real commodity money, my general Marxian theory of money takes as its object the interaction between (1) the imaginary, symbolic, and real/material dimensions inherent to money in general and (2) class processes of value production, appropriation, and distribution. This project accepts that a specifically Marxian theory of money is not produced from the logic of supposedly real commodity money, but through the entry point of class.

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