Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 202-221). / The training of craftsmen in Kenya is the responsibility of their traditional employer the contractor. However, over the last 20 years, the contractors’ motivation to train has been eroded by increased casualisation. Concurrently, there was growth of the informal procurement system propagated by private sector clients, who have no incentive to train because they are ad hoc consumers of construction services. Together these phenomena led to the collapse of the formal craft training and growth of informal skilling. Currently however, there is a lack of knowledge and understanding of the nature of informal craft training. The intent of this research was to redress this by identifying the types of skills informally employed craftsmen are acquiring, how these skills are acquired and how training delivery can be enhanced. The hypotheses of the research were that the skills and skilling methods in the informal sector do not differ significantly from those in the formal sector and that the nature of training in the informal construction sector is clearly understood.

The aim of the thesis proves a possibility of city growth in the inner city.

No description available.

No description available.

Yes / Introduction It is easy to think of the Trade Union Act (2016) as ‘Thatcher Round 2’: the economic strategy of austerity once again pits the haves against the have-nots, creating the potential for a re-invigorated trade union movement to return to its economically disruptive habits, which the government seeks to constrict. Thus, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady condemned the Conservatives for ‘refighting the battles of the 1980s’ instead of taking a more constructive approach (O’Grady, 2016). However, while the trade union legislation of the 1980s followed a decade marked by entrenched union disputes, the Trade Union Act (2016) has been introduced against a very different backdrop. The UK currently has historically low levels of industrial action, stagnating levels of union membership and limited areas of union density (DBIS, 2015; Godard, 2011; Dix et al, 2008). Could it be that the Trade Union Act (TUA) has more to tell us about trade union weakness than their strength? The Act comes at an important moment in the history of the labour move- ment. The Conservative austerity agenda not only attacks living standards, but reduces union membership through extensive job losses. The significance of this for the movement is exacerbated because the public sector is the most heavily unionised sector. This matters for many reasons, not least because the movement’s ability to resist the worst excesses of the austerity agenda rests on its membership and strength. This situation in turn shines a spotlight on what is perhaps the most pressing question facing the movement – the need for a model of unionism which can reach beyond the public sector, and in particular which meets the needs of the ever-growing body of precarious workers.

This dissertation is concerned with the making of metal making. It explores how skills, knowledge, and artefacts were circulated and grounded within the Swedish metal trades during the period ca. 1730 to 1775. It also analyses how these processes were related to different ways of organising practices of work. The metal trades are referred to as comprising various forms of state-supported metal manufacturing outside the guild system. The focus is on finer metal making (finsmide), above all cutlery making. The first chapter discusses the theoretical and methodological approaches. Critical to the analysis are the terms strategies and tactics, which are used to approach the interplay of different ways of knowing and acting in everyday metal making. This is done related to a trajectorial method. The trajectories of state official Samuel Schröder and the Stockholm cutler Eric Engberg are centred, but I also explore one broader skills-trajectory: the ‘English way’ of making cutlery. Chapters 2 to 4 examine the strategic stage for metal making, focusing on the attempts made by the eighteenth-century Swedish state to order the domestic trades in line with ideas of an all-embracing division of labour. This development is investigated by discussing regulations, spatial mapping and supervision, as well as descriptions and ‘corrections’ of workshop practices. Chapters 5 to 7 highlight the interplay of strategies and tactics within a changing manufacturing ‘system’. Artisans’ journeys, the construction of workshops in Stockholm, and the introduction of piecework at provincial knife works during the 1750s and 1760s are explored. The discussion leads up to the founding of a ‘free town’ for metal-making artisans in Eskilstuna in 1771. The results of this dissertation add to Swedish research on early-modern metal making in a number of ways. Urban space and the connections between metal-making communities are highlighted. In doing this, emphasis is placed on how practices of work were shaped over time by the movements of people, artefacts, and materials. Most notably, the circulation, imitation, and local adaption of knowledge and skills within the metal trades are accentuated. These findings also connect to recent research concerned with manufacturing and knowledge-making in pre-industrial Europe.

Cette histoire est celle d'un remembrement commercial (par analogie au remembrement agricole), encouragé dès 1963 par Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, ministre des Finances. En effet, prédominant jusqu'au début des années 1960, le petit commerce indépendant décline ensuite de manière continue et la grande distribution capitaliste se renforce, grâce notamment à des mesures d'aides au financement des investissements ou à des incitations fiscales (TVA). À partir de la fin des années 1960, l'effort de remembrement commercial n'est cependant plus univoque, car le mécontentement des petits commerçants s'amplifie et s'illustre parfois par des protestations violentes. Votée en 1973, la loi Royer est alors censée inaugurée une nouvelle politique d'équilibre entre les différentes formes de commerces. Elle se distingue cependant par ses effets pervers contraires aux objectifs annoncés et sa réforme revient de manière récurrente dans l'agenda politique jusqu'en 1996. / This thesis looks at retail trades' transformations in France, from 1945 to 1996. It opts for an institutional perspective and examines the state intervention in the sector. Archival collections from ministries, from the presidency of the Republic and from different central administrations were explored, and the state's action toward retail trades was studied as a sectorial policy. Hence, this work analyses, among other subjects, urban planning, commercial relationships between retailers and suppliers, professional training or the question of Sunday openings. This is the story of a retail amalgamation (remembrement commercial), encouraged as early as 1963 by Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Indeed, predominant until the 1960s, small independent retailers then declined continuously while hypermarkets and big capitalistic retail developed, thanks notably to credit facilities and fiscal incentives (V AT). From the end of the 1960s, this amalgamation policy became Jess unequivocal as the discontent of small shopkeepers was rising, sometimes resulting in violent protests. In 1973, the Royer law was voted and claimed to insure an equilibrium policy for different forms of retail. Yet, this law was characterized by its unanticipated effects and the will to reform the law became recurrent in the political agenda until 1996.

Research of a wide range of primary sources informs this work, including hitherto unstudied local union records, oral testimony, contemporary newspapers, government and employer reports. Conclusions reached in this dissertation are that while the founders of the local trade union movement shared a vision of improving the lot of workers in their employment and in the wider social context, and they endeavoured to establish effective structures and organisation to this end, their efforts were of mixed success. They succeeded eminently in improving and protecting the employment conditions of workers to contemporary expectations through effective exploitation of political and institutional channels and through competent and conservative local leadership. However, the additional and loftier goal of creating a better life for workers outside the workplace through local combined union action were much less successful, foiled not only by overwhelming economic difficulties, but also by a local sense of working-class consciousness which was muted by the particular social and cultural context of Rockhampton.

This thesis consists of three essays. The first essay, “A Theory of Bank Illiquidity and Default with Hidden Trades”, develops a theory of banking to explore how the availability of trading opportunities for both banks and individual investors affects the link between illiquidity and default in the financial system. The results show that default emerges only in the presence of systemic risk, and when an unpredicted crisis hits the economy. Moreover, in contrast to the previous literature, default is not an efficient outcome of the economy. The second essay, “Financial Liberalization with Hidden Trades”, studies how the availability of unregulated market-based channels for the circulation of liquidity in the financial system affects the process of financial integration, and the efficiency of the corresponding equilibrium, in a two-country economy with comparative advantages. The results show that the only level of integration which the two countries are able to coordinate is the one where the two banking systems are autarkic, but international hidden trades are possible. Moreover, the resulting consumption allocation is constrained efficient. The third essay, “Bank Liquidity, Stock Market Participation, and Economic Growth”, develops a dynamic growth model with fully microfounded banks and markets to explain the observed decreasing trend in the relative liquidity of many financial systems around the world. The main result characterizes the threshold after which the agents in the economy are rich enough to access the market, where the relative liquidity is lower, and shows that the relative liquidity of the whole financial system (banks and markets) drops because of the increasing market participation. Some evidence consistent with this theoretical prediction is provided: a one-unit increase in an index of securities market liberalization leads to a drop in the relative liquidity of between 13 and 22 per cent.

1. Introduction This dissertation consists of six chapters that span a very diverse set of topics. Yet, it has two unifying themes, economics and biology, that tie it together. The first four chapters present the principal findings from a project that was initiated jointly with David Cesarini and Magnus Johannesson, and that applies the twin method from behavioral genetics to economics. The last two chapters instead use a simple regression framework and evidence from biological anthropology to investigate recent claims regarding the effects of child bearing and past slave trades. 2. Genes and economics There is a small, but rapidly growing, literature studying the genetic and environmental origins of economic behavior and outcomes (Bowles et al., 2005; Beauchamp et al., 2011). Until recently, this literature focused exclusively on outcomes, and in particular income. In chapters 1-4 we instead focus on economic behavior and decision-making. Previous behavioral genetic work outside the domains of economics has changed the way that we think about a number of behavioral traits. In this literature it is typically found that i) variation is heritable ii) genetic factors are more important than family environment iii) a large fraction of variation cannot be explained by neither genes nor family environment (Turkheimer, 2000; Plomin et al., 2009). However, compared to many other disciplines, and psychology in particular, economics is lagging behind. In fact, as recently as 2009 the leading text book in behavioral genetics described economics as "still essentially untouched by genetic research" (Plomin et al., 2009, p. 353). Hopefully, the chapters in this dissertation can help to improve on this somewhat unsatisfactory state of the art. Chapters 1 and 2 study economic decision-making in the laboratory using the twin method. More specifically, we study the ultimatum and dictator games alongside risky gambles, using same-sex twin pairs as our subject pool. Given a few additional assumptions, the fact that identical twins have, in expectation, a twice as high coefficient of genetic relatedness as fraternal twins implies that we can study the genetic and environmental contributions to variation in behavior by studying twin correlations in observed choices. Chapters 3 and 4 apply the same method to actual portfolio choices associated with a far-reaching pension reform, as well as to a set of standard behavioral anomalies. Taken together, these four chapters provide strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis that genes influence economic decision-making. Thus, economic behavior does not appear to be much different from other types of behavior. 3. Economics and history The last two chapters of the dissertation turn to the past, rather than genes, in an effort to evaluate recent findings regarding two important welfare outcomes. In chapter 5 we investigate Nunn’s (2008) claim that past slave trades had a negative impact on current economic performance in Africa. By extending the sample period back in time we demonstrate that this relationship was not significant in 1960. In addition, by applying Nunn’s method to an episode of large scale slave raiding in Italy, we demonstrate that there exists a similar negative relationship across Italian regions, although it becomes insignificant when geographical controls are included. Intriguingly, going back to 1960, the coefficient on slave raids for Italy also has a similar time trend to that for Africa. Taking these facts, and our reading of the historical and anthropological literature, which is much different from that of Nunn, into account we do not find much support for the hypothesis that the African slave trades had a negative impact on current economic performance. Finally, chapter 6 investigates the large and negative relationship between giving birth to a son, rather than a daughter, and maternal longevity that was documented in a Sami hunter-gatherer population from Finland (Helle et al., 2002). Using a substantially larger sample of pre-industrial Swedish Sami we find no evidence in favor of such a relationship. 4. Brasklapp Five of the chapters in this dissertation (Ch. 1-4 &amp; 6) are slightly altered versions of previously published papers (Wallace et al., 2007; Cesarini et al., 2009 a, b; 2010; 2011). Unfortunately, the fact that earlier versions of the chapters were prepared as separate articles for five different journals means that they can at times appear both repetitive, and in terms of notation and formatting, somewhat inconsistent. I apologize to the reader for these inconveniences. / <p>Diss. Stockholm :  Stockholm School of Economics, 2011. Introduction together with 6 papers</p>