No description available.

Contemporary global agriculture has been undergoing transition towards different pathways. In developed countries, a shift from productivist agriculture to multifunctional agriculture has begun since the 1980s (Wilson, 2007). In the developing world, agricultural modernisation is still the primary strategy for agricultural development, and driven by urbanisation and industrialisation, deagrarianisation of rural society has been widely identified (Bryceson, 1996; Rigg, 2006a). As the largest developing country in the world, China embarked on market reform three decades ago and has ever since experienced dramatic socio-economic transition towards modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation. Significant levels of academic attention have focused on empirically identifying economic and policy drivers of Chinese agricultural production from a structuralist standpoint, largely neglecting the agency of smallholders and sociocultural factors. To address the resulting literature gap, this thesis adopts an approach that combines political economy and cultural analysis through an in-depth case study of a rural community in southwest China. A multi-methods approach is used to collect data, including questionnaires, in-depth interviews, focus groups, participant observation and the analysis of secondary data. The results suggest that Chinese smallholder agriculture has been dramatically transformed by an array of socio-economic forces. The “intensive, sustainable, diverse” Chinese smallholder agriculture which Netting (1993) portrayed, has been progressively shifted towards extensive, unsustainable and less diverse pathways. It suggests that the “perfunctory agriculture” performed by Chinese smallholders is the outcome of interactions and negotiations between various political, socio-economic and institutional constraints and farmers’ agency. Another key finding is that moving out of agriculture is becoming the norm in Chinese rural society. Most smallholders show willingness to rent out agricultural land and to enter into a capitalist relationship with employees, rather than primarily being cultivators of their land. Land transfer markets have become increasingly buoyant at the local level, and large-scale capitalist agriculture seems to be the desired future of Chinese smallholder agriculture for both the Chinese government and smallholders. Besides, based on the case of Hu Village, this thesis discusses the convergences and divergences between the road of Chinese agricultural development and that of developed countries and other emerging BRIC economies. Lastly, based on the findings of this research, four policy implications are proposed including sponsoring agricultural mutual aid groups, strengthening agricultural extension services, enhancing farmers’ negotiation power through laws, and initiating comprehensive socio-economic reforms to facilitate farmers’ pursuit of non-farm employments.

Mergers and acquisitions play an important role in international financial markets, which explains why this research area attracts of lot of attention from academics, bankers, and investors. Generally, in takeovers, two firms merge in order to achieve specific strategic and business objectives. The ultimate goal is often, but not always, the creation of shareholder value. In many cases, the creation of shareholder value is not the primary objective of the managers, however, which is one of the reasons why takeovers have been associated with the destruction of value in several existing studies. Instead, many M&A decisions are a function of managerial behaviour. In this thesis, I investigate the drivers of M&A activity, and consider both purely rational (neo-classical) and behavioural reasons as managers’ motivations for getting involved in M&A transactions. The thesis’s main body consists of three empirical studies that investigate how M&A activity is driven by macro-economic forces, managerial behaviour and board networks. Chapter 3 investigates whether merger waves are driven by macro-economic determinants and financial markets; Chapter 4 tests whether envy among CEOs has any explanatory power over the appearance of merger waves; Chapter 5 looks at whether board networks affect the relative merits of acquisitions and the probability of acquiring firms in “linked” industries. More specifically, Chapter 3 tests the extent to which US and UK merger waves are driven by macro-economic and financial market factors. Besides the analysis of domestic M&A activity, I also study the drivers of cross-border acquisitions between the UK and the US. I disentangle M&A activities according to how they are financed, and test whether managers follow market timing strategies when engaging in M&A transactions. I find evidence that domestic takeovers in the US and in the UK are highly correlated with the credit cycle and moderately correlated with the business cycle. I also test wave patterns in US and UK merger waves, and find that the merger waves in the two countries are significantly related to each other. Chapter 4 considers the view that irrational managerial behaviour could trigger UK merger waves. In particular, I assume that CEOs assess their own situation relative to those of their peers. If a CEO earns less than his peers, he becomes envious. Since it is established in the literature that firm size and executive compensation are positively correlated, CEOs have an incentive to engage in size-increasing mergers in order to decrease any compensation differential. Cross-sectional envy should therefore be considered as a potential explanation for merger waves. In an interdisciplinary approach, I develop a new measure for envy that is based on theories borrowed from the sociology area. My results from comprehensive tests with this new measure show that envy is unlikely to be an explanation for UK merger waves. Chapter 5 uses social networking theory to examine possible benefits for the acquirer from being well-connected. I assume that strong board networks are associated with better and faster access to information. Building on this rationale, I hypothesize that well-connected acquirers make better acquisitions due to reduced information asymmetries between them and the target. This chapter examines whether board interlocks between the acquirer and the target, existing prior to the acquisition, are associated with superior cumulative abnormal returns for the acquirer. Using centrality measures from social networking theory, I test whether firms that are well-connected make better acquisitions, as measured by the announcement returns of the acquirer. I find acquirer-target board interlocks to be significantly and positively associated with the acquirer’s cumulative abnormal returns. Centrality measures, however, turn out not to have any significant impact on the acquirer’s stock price reaction. Lastly, I show that acquirers are significantly more likely to acquire firms from industries with which they are “linked” via board members that have multiple directorships.