This thesis is a comparative study of public and private health care provision in Northeast Thailand. It main objective is to explore the question of whether private health providers are more efficient and effective than their public health counterparts The thesis also examines equity concerns raised by the growth of private sector medical institutions The study commences by describing the changes in health problems, health policies and health care delivery in developing countries and Thailand that have led to the development and growth of private health care. This is followed by detailed consideration of the Northeast of Thailand including the socioeconomic context, health indicators and health delivery systems development paying particular attention to private sector growth. The remainder of the thesis is comprised of an empirical study of selected public and private sector hospitals in Northeast Thailand and an analysis of the results Much of the data was collected from questionnaires delivered to patients and staff in the study hospitals. The major findings include roughly similar levels of patient satisfaction between public and private hospitals; patients utilizing public hospitals often had no choice of which institutions to use, and the average incomes of patients attending private hospitals were above those of public hospital patients. There was undoubted inequity of access to private sector facilities. Data gathered from hospital staff showed greater levels of satisfaction with staffing levels and quality in private hospitals than in public ones. Salaries were more compressed in public hospitals due to central government rules than in private hospitals whose management was based on market considerations. However, higher salaries were paid to skilled professionals in the private sector. Public sector hospital management was typically bureaucratic with central government guidelines and decisions determining many aspects of hospital organization. It was found that comparison between public and private hospitals was complicated by the different missions and activities of institutions in the two sectors. The thesis concludes by arguing that the mixture of public and private health care providers has contributed to a more competitive atmosphere which has encouraged greater concern with quality and efficiency in the delivery of health services in Thailand.

This thesis examines the impact of FTSE 100 index revisions on the various aspects of stock market quality and the cost of equity capital. Our study spans over the period 1986-2009. Our analyses indicate that the index membership enhances all aspects of liquidity, including trading continuity, trading cost and price impact. We also show that the liquidity premium and the cost of equity capital decrease significantly after additions, but do not exhibit any significant change following deletions. The finding that investment opportunities increases after additions, but do not decline following deletions suggests that the benefits of joining an index are likely to be permanent. This evidence is consistent with the investor awareness hypothesis view of Chen et al. (2004, 2006), which suggests that investors' awareness improve when a stock becomes a member of an index, but do not diminish after it is removal from the index. Finally, we report significant changes in the comovement of stock returns with the FTSE 100 index around the revision events. These changes are driven mainly by noise-related factors and partly by fundamental-related factors.

Customer call centers with hundreds of agents working in parallel are ubiquitous in many industries. These systems have a large amount of daily traffic that is stochastic in nature. It becomes more and more difficult to manage a call center because of its increasingly large scale and the stochastic variability in arrival and service processes. In call center operations, customer abandonment is a key factor and may significantly impact the system performance. It must be modeled explicitly in order for an operational model to be relevant for decision making. In this thesis, a large-scale call center is modeled as a queue with many parallel servers. To model the customer abandonment, each customer is assigned a patience time. When his waiting time for service exceeds his patience time, a customer abandons the system without service. We develop analytical and numerical tools for analyzing such a queue. We first study a sequence of G/G/n+GI queues, where the customer patience times are independent and identically distributed (iid) following a general distribution. The focus is the abandonment and the queue length processes. We prove that under certain conditions, a deterministic relationship holds asymptotically in diffusion scaling between these two stochastic processes, as the number of servers goes to infinity. Next, we restrict the service time distribution to be a phase-type distribution with d phases. Using the aforementioned asymptotic relationship, we prove limit theorems for G/Ph/n+GI queues in the quality- and efficiency-driven (QED) regime. In particular, the limit process for the customer number in each phase is a d-dimensional piecewise Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process. Motivated by the diffusion limit process, we propose two approximate models for a GI/Ph/n+GI queue. In each model, a d-dimensional diffusion process is used to approximate the dynamics of the queue. These two models differ in how the patience time distribution is built into them. The first diffusion model uses the patience time density at zero and the second one uses the entire patience time distribution. We also develop a numerical algorithm to analyze these diffusion models. The algorithm solves the stationary distribution of each model. The computed stationary distribution is used to estimate the queue's performance. A crucial part of this algorithm is to choose an appropriate reference density that controls the convergence of the algorithm. We develop a systematic approach to constructing a reference density. With the proposed reference density, the algorithm is shown to converge quickly in numerical experiments. These experiments also show that the diffusion models are good approximations of queues with a moderate to large number of servers.