Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Labor use'

Public policies are an important determinant of the welfare of individuals and the society at large. Careful evaluation of the impact of public policies on welfare is therefore imperative for our understanding of the positive and normative implications for these institutions. The three chapters of this thesis examine the welfare consequences of specific economic and political institutions. Chapters 1 and 2 study two distinct channels through which social housing, a common feature of developed countries, may impact the neighborhoods in which they are built and the labor market outcomes of their low income tenants. Chapter 1 is concerned with the effect of the provision of social housing on neighboring private ats. It assesses the spillovers of low-income tenants and the change in the composition of the housing stock that are to be expected from the provision of new social housing units. In particular, it uses the direct conversion of private rental flats into social units without any accompanying rehabilitation to identify the impact of the inflow into the neighborhood of low income tenants, separately from the effects of social housing on the quality of the existing housing stock. Chapter 2 shows that social housing influences the location of low income tenants, and that the neighborhood of social housing units may improve the labor market outcomes of the poorest tenants. I observe the relocation of welfare recipients through the selection process of social housing applicants in the city of Paris from 2001 to 2007. The institutional process acts as a conditional randomization device across residential areas in Paris. The empirical estimates outline that neighborhoods have weak short- and medium-run effects on the economic self-sufficiency of poor households. Chapter 3, by contrast, focuses on how regional migrations of unemployed workers may affect their job search prospect in Europe. Using a longitudinal sample of French unemployment spells, the empirical estimates outline positive migration effects on transitions from unemployment to employment that depends on the previous duration of the unemployment spells.

This thesis titled “Essays in Labour Economics” is comprised of three essays investigating various determinants of earnings inequality. Chapter 1 provides a novel explanation for labor market polarization—the rise in employment shares of high and low skill jobs at the expense of middle skill jobs, and the fall in middle-skill wages. We argue that recent and historical episodes of polarization resulted from increased automation. In our theoretical model, firms deciding whether to employ machines or workers in a given task weigh the cost of using machines, which is increasing in the complexity (in an engineering sense) of the task, against the cost of employing workers, which is increasing in training time required by the task. Some tasks do not require training regardless of complexity, while in other tasks training is required and increases in complexity. In equilibrium, firms are more likely to automate a task that requires training, holding complexity constant. We assume that more-skilled workers learn faster, and thus it is middle skill workers who have a comparative advantage in tasks that are most likely to be automated when machine design costs fall. In addition to explaining job polarization, our model makes sense of observed patterns of automation and accounts for a set of novel stylized facts about occupational training requirements. Chapter 2 establishes a novel source of wage differences among observationally similar high skill workers. We show that degree class — a coarse measure of performance in university degrees — causally affects graduates’ earnings. We employ a regression discontinuity design comparing graduates who differ only by a few marks in an individual exam, and whose degree class is thus assigned randomly. A First Class is worth roughly three percent in starting wages which translates into £1,000 per annum. An Upper Second is worth more on the margin—seven percent in starting wages (£2,040). In addition to identifying a novel source of luck in the determination of earnings, our findings also show the importance of simple heuristics for hiring decisions. Chapter 3 asks whether public policy affects the degree of intergenerational transmission of education. The chapter investigates this question in the context of secondary school transitions in Germany. During the last three decades, several German states changed the rules for admission to secondary school tracks. Combining a new data set on transition rules with micro data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP), I find that allowing free track choice raises the probability of attending the most advanced track by five percentage points. However, the effect is twice as large for children of less educated parents. The results suggest that the correlation between parents’ and children’s educational attainment may be reduced by more than one third when no formal restrictions to choosing a secondary school track exist.

Thesis advisor: Sanjay K. Chugh<br>Thesis advisor: Fabio Schiantarelli<br>My doctoral research focuses on the role of labor market frictions in shaping macroeconomic outcomes. I am currently pursuing three main lines of research that constitute the three chapters of this dissertation. The first chapter focuses on involuntary part-time employment as an additional margin used by firms to adjust to business cycle fluctuations. The chapter documents empirical regularities of involuntary part-time employment in the U.S. and furnishes a tractable analytical framework for studying this phenomenon that has gained so much attention in the years that followed the Great Recession. In the second chapter, which is joint work with Sanjay Chugh, Ryan Chahrour and Alan Finkelstein-Shapiro, we study the labor market wedge in the context of a search and matching model to understand how static and dynamic inefficiencies change over the business cycle. Measuring the labor market wedge and understanding its sources of movement is of great importance from a macroeconomic point of view, as existing research shows it holds a prominent place in explaining fluctuations in aggregate output. Finally, in the third chapter I study empirically the determinants of the job finding probability, a key object in the context of frictional labor markets. More specifically, I analyze how decisions on time allocation by the unemployed affect their chances of finding a job, and identify the activities that make more likely for an unemployed individual to receive and accept a job offer. Chapter 1. In recent years researchers and policymakers have shown renewed interest in involuntary part-time employment as a crucial indicator of labor market health. The fact that individuals have part-time jobs even though they would be willing to work more hours is evidence that resources in the economy are not employed at full capacity. This group represents almost 40 percent of total underemployment. Despite its large size and importance to policy-makers, surprisingly little literature addresses the empirical regularities or economic role this margin plays in determining labor market outcomes. In "Underemployment and the Business Cycle" I address several questions regarding involuntary part-time employment. First, how does involuntary part-time employment differ from the standard extensive and intensive margins? Second, what factors influence the choice of firms to use involuntary part-time workers? Third, how might economic policy contribute to the existence of involuntary part-time employment in the economy? And, fourth, have there been any changes over time in the response of involuntary part-time employment to changes in aggregate economic conditions and, if so, what explains them? To describe the empirical regularities of involuntary part-time employment, I use detailed micro-level data from longitudinally-linked monthly files of the Current Population Survey. A novel finding that emerges from the analysis of this dataset is that wages of involuntary part-time workers display higher volatility and lower persistence than those of their full-time counterparts, thus indicating a higher degree of flexibility. In addition, I find that changes in involuntary part-time employment are mostly explained by reallocation of workers from full-time to part-time positions within the firm, which involves more than just a mere reduction in hours worked. I then aggregate the data and compute business cycle statistics. Surprisingly, I find that the behavior of involuntary part-time employment resembles the behavior of unemployment more than the one of full-time employment. In fact, the results indicate that involuntary part-time employment is very volatile and strongly countercyclical. To understand the evidence I find at the micro and macro levels, I build an augmented search and matching model of the labor market featuring full-time and part-time employment, and a production function that combines both types of workers. The decision of whether a worker is full-time or part-time is made entirely by the firm, depending on the realizations of both aggregate and idiosyncratic productivity processes. The model is able to deliver the countercyclicality of involuntary part-time employment found in the data. The key mechanism to obtain this result is the relatively higher flexibility of part-time contracts that makes it more profitable for the firm to reallocate workers from full-time to part-time arrangements during recessions. Based on the model that captures key empirical facts, I conduct policy analysis to evaluate the effect of an increase in the cost of health insurance on involuntary part-time employment. The policy experiment predicts that an increase in the cost of health insurance provided by the firm to its full-time workers, such that their share in average full-time wages goes up by 1 percentage point, leads to an increase of steady state involuntary part-time employment by 10 percent, which nowadays would be equivalent to half a million additional involuntary part-time workers. I find evidence that involuntary part-time employment has become more volatile and persistent in the last 25 years. I study the impact that innovation in workforce management practices, a process that started in the 1990s and that has increased the degree of substitutability between full-time and part-time workers, may have had in changing the response over time of involuntary part-time employment to business cycle fluctuations. Impulse response analysis from the model indicates that an increase in the degree of substitutability makes involuntary part-time employment more sensitive to aggregate productivity shocks. Chapter 2. In "The Labor Wedge: A Search and Matching Perspective" we define and quantify static and dynamic labor market wedges in a search and matching model with endogenous labor force participation. Existing literature has generally centered on Walrasian labor markets in characterizing the inefficiencies, or ``gaps'', between labor demand and labor supply. However, given the conventional view in the profession that the matching process plays an important role in the labor market, the neoclassically-measured labor wedge suffers from a misspecification problem as it ignores the role of long-lasting relationships in explaining the cyclical pattern of the labor wedge. To construct the wedge we use a rigorously defined transformation function of the economy, which contains both the matching technology and the neoclassical production technology. Both technologies are primitives of the economy in the sense that a Social Planner must respect both processes. Given the model-appropriate transformation frontier and the household's static and dynamic marginal rates of substitution, we use data on the labor force participation rate, the employment rate, the vacancy rate, real consumption, real government spending, and real GDP to construct static and dynamic labor wedges. We find that, in a version of the model where all employment relationships turn over every period, the static labor wedge is countercyclical, a result that is consistent with existing literature. Once we consider long-lasting employment relationships, we can measure both static and dynamic wedges separately. We then find that, while the static wedge continues to be countercyclical, the dynamic (or intertemporal) wedge is procyclical. Since the latter is associated with the vacancy-posting decision of the firm, this result suggests that understanding the behavior of labor demand may be crucial to explaining the dynamic wedge. Our focus so far has been on obtaining a quantitative measure of both the static and dynamic wedges, and on analyzing their business cycle properties. Now we are working on extending this framework to provide a micro-founded explanation of the forces that could be driving the cyclical movements of the wedges. Chapter 3. Recent research has found that individuals who become unemployed allocate most of their forgone working hours into leisure rather than increasing the time devoted to job search activities. What is the rationale behind this decision? There are many factors that may affect the job search behavior of the unemployed. However, in this study I focus on a particular channel: the decision on how unemployed individuals allocate their time could be biased towards activities that increase their probability of finding a job. They might find more valuable to increase their social activities rather than looking formally for a job because this enhances their network, which could increase their chances of finding a job, even with less search effort. In "The Time Use Decisions of the Unemployed: A Survival Analysis", I conduct a duration analysis to estimate the effect of different time use allocations on the unemployment hazard rate using time use data from the Survey of Unemployed Workers in New Jersey. Defining "finding a job" as a failure, I estimate a single-spell, discrete-time duration model of unemployment with time-varying covariates using semi-parametric techniques. Given that I work with interval-censored data, I conduct the analysis using discrete time survival analysis techniques. The results indicate that education/training activities have a significant and positive impact on the hazard rate, i.e. they increase the probability that an unemployed worker finds a job, while leisure has the opposite effect. Furthermore, neither job-search nor networking have a significant effect on the hazard rate in the baseline specification. However, this result changes when incorporating into the regression interaction terms of these variables with a dummy that takes the value one if the individual is a long-term unemployed and zero otherwise. In this case, the coefficient associated with networking becomes positive and significant, while the coefficient of the interaction term is negative. This implies that networking has a positive effect on the hazard rate for short unemployment spells, but this effect weakens if the individual has been unemployed for a longer period. On the other hand, even after incorporating the interaction term, job search remains insignificant. These findings shed light on why individuals may not want to devote additional time to formal job search: it does not pay off with a higher likelihood of receiving a job offer, regardless of the length of the unemployment spell. On the other hand, other activities, such as investing in education or networking, are positively related to the probability of finding a job -- at least for short unemployment spells -- and thus it makes more sense for these individuals to devote more time to them

Firms' use of external labor arrangements (ELAs), such as temporary, contract and seasonal workers, has become increasingly prevalent over the last two decades. Despite the increasing importance of this phenomenon, little is known about firms' reasons for using ELAs. Most research to date has been exploratory, using qualitative methods or archival data not well suited to the constructs. The result of this research has been a long and often contradictory list of proposed antecedents of ELA use. In this study, I tested the ability of the transaction costs theory to predict when firms will fill a given job using an ELA rather that a permanent employment relationship. According to this theory, three characteristics of the job will determine whether the job will be filled using an ELA: transaction-specific investment, likelihood of repetition, and uncertainty of performance. Firms will be less likely to staff a given job using an ELA when the job requires investment in idiosyncratic skills, when the firm is likely to require a person with that set of skills regularly, and when performance in that job is difficult to measure.

The evolution and impact of North-North and North-South trade have been among the main areas of research in the literature of international trade. But how trade shocks emanating from a low-wage southern country affect the manufacturing sector of other low-wage countries has been little researched. In particular, there is a lack of evidence on firm-level adjustment to low-wage trade shock in a low-wage developing country context. The main objective of the thesis is to fill this gap in the literature by empirically examining the impact of import competition shock from China on the evolution of manufacturing sector in India. This thesis combines plant level data from the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) 1998-2009 with the product level trade data from UN Comtrade database. The thesis contains two main chapters –chapter 2, which explores the impact of a sharp rise in Chinese import exposure on overall plant performance and product reallocation dynamics within-plant, and chapter 3. The latter dwells on wage inequality and employment within-plant. Chapter 2 finds that increased import competition from China following its WTO accession leads to improvements in revenue productivity and a reduction of product scope at the plant-level. A 10 percentage point increase in Chinese import exposure leads to a 3.7 percent increase in large plants’ total-factor productivity. The same amount of increase in exposure to Chinese imports leads to a one percent decrease in the number of products produced by the plant. Plant product-level analysis suggests that the impact on selection of products is not symmetric. Plants drop the product in which Chinese import exposure is higher; however, the closer the product is to the core competence of the plant, the less likely it is to be dropped. Although import competition from high-wage countries has no statistically significant impact on plant performance or product scope, plant product-level adjustment shows that import competition shocks from both high-wage countries and China have a similar impact on the selection of products within a plant. Chapter 3 finds that the rise in import competition from China leads to a general increase in within-plant wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers in large plants. But the overall pattern is driven by much greater adjustment in flexible labor markets or states that have employer friendly industrial relation regulation, while no significant adjustment is evident in the inflexible market. I find that a 10 percentage point increase in Chinese import exposure leads to a 1.35 percent increase in skill premium in the sample of large plants, whereas the same change leads to a 2.65 percent increase in skill premium in the flexible market. It is also observed that increase in import competition from China causes a downsizing of low-productivity plants through employment destruction, and an expansion of high-productivity plants via employment creation. Again, the reallocation of employment is only evident in the flexible labor market.

The central purpose of this thesis is to explore the dimensions of labour market adjustment in Jamaica. The paper adopts a microeconometric approach, relying on new and more detailed Jamaica Labour Force Survey data for the period 1983-2006. Over this period, Jamaica has experienced significant expansion in its external trade which has been characterized by a severe import bias. Also, during this time, Jamaica's agricultural and manufacturing sectors experienced declines in their respective employment shares of 44% and 36% while service sectors expanded. One chapter of the thesis explores the empirical link between expanding trade flows and manufacturing labour market adjustment. The thesis also explores whether and to what extent sectoral labour market adjustment in Jamaica has been accommodated by an accompanying occupational transformation. Central to analyzing the issue of occupational adjustment however, is the careful definition of what constitutes a skill in order to elucidate the role of skill specificity in labour market adjustment. The thesis then investigates the incidence of unemployment in Jamaica in an attempt to identify key factors leading to escape from unemployment within a low skilled, high-unemployment, developing country context. The study finds an important role for worker characteristics, trade and industry information in affecting labour market adjustment in Jamaica. Using occupational skill definitions due to Dolton and Kidd (1998), the study also finds that most of the occupational and sectoral mobility in Jamaica, over the review period, took place among unskilled manual workers. As such, the Jamaican employed labour force experienced very little skill upgrading over the 24 year period covered. The very limited up-skilling observed over the review period was due to the emergence of relatively more highly skilled, sales and distribution related occupations. As far as adjustment costs are concerned, across all mobility types, simple sectoral moves were- in general, relatively less costly; with occupational transformation playing an accommodative role to the sectoral adjustment. Industry information, educational qualifications, geographic location, gender and the degree of skill specificity and were all critical determinants of the type of adjustment observed in the Jamaican labour market. Finally, the thesis underlines the very high incidence of long-term unemployment among uneducated, unskilled, young males in Jamaica. The study reveals negative duration dependence in the Jamaican labour market and suggests a critical role to be played by worker training in affecting unemployment escape probabilities.

This thesis contains three studies on the topic of labour market search. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the studies. Chapter 2 reports an experimental study which examines how social comparisons affect behavior in a sequential search task. In a control treatment subjects search in isolation, while in two other treatments subjects get feedback on the search decisions and outcomes of a partner subject. The average level and rate of decline of reservation wages are similar across treatments. Nevertheless, subjects who are able to make social comparisons search differently from those who search in isolation. Within a search task we observe a reference wage effect: when a partner exits, the subject chooses a new reservation wage which is increasing in partner income. We also observe a social learning effect: between search tasks, subjects who have been paired with a more patient and successful partner increase their reservation wages in the next task. Chapter 3 reports a study in which we provide the first microeconometric estimates of the hazards to matching on both sides of a labour market, decomposed into two constituent parts. Namely, (i) the rate at which job-seekers and vacancies contact each other (i.e. having interviews), and (ii) the probability that a contact results in a match. To do this, we use unique data which contains information on job-seekers, vacancies, interviews and interview outcomes. We use a specification which addresses the problems of the temporal aggregation bias and spatial spillovers highlighted by the two-sided estimates. Our estimates suggest that market tightness affects the matching rates mainly through affecting the meeting rates. In both the raw data and the estimates, we find the decline in the matching hazard is driven by the decline in the contact hazard, and not by a fall in the matching probability. And we also report the effects of various characteristics on matching decomposed into the effects on meeting and matching probability. Using the same data as Chapter 3, Chapter 4 provides further evidence on the mechanism by which job-seekers and vacancies decide whom to contact during their search. Since the data features an environment where both sides of the market have access to a database (or marketplace) of potential partners, a natural model of search is one of stock-flow matching, and we show that the predictions of this model outperform those of a simple random matching model. Our descriptive and econometric evidence shows that it is the inflow rate of new agents, rather than the total stock of agents, which determines the contact rates of existing agents, consistent with the predictions of the stock-flow model. Chapter 5 summarizes the findings of this dissertation and concludes.

This thesis examines the utilization and management of labour in the British coalmining industry in the period between 1900 and 1940. The period was one in which the British coal industry experienced a dramatic reversal of fortunes. Over the nineteenth century and up until the First World War, output and employment increased rapidly. Expansion had been assisted by the opening-up of large export markets in Europe and by 1913, the British coal industry shipped abroad a third of its output of 287 million tons.

The dissertation aims to explore the supply and demand side determinant of child labour at macro, meso and micro level. At macro level it explores the effect of globalization (defined as openness to trade and inflow of foreign direct investment) and credit market imperfections on child labour. At meso level it explores the effect of labour market conditions on child labour. As the above two levels of analysis are mainly concerned with the demand for child labour, the micro level analysis explores the supply side determinant of child labour. At micro level this dissertation explores the effect of intrahousehold distribution of power on child related outcome. Specifically it explores the effect of mother’s decision making power on her child’s labour and schooling. The macro level analysis is based on cross country regression framework while meso and micro level analysis is based on the data from Pakistan. At macro level, this dissertation points out that trade openness and FDI inflow raise the standard of living in an economy thereby reducing child labour incidence. As the channel through which trade could affect child labour is by increasing income of the poor, credit market imperfection shows insignificant effect. At meso level, this dissertation points out that high adult wages in an area increase demand for child labour while presence of adult unemployed proportion in an area reduces demand for child labour. However, presence of unemployed adult in a house increases supply of child labour. Exports, on one hand, reduce supply of child labour by affecting the income of poor at macro level while on the other hand at meso level, subcontracting of production process to small informal sector increases demand for child labour. The informal sector being unprotected by law employs a high proportion of child labour. At micro level mother’s decision making power significantly decreases child labour supply and increases child schooling. The effect is significant in case of girls but not in case of boys. This study also shows that whether children work for generating income or as family helpers, mothers are equally concerned for their welfare. Their decision making power significantly reduces labour among children.

This thesis consists of three empirical essays within the field of labour economics. As a whole, it explores the (un)intended consequences of labour regulation, with each chapter providing an independent analytical contribution to a specific aspect of the field. Chapter 1 analyzes the effect of a reduction in standard working hours on employment tran- sitions. In this chapter, I study Chile's reduction of weekly working hours from 48 to 45, which was announced in 2001 but implemented in 2005. This policy was innovative, compared with those in other countries, because it isolated the reduction in working hours from other policy changes, such as working time flexibility and financial incentives to firms. Thus, this policy is an interesting example for other countries to study, especially those without the scale capacity to provide such incentives, as it allows them to identify its effects on employment. Our results, which are confirmed by several robustness checks, suggest that despite the pre-announcement of the policy, firms displayed non-anticipatory behaviour on key variables. Furthermore, we find that firms waited to implement the reduction in working hours until just before the deadline. Overall, we find that a reduction in standard hours had no significant effects on employment transitions, although we do find a significant e¤ect on hourly wages (i.e., wage compensation). Chapter 2 extends the analysis of Chapter 1 to health outcomes. This is important, as the health effects of reductions in working hours have not been addressed by the existing literature; instead, most of the empirical evidence concerns employment outcomes, family life balance, and social networks. Using panel data from France and Portugal, this chapter exploits the exogenous variation of working hours coming from labour regulation and estimates its impact on health outcomes. In this way, our contribution to the existing literature is threefold: first, this is the first evaluation of health outcomes of policies that reduce working hours. Second, we avoid the problem of endogeneity with health outcomes by using exogenous reductions of working hours. Third, as the effects on health might depend on the level of working hours, our analysis is performed for two different countries with differing weekly hour thresholds (France, 35 hours; Portugal, 40 hours). Our results suggest a non-monotonic relationship between weekly working hours and health outcomes. In particular, a negative (positive) effect is found for young men (women) in France, and no e¤ect is found in Portugal. Chapter 3 (coauthored by Eugenio Rojas and Mauricio Villena) examines childcare policies and analyzes who effectively pays for childcare when it is not publicly funded. This is interesting, since in several countries governments provide and fund childcare, but in many others it is privately funded, as labour regulation mandates that firms have to provide childcare services. For this latter case, there is no empirical evidence on the effects generated by the financial burden of childcare provision. In particular, there is no evidence about who effectively pays for childcare (i.e., firms or employees) and how it is paid for (i.e., via wages and/or employment). Our study is the first one to provide empirical evidence on the effects generated by the finan- cial burden of childcare provision. For this, we exploit a Chilean labour regulation requiring that firms with 20 or more female workers provide and fund childcare for their workers. Our hypothesis is that, in imperfect labour markets (e.g., oligopsonistic), firms will pass childcare costs on to their workers. To analyze this, we exploit a discontinuity in the childcare provision mandated by the Chilean Labour Code. Our results suggest that firms pass almost the entire childcare cost (nearly 90%) on to their workers via lower wages (not only to female but also to male workers) and not by altering the share of male workers within the firm.

The topic of international skilled labour mobility has received growing attention within the field of population geography and other disciplines. This interest reflects the large growth of international skilled labour mobility, especially during the 1980s. Attention of prior research has focused on the migratory movement of managers and professionals as they radiate across the globe, recording and representing the dispersal of international investment and the overseas expansion of producers of goods and services. The research examines Scotland's participation in the international exchange of skilled labour. The research undertaken addresses the varying theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches of prior research on international skilled labour mobility in geography, as well as in other disciplines, such as management studies and occupational psychology. In doing so, the interplay between work and non-work spheres in shaping Scottish international skilled labour mobility is highlighted, as is the differing temporal and spatial focus of existing studies. The author's research thus investigates both the economic and social contexts of Scottish international skilled labour mobility, these contexts being characterised at macro, meso and micro level. In addition, the research adopts a broader definition of skilled labour movements than prior research, and so the study discusses the place of short term business travel as well as longer term migratory movements and the relationship between them. In illustrating the economic context of Scottish international skilled labour mobility, the research outlines macro level changes in the Scottish economy and the role of foreign direct investment as a source and channel of Scottish skill exchange. In turn, the specific institutional characteristics of activities generating these labour flows are examined and related to the occupational status of mobile persons.

This thesis brings together selected published works on the theme of spatial mobility and labour markets. The works selected adopt a range of methodological approaches, including quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. They are grouped into four inter-related subthemes: (1) labour migration and labour market adjustment; (2) mobilities, migration and commuting; (3) spatial (im)mobility, place and social networks; and (4) immigration, integration and labour market issues. These sub-themes span responses to changes in employment and non-employment, the continuum of labour market-related movements from daily and weekly commuting to employment-related migration, spatial mobility and immobility, and internal and international migration. Taken together, the works presented provide an original contribution to knowledge on spatial mobility and labour markets. They also inform key policy debates. Particular contributions include: (1) evidence on spatial and temporal variations in labour migration as an adjustment mechanism within the broader context of changing labour markets; (2) empirical and theoretical insights into the location and mobility strategies of dual career households and how some individuals might substitute commuting for migration for individual and household gains; (3) evidence on the importance of area perceptions and place-based social networks in constraining spatial mobility – particularly for some individuals in some places; and (4) policy-relevant evidence on the impact of international migration on regional and local labour markets and implications for local skills strategies and local action on integration of new arrivals. Together the works highlight the reality of the fuzziness of the binary measurement categories conventionally used in analyses of spatial mobility and indicate the need for greater flexibility. They also demonstrate the need for increased sensitivity to the diversity of individual, household and local labour market experiences in different times and places.

China has become a global manufacturing centre with its `unlimited' supply of low cost and unorganised peasant workers. The potential of Chinese workers to change this condition has significant meaning for global labour politics. This study offers an ethnographic portrait and a sociological account of the transformation of labour relations and labour politics in China from 2004 to 2008 focusing on workers' strikes, community and organisation. It reveals how wages and working conditions are bargained, fought over, and determined in the global factories. Geographically this study concerns the city of Shenzhen, China's first Special Economic Zone (SEZ), where labour conflict is most prevalent. Historically, it is traced back to the late 1970s to explore how the pattern of labour conflict has changed over time. The author spent one year conducting participant observation based in a grass-roots labour non-governmental organisation (NGO) in an industrial zone from 2005 to 2006. A multi-case method is used to document workers' stories to strive for a higher wage and better working conditions and their relationships with management, NGOs, the trade union and the local state. The author suggests that benefiting from an expanding labour market, an escalating dynamic community, and the skilled and supervisory workers' network, workplace struggle has exerted significant challenges to the state authorities and the global capital. The capital responded to these challenges by work intensification, production rationalization, expansion and relocation. The local state reacted by better enforcement of the labour regulations and steady enhancement of the minimum wage rate, while the central state initiated a new round of labour legislation to better protect workers. The author refers to the changing labour regime in this stage as `contested despotism'. Its potential to give way to a new form of factory regime is dependent on the possibility of effective workplace trade unionism.

Given the growing interest in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure (CSRD), especially in developing countries, this thesis adopts neo-institutional theory to investigate the extent and types of CSRD practices and factors influencing its adoption in oil and gas companies operating in Libya. Two methods of data collection were used: namely, semi-structured interviews and annual reports. The semi-structured interviews were conducted first with 14 oil and gas firms’ managers working in Libya, to identify the factors influencing CSRD adoption, and second with 6 external actors to confirm or reject such claims. The second method involved a collection of 106 annual reports for the period 2009-2013, to first identify the extent and types of CSRD practices, and second to proceed with a regression test to assess the relationship between CSRD determinants and the extent of CSRD practices. The findings from the qualitative analysis show that managers perceive a diversity of coercive, mimetic and normative pressures interplay to influence CSRD in the Libyan context. Particularly, the adoption of CSRD is influenced by the state through its governance body - the National Oil Corporation (NOC), foreign business partners, other foreign-owned companies’ behaviour, the need to uphold firms’ reputation, and pressures to meet societal expectations. Other determinants identified include government ownership, parent company factors, board size, board meeting, firm size, age, presence of CSR committee, and profitability. Furthermore, the absence of clear legal requirements, a shortage of knowledge and awareness, the absence of civil society organisations, the absence of the Environmental General Authority’s (EGA) role, and a lack of motivation from the government were found to act as major impediments to CSRD development. The findings obtained from the quantitative analysis show that the level of CSRD is low when compared with Western countries, but in relative terms, the most disclosed types of CSR information were related to the human resources and environment. Moreover, the findings obtained from the CSRD regression model suggest that CSRD practice is positively associated with government ownership, joint venture ownership, foreign ownership, frequency of board meetings, parent company factor, and firm size. However, CSRD has no statistically significant relationship with board size, CSR committee, and age of the company, while profitability is negatively associated with CSRD practices. These results contribute towards the literature adding to the knowledge of CSRD practices’ “implementation”, by empirically providing evidence for the context of CSRD in Libya. This is achieved by explaining how specific external and internal determinants contribute to or impede the development of CSRD practices. These findings, therefore, could be useful to corporate regulators and policy makers in developing a more focussed agenda of CSRD activity, when considering regulations for disclosure.

Repercussions of the demographic shift for firms include issues such an incremental rise in the average age of the workforce, unequal inflows and outflows of labour and managing organisational skill levels. In the case of Germany, organisational responses to demographic change are exacerbated by a predominant early exit culture, legislation which protects against the dismissal of older employees and related provisions set out in collective bargaining agreements. The aim of the research is to examine how demographic shifts impacted on German companies in the steel, chemicals and utilities sectors. After discussing these challenges, the thesis analyses measures implemented by these firms and explains differences in the responses between the sectors. The empirical findings clearly indicate that far more was being done to prepare for, and to counter, the effects of demographic developments than the extant academic literature suggests. Companies which responded most proactively to demographic change issues perceived this to be part of their role as a responsible and caring employer. The end to the financial support of early retirement by the German government was found to be an important catalyst for firms to develop measures to accommodate older workers, instead of offering them an early exit from the company. Nevertheless, a failure to respond effectively to the end of state-funded support for early retirement, as well as the tendency of some firms to ignore deep-seated motivational issues in older workers, suggests that companies have some way to go before they can be described as effectively tackling demographic change. Hence, this thesis is unable to prove conclusively that critics of the German management of demographic in organisations are wrong in pre-empting that German firms run the risk of falling into a demographic trap (Thun et al, 2007). The thesis frames demographic change within a wider context of organisational shifts, by examining external and internal drivers of change. Variations in responses between sectors are explained by drawing attention to drivers of change within the three industrial sectors which have shaped the behaviour of firms, including past experiences of organisational restructuring. Finally, the thesis makes a number of important theoretical, empirical and practical contributions to the academic literature. The most important contribution is to provide qualitative, empirical data on how firms in Germany are dealing with demographic developments to address gaps in the literature on company responses to demographic change.

The thesis examines Flexible Work Arrangements (FWAs) in the Greek labour market and theoretical perspectives that may explain employers’ and employees’ perceptions of flexible working in Greece. Its objectives are: (1) to contribute to the sociology of work and labour economics literatures, by revisiting theoretical perspectives, applying them to the Greek labour context and adding empirical evidence on different FWAs; (2) to contribute to the literature on flexible working and new forms of management practices, by not only focusing on a context that has been neglected, but also by developing a two-level study of both employers’ and employees’ perspectives; (3) to assess potential implications of flexible working by focusing on the job quality of flexible workers and, in doing so, contribute to the growing literature on the impacts of new forms of work. In Chapter 3, the datasets are presented. First, the fourth European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) and the second European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) are described and employed to benchmark employee use of FWAs in Greece. Second, a survey conducted in Greece during the period 2010-2011 is described. The resulting Greek Dataset on Flexible Work (GDFW) covers 40 companies and 492 employees. The second part of the thesis reports three empirical studies. In Chapter 4, EWCS and EQLS show that the use of FWAs in Greece is significantly lower (compared to other EU countries) highlighting the question: why is the incidence of flexible working lower in Greece? Four FWAs forms are studied: part-time, temporary, telework and work from home as well as a hybrid category, “no contract”. The findings suggest that part-time, temporary and “no contract” employees characterise a secondary labour market, while telework and work from home, though rare are more noticeable than previously observed in the literature and demonstrate characteristics of a primary labour market. Overall, this first empirical study enabled a reassessment of the research questions, data needed and provided further insights into how chosen theoretical perspectives could be further explored to set hypotheses concerning employers’ as well as employees’ perspectives. The first study (Chapter 5) analyses the GDFW through institutional theory. Its purpose is twofold: first, to examine at an organisational level the environmental factors that may impact on employer offer of FWAs. Second, to explore characteristics, that are directly associated with employee use of / interest in FWAs. Additionally, the relationship between FWAs with Work-Life Balance (WLB) and life satisfaction is examined. Results show that pressures coming from competition, EU, legislation and labour market are significant predictors of employer offer. With regard to employees, the results suggest that the use of FWAs and employee interest in FWAs are associated with: their role in the organisation, tenure and family obligations. Implications of these findings for human resource management, industrial relations and the spread of flexible working in Greece as well as future research are discussed. The second study investigates FWAs quality in Greece through dual labour market theory (Chapter 6). Hypotheses are set and tested using the GDFW. Perceptions of employees and employers on FWAs show that these are associated with low job quality. Flexible workers are mostly females, younger employees and those with lower educational background, suggesting a segmented workforce and a distinction between full-time employees (“insiders”) and flexible workers (“outsiders”). These inequalities are likely to remain, thus showing that convergence in the labour market is a distant European goal. Chapter 7 summarises the research objectives of the thesis. It summarises the results obtained for the Greek case, and compares them to the European context. It further describes how findings may be generalised. Most importantly, it provides the practical implications of the thesis, acknowledges its limitations and addresses how what has been learnt by this research can foster future research.

Greece, like many other countries, has experienced great changes in food supply, consumption patterns and health outcomes. Famous for its Mediterranean diet, it has actually undergone a modem nutrition transition, and now has high rates of overweight and obesity and increased incidence of non-communicable nutrition-related diseases. This study begins with that reality and the current failure of food policy and nutrition-related initiatives to tackle problems. The study explores whether and how social marketing could remedy this policy deficit and contribute to changing Greek food behaviour. The thesis describes a contextual review of the state of nutritional health, the food system and food policy in Greece and outlines social marketing theory and experience. Two studies were conducted to answer the research questions. The first was a case study conducted on a sample of undergraduate students through nine focus groups with fifty-nine Greek undergraduate students from eight Athenian education institutes to explore the influencers of eating behaviour, the impact of current initiatives and the potential of social marketing. A second study of thirty-two key stakeholders in significant positions in the Greek food system explored through semi-structured interviews the reactions of education institutes, civil society, government and food supply chain representatives to the Greek food situation and the potential of social marketing. The fieldwork studies found that social marketing was not likely to be a panacea but has potential for Greece. The first study found that eating decisions are complex, based on individual as well as environmental factors. Both studies highlighted policy failings in government, while the second study specified the problematic structure of the public sector and a reluctance to confront existing food culture. Both studies found potential for social marketing to help change Greek food culture but its utility depends on factors beyond the realm of food policy alone. Political will, suitably qualified people and changes in the food system are all necessary. The thesis concludes that social marketing would be enhanced by an integrated food policy framework and from a broader understanding of behaviour change in general and of the dynamics of eating behaviour in particular. A new model of this integrated approach is proposed. Greek food policy would be enriched by the citizen-centric approach of social marketing but only if the full 5 Ps that will include "Policy" are applied as the policy element is too easily marginalised. The thesis proposes that food policy be integrated around three dimensions of action: food safety and hygiene, nutrition and environment.

This thesis explores the idea of the ‘railway family’ in the British railwayindustry between 1900 and 1948. The ‘railway family’ was borne out of a desire tocreate an ‘imagined community’ of railway workers across the wide geographicalboundaries of individual railway companies and the local branches of national tradeunions. The thesis seeks to understand how railway companies and trade unionsmanaged and extended the idea, particularly through their magazines and newspapers,in order to cultivate loyalty and support amongst their employees or members andtheir families. Despite being a male-dominated industry, the idea of the ‘railway family’opened up avenues of participation for women within the railway industry, mostespecially through the women’s trade union auxiliaries. These auxiliaries were open tothe wives and daughters of railway trade unionists and created a space for theseindividuals to cultivate their own identity as part of the railway industry and as women,wives and mothers through fundraising for trade union causes, supporting the unionduring labour unrest and campaigning on political issues that affected the ‘railwayfamily’. The idea of the ‘railway family’ was not just a theoretical model but was livedin practice by railwaymen and their families within their local communities. Thecreation of occupational communities and the ways in which the ‘railway family’supported one another without the interference of railway companies and tradeunions will be explored through a case study of Gloucester. This thesis is the firstoccasion that the idea of the ‘railway family’ has been studied, both in theory and in practice, in order to understand how railway companies and trade unions interactedwith railway workers and their families and how these individuals utilised the idea tocreate a lasting support network for all those involved with the railway industry.

Agriculture represents a class or expression of complexity which researchers need to look at because of its immense contribution to rural development and poverty reduction. Scientists and researchers per their disciplinary training and specialisations differ in wider perspectives and methodologies. In addition to the compartment functioning processes of organisations, fluid interaction and collaboration of actors are further limited. This study examines how actors in Crops for the Future (CFF) interacted formally and informally as a complex agricultural research organisation to address the transdisciplinary communication challenges it faces. Using ethnographic methods with participant observation, interviews and official document reviews, the study revealed that, the structuring of CFF into themes and programmes was intended to network and work in their areas of disciplines. The study revealed that internal policies of CFF such as the research value chain (RVC), the doctoral support programmes (DTP) and flagship projects aim to improve research collaboration and as a research strategy, tend to support working together effectively. However, it further revealed that, though actors collaborate and network across different knowledge communities, elements of personal interest and power appear to play a significant role in that drive. Raising questions of communication and reporting process, revealed a mixed form of vertical and horizontal hierarchies, supported by a project and functional structures of management in CFF. The informal practices of actors in CFF (social networking, friendship, interactions etc.) tend to strongly support and enhance the formal structures and policies (programmes, themes, reporting and management structure etc.).

The extent of youth unemployment in the UK in the years following the 2008 economic crisis, as well as the backdrop of longer-term concern regarding the rise of precarious work (Beck 2000, Standing 2011) prompted discussions of a 'lost generation' of young people set to feel the economic scars from embarking on their careers at a time of economic turmoil. The 2008-2009 recession was also (dubiously) labelled a 'mancession' and the first 'middle class recession'. Despite this, comparatively few sociology studies have adopted a quantitative approach to compare the class and gender dimensions of inequality in young people's employment trajectories prior to and following the 2008-2009 recession. This research makes an original contribution to the field by using longitudinal sequence analysis methods to contrast the employment trajectories of two cohorts of 16 to 24 year olds in the UK: a pre-recession and a recession cohort. In doing so, it establishes the extent to which the patterns of class and gender inequality amongst young people, not only in unemployment, but also in the movement in and out of 'precarious work', differed prior to and following the 2008-2009 recession. It finds that precarious employment was not as widespread as 'end of work' theorists suggested but that the recession brought an increased minority of young people who experienced employment difficulty. Furthermore, it argues that the recession did not advantage or disadvantage class or gender groups in a uniform way. Rather, changing trends in the recession highlighted a number of complex and shifting patterns of inequality amongst young people of different genders and from differing class backgrounds.

In recent years there has been an increase in metrics and indices measuring corporate social responsibility (CSR) (SuatainAbility, 2010; IBE, 2013). In legitimating the premise of these metrics focus has centred on the effects of inclusion, either in regard to financial impact for the firm (Beurden and Gössling, 2008; Griffin and Mahon, 1997), validity in gaining and conveying legitimacy (Chatterji et al, 2007; Agle and Kelly, 2001; Font et al, 2012; Graafland et al, 2004), or social impact in promoting responsible business practices (Slager et al, 2010; Slager, 2012; Adam and Shavit, 2007; Scarlet and Kelly, 2009). Yet, arguably these tools are now institutionalised elements of CSR (Waddock, 2008), and thus focus is no longer centred on gaining legitimacy, but rather on retaining it, as they 'face the need to evolve ... in the context of the changing demands of constituents and environmental change' (Durand & McGuire, 2005, p.168). However, little is known about how these effects (financial, social and validity) impact the valuation dynamics associated with participation in these tools over time. This thesis aims to fill this gap by exploring processes of legitimation and critique of participation in Business in the Community's Corporate Responsibility Index (BiTC's CRI). Through the lens of Boltanski and Thévenot's economies of worth (2006), the thesis examines the 'orders of worth' drawn upon in legitimating and critiquing participation in the CRI over time. Methodology is abductive, with data and extant theory explored simultaneously so as to establish contributions through a mutually-informed comprehension of what the data is a 'case of' (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014, p.5). Research-theorising applies Peircean semiotics (Peirce, 1909), by which, extant literature and theorising are applied, tested, and either set aside from/or built-upon, when set against the data of the empirical case. Data collection is qualitative, consisting of observations (4 formal and numerous informal), interviews (68) and documentary analysis. The research ultimately draws on Boltanski and Thévenot's Economies of Worth (2006), and the notion of 'composite assemblages', developed further by Mailhot & Langley (2017), Gond et al (2017) and Taupin (2012). The thesis supports Taupin's (2012) suggestion; that a rating's legitimacy is based on a collection of 'moral worths' (p.529), and conceptualises this through the 'composite assemblage' advanced by (Mailhot & Langley, 2017). Analysis contributes to scholarly understanding of processes of legitimation, by unpacking the relative 'robustness' of an assemblage, to internal and external 'tests' of worth. In unpacking these processes, the thesis brings together theory from EW, 'substantive and symbolic CSR', materiality, risk, and boundary objects; to uncover a complex 'web' of dynamic central, and peripheral value assemblages, which BiTC staff and participating CR practitioners draw upon, in legitimating and critiquing participation in the CRI.

Knowledge Management (KM) in this research refers to a process that dives deep into an organization and analyzes operational metrics to understand and help the enterprise make use of knowledge both explicit and tacit, facilitate a state of knowledge awareness and sustain the knowledge managing and learning process. This novelty of the research is its first attempt to combine China's KM implementation issues statistics, literature review on KM model and KM CSFs, integrating with research objectives findings to develop a KM framework for China SME shipyards. This framework interlinks the knowledge cycle of knowledge acquisition, application and improvement continuously within organization by 3 KM domains of organization entity, people interaction and organization memory, formulated by 12 KM CSFs derived. The uniqueness of this framework is it emphasis on people. Organization entity involves people support of top management to motivate and drive organizational culture to embrace KM. Continuous organization knowledge improvement involve people interaction to facilitate knowledge processes through socialization programs, training and building of trustworthy team. People are the one who contribute to organization memory by retain and update organization knowledge for effective reprocessing and retrieval via information technology. The survey took the form of structured interview in five stages of field study with eight sets of survey questionnaires. AHP method is applied to quantify practices and translate it into measurable absolute numbers. Result showed that one third of China SME shipyards are NOT Ready for KM implementation. Among the deficiencies, knowledge structure is the first limitation, followed by the knowledge content and training. The value of this research is to highlight and illustrate to enterprises the opportunity of the application of KM Framework could continuously improve their organization knowledge from operating processes through systematic knowledge acquisition and application, to gain their competitiveness and sustainability in long term. In short term, this KM framework by application could answer to the question that all China SME shipyards unanimously asked "Do you think my shipyard is ready to implement Knowledge Management?"

Chapter 1: Land Inequality and Human Capital: Evidence for the United States from the Homestead Act. This chapter uses historical records of land patents and county level census data to estimate the impact of the Homestead Act of 1862 |an egalitarian land distribution policy implemented in the United States| on land inequality, school enrolment, and literacy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The results show that the Homestead Act reduced land inequality and increased school enrolment and literacy, and that there is not heterogeneous effects on school enrolment by sex, but the effect is driven by the impact on children of primary school age. Using the Homestead Act as an instrument for land inequality, the results show that land inequality had a strong negative impact on school enrolment. This result is relevant to the literature because identification does not rely on variation across geographic, climatic, or soil characteristics. These results are robust to the inclusion of state specific year fixed effects and are not driven by convergence. On the contrary, I argue that convergence in school enrolment was a consequence of the Homestead Act. Chapter 2: Land Redistribution and Crop Choice: Evidence from Reform and Counter-Reform in Chile. This chapter uses unique historical data on the Chilean land reform of the 1960s and 1970s to estimate the impact that redistribution had on land inequality and crop choice. The results show that land redistribution had a persistent negative effect on land inequality, and that areas that were treated with more reform increased their share of land cultivated with fruits, vegetables, and vineyards, and lowered the share of land destined to forest plantations. The fact that a military coup interrupted the reform process allows for the comparison of the effects of reform and counter-reform, which sheds light on the mechanisms through which redistribution operated. I find that land that was transferred to new owners drive the results for crop choice, but not those for land inequality. Chapter 3: Earthquakes and Birth Outcomes in Chile. This chapter estimates the e effects of earthquakes on birth weight and length of gestation. I use administrative data on the universe of live births in Chile between 1994 and 2011. I combine that data with GIS raster information from USGS ShakeMaps to assign a detailed measure of earthquake intensity for each birth during each trimester of pregnancy. I find that, although the baseline estimates suggest a weak negative effect, these results are not robust to the exclusion of births from a strong 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of south-central Chile, which caused approximately 500 casualties, heavy infrastructure damage, and significant disruption to the government's logistics.

China has been experiencing constraints to the sustainable development of its domestic economy in recent years due to a reliance on a low value-added oriented economy. The enhancement of innovation among local firms is, therefore, being encouraged by the Chinese government. The Chinese government regards the automotive industry as one of its strategic industries yet the local automotive firms in China still remain relatively under-developed due to a limited independent innovation capacity. Therefore, the enhancement of an indigenous innovation capacity in the automotive industry is badly needed. Favourable policies have been applied in the automotive sector in order to support the technological development of local automotive firms which includes the constraints on foreign direct investment (FDI) in the automotive sector. Automotive multinational corporations (MNCs) are strictly required to establish international joint ventures (IJVs) with local automotive firms and can own no more than a 50% share in an IJV. The logic behind this is to protect the local automotive firms and allow them access to the technological resources of the MNCs and the opportunity for organisational learning. This logic is supported by current literature as IJVs are, arguably, able to deliver innovation outputs through direct access to the resources of the parent companies and the interpartner learning effects. Despite this, real-life examples suggest a limited innovation performance in the automotive IJVs in China. The innovation achievements are largely limited to minor changes to established products and some new products based on existing technologies. Whilst there is little technological innovation apparent in the automotive IJVs in China, there is evidence of this emerging from local automotive firms without the assistance of an IJV partnership. This PhD thesis explores the underlying reasons for the gap between current academic theory and the reality in the automotive industry. Qualitative case studies of three Chinese automotive IJVs and one independent local automotive firm with a reputation for innovation were conducted to investigate the factors that limit innovation activities in automotive IJVs. The findings of this research suggest that the IJV partnership itself is a constraining factor in the context of the Chinese automotive industry. This is because the nature of automotive IJVs in China lead to a lack of strategic focus on innovation and the IJVs follow a closed innovation paradigm as they only benefit from the limited resources of their parent companies, with little or no access to other external resources. Furthermore, the mismatch of the technological capabilities causes ineffectiveness in the utilisation process of the transferred resources. This research contributes to knowledge by explaining the gap between current theories on IJV and the reality within the industry. Furthermore, a revised model of knowledge management is proposed in the context of IJVs. In light of the main research findings, recommendations are made regarding the policy and practice of using IJV partnerships for the enhancement of innovation capacity among Chinese firms.

This thesis explores two main hypotheses: the first is that the Thessaloniki Biennale fulfils an instrumental role linked to financial and political interests, particularly tourism and cultural diplomacy. The second hypothesis concerns the possibility that the Thessaloniki Biennale may have alternative potential(s), and explores to what extent and in what ways this was realised. This thesis draws on the debates raised in the literature on art and culture’s instrumentalisation for ‘non-artistic’ purposes, art and culture’s potential for ‘subversion’, and the burgeoning literature on the biennial exhibitions of contemporary art. The analysis is interdisciplinary, applying a broad range of methodologies and theories: semiotics, social history of art, social theory of art and culture, the analysis of cultural policy formulation, and discourse analysis. The aim of this thesis is to synthesise these different methodologies to provide a rich, multi-faceted account of the Thessaloniki Biennale. In this thesis, I contend that the Thessaloniki Biennale attempted to ‘re-brand’ Thessaloniki as historical and multicultural, as well as a centre of contemporary art. In this way, it contributed to enhancing the city’s competitiveness and attractiveness as well as its influence in the broader area. Thus, the art event became entangled to official Greek cultural policy, and the agenda of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. At the same time, the Thessaloniki Biennale challenged stereotypical interpretative frameworks as regards art practice in regions outside the so-called West, and avoided exhibition practices which commercialise ‘cultural difference’. Also, certain artworks undermined the privileged narrative on the city’s identity, by highlighting aspects of the city and its history which were largely ignored in the official written texts of the art event. The ‘subversive’ potential of the art event could be deepened and expanded by democratising the processes of selection of participating artists, and by working more closely with independent artistic groups, citizen and activist groups.

The thesis explores the purpose of cooking education. The impetus for the research question - why teach (young) people to cook? – was the introduction of the 1988 National Curriculum for England & Wales. This changed the content and pedagogy of cooking education from a home and practical focus to an industrial and technological focus. Literature searches found little academic research into the purpose of cooking education. The research therefore set out to map the entire policy and pedagogical rationale(s) for what it defines as Food and Cooking Skills Education (FCSE). The research applied a dual focus on FCSE: as food policy and as pedagogy. A multi-method methodology was adopted, using a food systems conceptual approach, in order to capture the depth, range and breadth of possible rationales for FCSE. Methods used were: historical and documentary analysis, semi-structured interviews, questionnaire survey and an international comparative survey. Five qualitative studies were conducted: (1) a historical account of FCSE in England and Wales since the industrial revolution; (2) a survey of young people’s experience of cooking education in English schools; (3) a questionnaire survey of UK food industry FCSE perspectives; (4) an international comparative survey of thirty-five countries’ FCSE policies and pedagogy (including Scotland & N Ireland); and (5) élite interviews of policy-makers and activists from state related and civil society sectors. The five studies provide the first account of FCSE’s role and purpose, whether taught formally or informally. Seventeen rationales were identified, of varying emphasis. Historically, FCSE was found to have generated different purposes at different periods, with the modern era encompassing them all, and environmental sustainability now emerging. Internationally, countries vary in their modes of food cultural and skills transmission. A consensus of the importance of FCSE was recorded. The thesis concludes with nine cross-cutting themes exposed by the studies, which are presented as a preliminary theory of the purposes for and against cooking education. These include: food control, food literacy, skill types, culinary diversity, public health, resources, pleasure and environmental sustainability. Recommendations for policy and further research are made.

This thesis consists of three self-contained studies on corporate tax avoidance of Chinese firms around the 2008 Corporate Tax Reform. In Chapter 1, we describe the background of this thesis, provide a general introduction of the Tax Reform and outline the motivation of this research. Chapter 2 studies how multinationals’ decisions of foreign direct investment (FDI) into China responded to the tax reform where exemption from the dividend withholding tax was repealed and investors from various jurisdictions faced different withholding tax rates due to their existing double tax agreements (DTA) with China, providing incentives to adopt an indirect strategy for foreign affiliates and thus to reduce host country taxation of foreign income. We find a significant rise in FDI flows sourced from low tax conduit jurisdictions with favorable DTA subsequent to the tax reform, while there is no similar increase in FDI flows sourced from other jurisdictions. In addition, our results suggest that the pattern of FDI changes is similar for jurisdictions adopting divergent double tax relief mechanisms. Overall, our findings are supportive of the existence of indirect investment structures in which investors use conduit strategies via chains of ownership in order to minimize their corporate tax burden. Chapter 3 investigates whether and how firms shift income across consecutive years in response to a known schedule of tax rate changes. Both accruals-based and real earnings management models are tested for firms with tax rate increase or decrease. We find that firms expecting tax rate increase are more likely to manage their earnings upward via accruals instead of real activities, while firms facing tax rate reduction do not exhibit significant downward earnings management behavior via accruals or real activities. Our tests also show that state or institutional ownership do not have significant impact on the extent of accruals-based or real earnings management in response to tax rate changes. Chapter 4 studies the changes in effective tax rates (ETR) and book-tax differences (BTDs) of firms in response to a rise or cut in statutory tax rate during a major tax reform in an emerging market, and offers insights into the interaction of financial accounting considerations with corporate tax avoidance. We find that firms located in special economic zones (SEZ) with a rising statutory tax rate after tax reform exhibit a rise in ETRs and permanent BTDs, but the temporary BTDs of SEZ firms dropped after CTR-08, suggesting a trade-off of time value benefits of deferring tax payment for the advantage of accelerating tax payment during a period of rising tax rate. DR firms, on the other hand, show a decrease in ETRs and permanent BTDs when they face a decrease in statutory tax rate. In Chapter 5, the main findings and implications of the thesis are summarized and future research directions are discussed.

Challenges faced today in the truck industry indicate a need for transformation in truck manufacturers’ business logic. First, current business models are based on the sales of new vehicles so truck manufacturers fail to capture substantial financial benefits from servicing the installed base. Second, the truck market is prone to regional market cycles, which necessitates truck manufacturers to find solutions to stabilize their revenues. Moreover, environmental legislation and social pressures encourage truck manufacturers to look for solutions to preserve natural resources and enhance social welfare. To address these challenges, this study examines a regenerative result-oriented product-service (RROPS) business model, which combines a result-oriented product-service system and a closed-loop supply chain. By adopting a RROPS business model, truck manufacturers can earn regular sources of revenues, because demand for services is counter-cyclical, while improving their environmental and social performance. Hence, the goal of this study is to establish how to generate sustainable value for truck manufacturers. The study follows a multiple methods research design and collects data from truck manufacturers and logistics firms. Based on relevant literature and findings from a case study of a truck manufacturer, this work operationalizes eight building blocks of a RROPS business model, using the Business Model Canvas as framework of reference. China, the world’s largest national truck market by volume, is chosen as context for the study because truck manufacturers in China face economic, social and environmental challenges (e.g low profitability, no value capture from used trucks) that a RROPS business model could help addressing. Referring to the resource-based view and the social exchange theory, two conceptual frameworks are developed to determine mechanisms of sustainable value generation. Research hypotheses are tested with a sample of 180 survey responses collected from 22 truck manufacturers. Qualitative and quantitative survey data from logistics firms are also collected to conduct a comparative analysis between truck manufacturers' and logistics firms' perspectives with respect to market-related building blocks of a RROPS business model. The resulting contributions to knowledge are threefold. First, this study adds to existing literature on sustainable business models by offering a comprehensive analysis of a RROPS business model from a triple bottom line perspective. Second, this work extends the resource-based view and the social exchange theory by identifying and testing how business model elements of a RROPS business model contribute to the generation of sustainable value for truck manufacturers. Finally, this study establishes individual and combined mediating effects of three business model elements and shows that RROPS key partners contribute the most to explain the variance in RROPS gains, followed by RROPS key resources and RROPS internal risk management. With respect to managerial implications, this research demonstrates the relevance of a business model approach and establishes key characteristics of building blocks in a RROPS business model as well as the interdependencies between these business model elements. Truck manufacturers should pay particular attention to grow relational exchanges with their business partners and develop firm's internal strategic assets such as information and communication technologies and internal risk management practices. Furthermore, outcomes of the comparative analysis highlight that truck manufacturers should make more efforts to comprehend truck owners’ business environments. In China, a RROPS business model appears as a suitable solution to comply with the triple bottom lines of sustainability in the truck sector, but changes in customer habits and Chinese legislations are required to promote this new business logic.

Food waste in recent years has become an international priority because of the large amounts of food wasted from farm to fork. In low-income countries like Nigeria, losses are significantly higher along the food chain from production to retail. There is a dearth of research that considers various crop value chains in different geographical regions and the prevailing conditions that influence these losses. Nigeria produces 3.9 million metric tonnes of citrus annually and it estimated that 30-70% is lost to postharvest losses. This study investigated the causes of losses from farm to fork along the citrus value chain in Nigeria. It adopted the ‘follow the thing’ framework to trace the journey of an orange from the farm to the consumers’ home. A multi-method methodological strategy was employed to capture the causes and impacts of losses from the perspective of core actors with the use of questionnaires, interviews and field observations. Empirical findings suggest that citrus postharvest losses are between 10-100%. Losses were found to result from an absence of processing facilities to provide a ready market for fruits. Other causes include improper postharvest handling in the form of poor harvesting techniques, inadequate storage, packaging and transportation facilities. These losses had negative impacts on the livelihood of the actors, as they directly reduced the income they obtained. The most important cause of losses identified was the lack of political willpower due to bad governance in the provision of processing facilities. This further provided a disabling environment for the citrus market to thrive. The thesis recommends ‘follow the thing’ as an adequate framework to study and understand postharvest losses.

The present thesis explores the internationalisation of firms in relation to regionsector characteristics. We focus on outward investment by German firms and classify the heterogeneity across firms, regions and sectors, as well as foreign destinations. The thesis is structured in 5 chapters: a general introduction, followed by 3 empirical chapters and a final conclusion. In the introductory chapter we provide a general conceptual framework and selective review of the literature. Our starting point is that internationalisation is heterogenous across firms as it requires ownership advantages. However, the source of these is less explored and we discuss how regional factors such as the proximity to MNEs can influence foreign expansions. Conceptually we rely on spillover and competition effects and put forward that MNEs can act as catalysts for internationalising domestic firms. Chapter 2 analyses the propensity of German firms to be active as outward investors, exploring and qualifying the heterogeneity across firms, regions and sectors. We find that different forms of proximity matter for the intensive and extensive margins of outward investment by German firms. First, region-sector co-location with MNEs is more important than regional co-location. This lends support to the notion of technological proximity as a facilitator of spillovers. Second, the association between region-sector proximity and the propensity of firms to invest abroad is larger at finer spatial scales. This hints to the tacitness of some knowledge and information about internationalisation processes, as these types of effects and externalities mainly arise between spatially proximate firms. Third, region-sector proximity is shown to matter most when the firm and the proximate MNE are both German-owned. It highlights a potential role of cultural proximity and regional embeddedness for positive externalities or feedback loops to occur. Chapter 3 enquires how destination-specific ties available in the home region in Germany can be leveraged by the internationalising firm when making location decisions abroad. We provide empirical evidence on this by using data on inward and outward investment linkages and migrant networks between a German region and foreign destination. Our findings also reveal that those matter more for likely first-time investors, while within business group experience is not shown to play a role. Using a mixed logit model we further highlight significant heterogeneity across firms in their directionality of outward investments. Larger firms are found to be able to expand to more distant foreign destinations while smaller firms mainly choose European locations. Chapter 4 turns our focus to whole sectors and compares their domestic and global geography. To do so we use detailed geocoded data on the global locations of German manufacturing firms. We reveal that also at the global level there is considerable heterogeneity in the spatial pattern across sectors. The concentration ’intensity’ is also generally higher than at the domestic level and the level of technology in a sector plays a key role for its pattern. While at the domestic level high-tech sectors are found to be the most concentrated, at the global level it is rather low and medium-low tech sectors. At the same time, firms in medium-high tech sectors are the least concentrated in both. As they are often referred to as the ’backbone’ of the German economy, we see potential implications for territorial cohesion and regional disparities.

The 2030 global development agenda represents a renewed commitment to gender equality and an explicit call for business contribution. Even though during the last 15 years the gender gap has narrowed, women continue to lag behind men in the economic opportunities available to them. Feminist economists have largely acknowledged that many gender inequalities happen in organisations and, therefore, business organisations have much to contribute. In this respect, one of the most significant shifts of the post-2015 agenda has been the explicit call for a more proactive role of the private sector. Responsible business practices or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) represent an opportunity for the effective incorporation of gender issues into the business strategy. However, the actual integration of gender issues in the CSR agenda has been limited, CSR has been frequently studied at one level at a time (macro, organisational or individual), research has been primarily carried out in developed regions such as Europe and North America, and the practice of CSR has been characterised by a more external focus on philanthropic environmental and community activities. Considering this context, the main purposes of this thesis is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to contribute to strengthening the theoretical links between CSR and gender equality at work by developing an integrated multilevel framework. This framework takes a CSR perspective and it is based on the capability approach for human development proposed by the Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics Amartya Sen. Besides this central theoretical background, levels are built from a multidisciplinary standpoint including literature from public policy, development studies, management, organisation studies and social and organisational psychology. On the other hand, this thesis pursues a better empirical understanding of CSR and gender equality in developing countries by implementing the proposed framework in Latin America. By focusing on global and national governance institutions in studies one and two, organisational strategies in study three, and employees’ attitudes and perceptions in study four; this research collects and analyses quantitative and qualitative data under a mixed method research design. The first two studies use a qualitative approach based on the analysis of documents and interviews. The last two studies take a quantitative approach by collecting and analysing data from an online survey. Findings emphasise the need of a better integration of gender issues within the CSR agenda at all levels but particularly for public governance at the national level. Global governance institutions have been effective at enacting legally binding measures and reporting country progress in terms of gender equality across the region. However, there is still a lack of policy instruments based on economic incentives and public-private partnerships aimed at engaging the private sector in gender issues. On the other hand, the level of integration of gender issues was found to be stronger at the organisational level. Particularly, companies that have aligned their strategies to international responsibility standards tend to also include policy initiatives aimed at reducing gender inequalities. Similarly, companies that are perceived as being responsible by their employees generate favourable attitudes towards the implementation of these gender initiatives at work. However, these gender initiatives have been found to have almost no impact on the actual advancement of female workers. These results are discussed from an integrative perspective and implications for public policy and business organisations are proposed. Limitations and avenues for future research are also identified with focus placed on the possible developments of the proposed framework considering these findings.

Modern corporate governance is most characterized by management, board of directors, shareholders’ meeting, and supervision committee board. However, by investigating functions of the Party Committee, a dominant corporate governance power over modern corporate governance in Chinese central state-owned business groups (CSOBGs) , this thesis explains how Chinese CSOBGs are governed and intervened by Chinese central government and CPC at micro-level, and to what extent and under what situations political events and cadre bureaucratic system intensify the misalignment of interests between agents and principals, and how such corporate governance structure affects SOEs’ investment decisions and investment efficiency. I find that the Party Committee embeds Chinese CSOBGs’ leading executives in Chinese cadre bureaucratic system. Executives’ intention to advancement within the cadre bureaucratic system motivates the political-driven out-bound mergers and acquisitions by Chinese CSOBGs especially during critical political periods around NCCPC . I document a strong positive correlation between the promotion of leading executives of Chinese CSOBGs and the incidence of out-bound mergers and acquisitions during their tenure, and a significant negative 1-year post-acquisition performance. Furthermore, such corporate governance practice exacerbates the misalignment of the interests between non-listed Chinese CSOBGs and their listed subsidiaries, resulting in high leveraged parent tunneling from their listed subsidiaries. I report a statistically significant negative cumulative abnormal return of CSOBGs’ subsidiaries responding to these politically motivated transactions. The negative cumulative abnormal return of listed group affiliates is elucidated by critical political period, subsidiaries’ separation of ownership and control, liquidity, and parent’s leverage. I present that when CSOBGs first declare their proposals of their out-bound mergers and acquisitions, market only responds positively to their subsidiaries that are enjoying greater separation. However, the critical political periods, sensitive investment timing related to executives’ political promotion, wipes the positive influence out. With the worry of group’s tunneling, for subsidiaries with strong liquidity but a highly leveraged parent, the short-term event-driven stock performance is significantly negative. Last, consistent with previous literature, this study provides the evidence that during hot political periods, SOEs and politicians suppress negative information and disclose after the hot political periods. A significant relation between the count of news articles 3 months ahead the announcement and the short-term stock market return of out-bound mergers and acquisitions by CSOBGs is reported. Further more, stock market reactions to these news articles diverse to different political periods. I find the stock return within the event windows is negatively correlated to the news’ sentiment during the hot political periods. It indicates that the market discounts the news’ sentiment even takes them in the opposite way during the hot political periods.

In today’s highly competitive global manufacturing industries, the reality facing most prime or focal manufacturing organisations around the world is one where resources have been reduced, inventory has been drained, technology spending curtailed, and processes that are not core to an organisation’s business have been scaled back and / or outsourced. In competitive global marketplaces prime manufacturers simply cannot afford to have any area of their operations compromised. Supply chain operations need to be robust and resilient in order to retain and increase market share. Supply chain failure is a phenomenon that can potentially cause major issues for many organisations, especially when failure becomes persistent. Supply chains may under-perform or fail in different ways. Here we are concerned with a particular kind of supply chain failure, persistent failure over time, which occurs when a supplier fails persistently to provide the level of quality and delivery performance originally expected or specified in an agreed contract. The phenomenon is observed in industries where there is a lack of substitute suppliers with adequate design and production capability and / or capacity, potentially high switching costs, and regulatory and accreditation issues. The goal of this research is to provide managers at prime manufacturing organisations with an effective way to understand their supply environment and provide insights to help identify and resolve supply problems that might otherwise become persistent failures. In this research project, we seek to understand and rationalize what persistent supply chain failure is, identify why it happens and what influences it. This is achieved by conducting new primary empirical research to examine the ‘mechanisms’ and ‘dynamics’ of persistent failure and how organisations react to persistent adversity in supply chains. Multiple case studies have been conducted in the Aerospace Industry to understand and explain the nature of the phenomenon of persistent failure. An analysis of the extensive empirical evidence collected has enabled a new model of persistent supply chain failure be developed using causal loop diagrams. The ‘Persistent Failure’ model helps to understand the causes of the phenomenon and helps to identify mitigating strategies that can limit its emergence in supply chain relationships. The empirical study, the qualitative and quantitative analyses, and the causal loop model of persistent failure provide a significant contribution to the body of knowledge in purchasing, supply chain and operations management.

This thesis consists of three closely related studies investigating individual decision-making under risk and uncertainty, with a focus on decision weighting. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the common themes and theoretical framework for this research. Chapter 2 reports the development of a simple method to measure the probability weighting function of Prospect Theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) and rank-dependent utility theories. Our method, called the Neo-Lite method, is based on Abdellaoui et al. (2011)’s source method and the Neo-additive weighting function (Chateauneuf et al., 2007). It can be used for both risk (known probabilities) and for ambiguity (unknown probabilities). The novelty of our method lies in how data of decision weights are used to obtain the measurement of the whole function. Compared to the more widely used parametric fitting, our method is simpler, as it minimizes the number of decision weights required and does not rely on the elicitation of subjective probabilities (for ambiguity). An experiment of choice under risk demonstrates the simplicity and tractability of our method. The predictive performance of probability weighting functions measured using our method is shown to be almost equally good to that measured using the standard parametric fitting method. Chapter 3 presents a theory of choice under risk primarily to explain why individual probability weighting functions are often found to be non-linear and inverse-S shaped. Our rationale for non-linear probability weighting is based on a psychologically grounded feature of choice making, a feature we call attention-based state weighting. We show that, under well-defined circumstances, our theory can be equivalent to Cumulative Prospect Theory (Tversky & Kahneman, 1992) with a probability weighting function depending on not only ranks but also sizes of outcomes of risky prospects. This allows our theory to accommodate evidence about probability weighting that cannot be explained by Prospect Theory or Cumulative Prospect Theory. The evidence just mentioned refers to recent findings that people have stake-sensitive probability weighting functions. Chapter 4 reports an experiment that further explores the idea of stake-sensitive decision weighting. In addition, the experiment also tests hypotheses derived from the theory presented Chapter 3. In this chapter, we use a more general concept, decision weights, to refer to probability weights that can be stake-sensitive. Particularly we investigate whether and how decision weights are affected by two main properties of a lottery: outcome level (or expected payoff level) and outcome spacing (or the ratio of the best outcome of the lottery to its worst outcome). We elicit subjects’ Certainty-Equivalents for carefully-designed sets of lotteries and estimate their decision weights and utility curvatures using a model slightly more general than Cumulative Prospect Theory. Our main finding is that only outcome spacing has significant and systematic influence on decision weighting at the aggregate level, and that both outcome level and outcome spacing have systematic and significant effects at individual levels. This finding, together with the theory of Chapter 3, challenges the common understanding of probability weighting. Chapter 5 concludes the thesis by summarizing all findings in previous chapters, discussing the implications, and pointing to directions for future research.

Former Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude once made the ambitious claim that one million public sector workers would own and run the services they provide by 2015. It never happened, but there are still approximately 110 Public Service Mutuals (PSMs) in England. Yet whilst mutuality permeates the discourse of this policy, mutualism in PSMs, as both ethos and practice, is under-theorised and under-researched. This thesis addresses these gaps using a critical realist approach. Drawing on a review of literature on mutuality and co-operation, mutualism in PSMs is conceptualised as interrelated cultural and structural emergent properties, comprising mutual ideas, relations and practices. These are applied in an empirical research project to explore the mutual in PSMs. A large N survey of healthcare providers was followed by in-depth comparative case studies of an NHS Foundation Trust and two PSMs. Using a critical realist framework, mutual structures and generative mechanisms, together with agent (employee) interaction with them, were investigated. The findings revealed that organisational mutual practices of ownership, shared benefit, voice and transparency can cause the emergence of the mutual relations of trust, co-operation and reciprocity when allied to a common purpose. In turn, the causal powers of these mutual relations strengthen organisational mutual practices. However, this does not occur quickly or automatically and the corporate agency of managers and staff, coalescing around joint projects, is necessary for the mutual in Public Service Mutuals to emerge and thrive.

Adopting a socio–economic perspective and a multimethod field research approach this thesis investigates the correlation between trust and workflow in advertising communities of practice. Using a semiotic mode of analysis a comparative examination of offline and online communities will be conducted to inspect the practices of trust when multiple stakeholders follow the creative workflow process to fulfil creative briefs. The motivation to lead the research stems from a current lack of understanding of how trust is operationalized in online creative communities. Shortcomings from the literature 1) do not account for the significance of constructed workplace settings in the offline domain, 2) focus on providing generalisations through quantification, while fail to offer insights through qualitative methods and 3) overlook the weaknesses of trust in professional relationships. To address these shortcomings the thesis provides an extensive literature review to explicate the complexity of trust. The review forms the foundation of the thesis from which it makes original theoretical, analytical and empirical contributions. It 1) introduces a conceptual framework that correlates trust with workflow in offline and online advertising communities; 2) presents a novel thematic–narrative analytical method to interpret and map trust and workflow at the granular level; 3) reports from three sequential field studies that explores trust and workflow in professional relationships. These contributions highlight the operationalization of trust and that trust is an active determinant of workflow. The findings have implications to the study of trust and virtual workspaces in the digital economy that will influence their design, development and utilization. The first study examines trust and workflow in an offline advertising community. The findings indicate a positive correlation: trust is strongly aligned to workflow, inferred by strongly embedded situational and trust–warranting properties. The second and third studies examine trust and workflow in online advertising communities. The former indicates a negative correlation: trust is mediumly misaligned to workflow, inferred by weakly embedded situational properties. The findings of the latter also indicate a negative correlation: trust is strongly misaligned to workflow, inferred by weakly embedded situational and trust–warranting properties. In short, trust and workflow have a negative correlation online compared to the offline domain and is deficient in situational and trust–warranting properties. As a consequence the online domain does not perform to the same professional standard as the offline domain.

This thesis consists of three papers on the economics of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The papers study different aspects of CSR from the perspectives of consumers and firms. The first paper looks at how consumers value CSR and their willingness to pay for ethical attributes in a product. We include a CSR signal to examine how information on CSR affects individuals’ preferences and willingness to pay. The second paper builds on the study in the first paper, however, we also include a CSR nudge and the Big Five Inventory on personality to examine the interaction between information and personality traits on the willingness to pay for CSR. Finally, in the third paper we look at how firms’ CSR signal can influence their financial performance.

This thesis presents two studies of computer-mediated non-monetary exchange. The Internet has improved the potential for previously unconnected people to organise into interest groups with the intent of meeting offline. This has resulted in a range of organisations emerging with the explicit aim of helping people to give and share resources. These organisations typically reject money and markets, insisting that social interaction should occur through generosity alone. The first study presents a netnography and depth interviews which reveal how technology is used to enact and influence the management of identity, partner selection, ritual normalisation, and negotiation of property rights. The findings have significant implications for the design and management of systems that encourage non-monetary forms of collaborative consumption. In the second study a longitudinal social network analysis reveals how the social structures involved in these systems have no obvious historical precedent. This has implications for the way in which the social sciences should conceptualise reciprocal economic arrangements. It also raises some sociological implications for the possibility of designing economic systems in the absence of money. Finally, a new approach is proposed which advocates diachronic analysis of property rights as a means to explain how markets and institutions that try to subvert markets exist alongside each other.

The purpose of this thesis is to understand the impact of brand experience and brand image on consumers’ perceptions of trust in the context of the UK financial services sector. Since the financial crisis in 2008, trust has been an issue for financial services brands with scandals surfacing continually such as the “Libor Scandal” in 2012 (BBC News, 2013); the manipulation of foreign exchange markets by proprietary traders in large banking institutions (Financial Times, 2014); a number of banks being fined a total of £2.7 bn (BBC News, 2013) and so on. In these kinds of scenarios of declining trust, it is of paramount importance that financial services brands not only focus on their brand identity but also consistently deliver a favourable brand experience and build a strong brand image to contribute in the restoration of trust in financial services. Therefore, this study makes a timely contribution by providing a nuanced understanding of how and to what extent brand experience and brand image impact consumers’ perception of trust in the context of financial services from an interdisciplinary perspective. The theoretical model incorporating brand experience, brand image and a number of important interdisciplinary trust constructs has been developed from the interdisciplinary literature on trust and brand (Mayer et al., 1995; Aaker, 1997; McKnight et al., 1998; McKnight and Chervany, 2001-2002; McKnight et al., 2002; Mayer et al., 2007; Ennew and Sekhon, 2007; Ennew et al., 2011; Brakus et al., 2009) through inductive top-down theorising (Shepherd and Sutcliffe, 2011). The model explains the relationship between a number of brand and trust constructs. It proposes that in the context of financial services sector, where the perceived risk is high, trusting belief positively impacts trusting intention (H1); the structural assurance dimension of institutional trust has a positive effect on trusting belief (H2) and on trusting intention (H3); the situational normality dimension of institutional trust has a positive effect on trusting belief (H4) and on trusting intention (H5); the faith in humanity dimension of dispositional trust has a positive effect on trusting belief (H6) and on structural assurance dimension of institutional trust (H7) – whereas the trusting stance dimension of dispositional trust has a positive impact on trusting intention (H8) and on structural assurance dimension of institutional trust (H9). The theoretical model also proposes that a positive brand experience has a positive impact on trusting belief (H10) and likewise a positive brand image has a positive impact on trusting belief (H11). As part of theory testing following an objectivism ontological and positivism epistemological position, a survey-based quantitative approach was employed to test the hypotheses. Under the auspices of a large MNC with offices in the major cities of UK and in many countries of the world, a sample was drawn from its UK based employees, which was reasonably representative of the UK population. As the respondents were asked to answer questions about their main bank, any male or female who lives in the UK and has a UK bank account would qualify as being suitable subjects for this research. A total of 420 paper based questionnaires were distributed to this sample through customer services operatives and managers. Of them 301 questionnaires returned, 300 were usable and one was incomplete, thus resulting in a response rate of 71.46%. The measurement scale for trusting belief was adopted from Ennew and Sekhon (2007) and Ennew et al. (2011) trust index; the measurement scales for brand experience and brand image were adapted from Brakus et al. (2009) brand experience scale and from Aaker (1997) brand personality scale respectively – both of them were further validated in the context of financial services sector. The measurement scales for trusting intention, institutional trust and dispositional trust were developed from interdisciplinary trust literature (Mayer et al., 1995; McKnight et al., 1998; McKnight and Chervany, 2001-2002; Ennew and Sekhon, 2007; Ennew et al., 2011) and further validated. To test the factor structure and to identify poorly-performing items and scale reliability, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was conducted followed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) for checking uni-dimensionality and validity (Garbing and Hamilton, 1996; Cadogan et al., 2009) of the measurement scales using Lisrel 8.80. Finally, hypotheses were tested through Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The findings validate the interdisciplinary brand-trust theories: out of eleven hypotheses tested, nine hypotheses were accepted and two hypotheses were partially accepted. The study sheds light on the role of institutional trust and dispositional trust on financial services consumers’ overall perception of trust through influencing their trusting belief and trusting intention; and underscores the importance of having a sound and strong financial structure to engender trust. Furthermore, it reveals that although consumers have noticed the efforts of financial services institutions and regulators in putting an overarching structure for financial systems in place, they are not fully convinced that the current situation is typical and normal. The study found strong links between consumers’ perception of a positive brand image and on their perception of trusting belief. In unveiling the relationship between brand experience and trusting belief, the study found that the affective dimension of brand experience has a significant influence in influencing consumers trusting belief, whereas the intellectual dimension of brand experience is not viewed favourably by the financial services consumers. This research contributes to convergent theories of trust and mutually inclusive theories of trust and brand through adopting an interdisciplinary approach. In particular, it contributes to theory application by operationalising an interdisciplinary brand-trust conceptual model. The findings bring valuable insights that contribute towards the integrated brand-trust literature and validate the interdisciplinary theory of trust that centres around the seminal work of Mayer et al. (1995), McKnight et al. (1998), McKnight and Chervany (2001-2002) and Tan and Sutherland (2004). The research shows the impact of brand experience, brand image, institutional trust, and dispositional trust on consumers’ overall perceptions of trust in the context of the financial services sector. In addition, the study makes a methodological contribution through developing measurement scales for trusting intention, institutional trust and dispositional trust, which are particularly suitable for the financial services sector; and also by validating brand experience and brand image scales for financial services. Due to the divergent interdisciplinary perspectives of trust, the literature on trust still remains divided especially in its conceptualisation of the constructs. Hence this study makes an attempt to bring harmony to an on-going debate around trust. It also incites a debate whether trust in the context of the financial services sector should be conceptualised and operationalised from a single disciplinary perspective or through employing an interdisciplinary approach; and whether the issues of trust and branding should be treated as integrated phenomena or not. The study is of relevance to managers and policy makers, for it will inform them of the importance of institutional trust, dispositional trust, brand image and brand experience on consumers’ overall perceptions of trust; and provide them with more sophisticated measures for brand experience and brand image for financial services, which in turn will create an opportunity for them to develop more effective branding strategy. The measures of trusting intention, institutional trust and dispositional trust that have been developed especially for the financial services sector as part of this study also offer significant implications for practice. In the light of this study, policy makers, commercial organisations and other interested stakeholders in the financial services sector can measure and track trust in a more comprehensive manner than previously. They will be able to monitor changes in perceptions of trust more accurately and in a more regular fashion, understanding the level of changes on each kind of trust and the reasons for these changes in the overall perceptions of trust. This will also help firms to develop a more effective strategy to restore or enhance consumers’ perceptions of trust as it provides policy makers and firms with guidance regarding where a particular focus on types of trust should be given.

This thesis contains three studies that provide theoretical and empirical evidence on household decisions in housing and investment portfolios in China, using 2010-2014 data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). The first study investigates regional disparities in homeownership and value of owner-occupied housing in Chinese cities by using panel data from 2010-2014 CFPS. The results show that demographic characteristics actively shape the housing outcomes of urban households in different regions. The results also reveal development trajectories of regional economies. The findings indicate that while urban households benefit from an emerging population and an enormous growth in the private sector in the Eastern and Central regions, in the Northeastern region households are hindered in homeownership by an ageing population and an economy dominated by oversized but inefficient state-owned enterprises (SoEs). The second study adopts a nested logit approach, applying three data sets from the 2010-2014 CFPS. This approach explores how household investment choice differs with personal and household characteristics (e.g., such as health, demographic features, and institutional factors) across the broad investment categories of financial assets, private businesses, and real estate. I also employ a sub-sample from the 2012 CFPS that is restricted to parental households to examine how parenthood alters household investment decisions by building a binomial logistic model. The empirical results show that migration and income have a positive effect on investment decisions in the nested logit models. The evidence from the subsample finds that there are significant differences in the impact of demographic composition between investment categories. Using the 2010-2014 CFPS panel data, the third study investigates how household investment holdings vary according to demographic composition and intra-household bargaining strength in urban China. In addition, to explore the allocation of household investment, a further examination is carried out in the fixed-effect model with the specification of the Working-Leser function and in a Tobit model with two limits. Empirical evidence supports the following hypotheses: (a) changes in demographic composition considerably alter household investment holdings; and (b) the existence of a higher proportion of female children is strongly associated with an increase in household investments in financial assets.

This research examines how farmers working medium-sized farms in Mexico have adopted and enacted Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and how these ICTs have impacted work practices. The effects of ICTs on farmers’ economic relations are explored from a business process perspective using a framework that combines Transaction Cost (TCT) and Social Embeddedness theories. A single case study in Mexico with two embedded units of analysis from different crop sectors, a cluster of banana producers from Tabasco and an organic rice grower from Campeche, provide an in-depth understanding of the adoption of ICTs and their impact. We examine issues of learning and co-operation, and how ICTs have affected production and distribution and the positioning of farmers in the context of their work practices and economic relations. The thesis discusses the ICTs used in the business process cycle of farming and their impact on business development and economic exchange. The research elaborates on and confirms the existence of network forms of organisation that operate in the farmers’ communities and analyses their social embeddedness. The findings show that information technologies bring improvements to the agricultural business process, facilitating not only the collection, collation and analysis of data to support informed decisions, but also innovative farming and business practices through learning and co-operation. We find that ICTs complement and support social relationships, both preexisting (traditional community connections and business links) and novel (virtual contacts and social media) to stimulate business development. The significance of social context is corroborated and should help inform development policy.

Financial retirement risk is one of the biggest dilemmas faced by individuals and societies in late modernity. It is an unintended consequence of over fifty years of social, scientific and economic development. These have produced ageing citizens, who spend too much and save too little. In response, economists argue that more of the State's pension risk must be transferred to the individual. To achieve this, the UK Government introduced auto-enrolment workplace pension policy to 'nudge' spenders into becoming savers. In this thesis, I use this change in legislation to explore what happens when the libertarian paternalism, implicit in behavioural economic theory, enters the real world. Adopting a sociological approach through critical discourse analysis, I explore the different interpretations of financial risk constituted by the State, media, employers and employees. The study traces how the State has attempted to transfer financial risks onto individuals through a process labelled the risk game. This involves constructing and legitimising discourses of winners versus losers, spenders versus savers and experts versus lay people. However, the risk game is not straightforward. Other participants, such as the press, employees and employers, play with the discourses government set in motion and through their discursive reinterpretations, they attempt to transfer the risk onto the other players, including the government. The discursive strategies adopted include: the passive matching effect, used by employees to pass the responsibility to the employer; and the avoidance effect, where employees return the risk to the State in a new form. Other employees actively choose to play by different rules, using the operative visualization of risk, through discourses of long-term vision and self-reflexive action. Understood as the risk game, this thesis reveals flaws in the implementation of the government's auto-enrolment pension policy. Informed by Beck’s theories, the thesis concludes that rather than nudging individuals, the State can only transfer responsibility for risk through coercion or with the recipient’s understanding and active engagement. This has implications for pension policy and the pensions industry and casts doubt on the prevailing economic theory that spenders can be nudged into becoming savers.

The Caribbean is an understudied region in terms of gender wage gaps and this research adds new insights into the sparse economics literature on this topic for the region, and in particular, for the two-island state of Trinidad and Tobago. Economic inequality between men and women is a pertinent problem deserving of in-depth study because it has far-reaching inter-generational consequences. Furthermore, gender inequalities in the labour market are considered as indicators that considerably restrain economic growth. Trinidad and Tobago’s economy has undergone tremendous strides in terms of economic growth over the past 20 years, and this study provides a deeper understanding of how the gender pay gap evolved over that time period. The present analysis of the gender wage gap has allowed us to ascertain if working women in Trinidad and Tobago were able to benefit from the country’s improved economic prosperity. The present study employs 2012 Continuous Sample Survey of the Population (CSSP) data for Trinidad and Tobago to investigate the causes of gender income differentials. The CSSP is used to generate labour force statistics for Trinidad and Tobago, and provides a wide range of information, including data on wages, gender, employment, unemployment, hours of work, industry, occupation, and level of education. The CSSP has two main advantages that make it a good source of data for analysing labour market issues in Trinidad and Tobago. Firstly, it is a nationally representative population survey, and secondly, it is the most detailed population survey for the country. The Blinder-Oaxaca and Neumark methods of decomposition were used to portion the wage gap into “explained” and “unexplained” components. The findings suggest that the differential is not well explained by differences in the levels of human capital (“explained” component) and indeed gender bias in favour of male workers seems to be prevalent (“unexplained” component). The raw wage gap in 2012 measured 11.4 per cent, and in the absence of gender discrimination women’s wages could increase by as much as 26 per cent. In addition to decomposing the gender wage gap at the mean level of wages, the research also investigated the causes of gender income differentials along the entire distribution of wages. Two recent quantile decomposition techniques – developed by the Machado and Mata (2005)/Melly (2006), and Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux (2009) were used to portion the gap into “explained” and “unexplained” components. Similar to the findings from the Blinder-Oaxaca methodology, the results for this portion of the research suggest that the differential in wages is not well explained by differences in the levels of human capital and substantial gender bias in favour of male workers. Quantile decompositions allow us to ascertain if there is a “glass ceiling” or a “sticky floor” in the labour market. Glass ceilings are said to exist when there is a larger unexplained gender wage gap at the top of the wage distribution, whereas sticky floors exist when there is a larger unexplained wage gap at the lower end of the wage distribution. The results suggest that female workers in Trinidad and Tobago face sticky floors rather than a glass ceiling. Lastly, the well-known Heckman two-step procedure (sometimes referred to as the limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) estimator) was employed to test for the presence of sample selection. The test for selectivity was carried out for both men and women separately. The results indicated no evidence of sample selection in any of the model specifications, including Mincerian-type wage regressions with additional controls for occupation, industry, and sector of employment (public vs. private). However, the sample selection model did not consider any exclusion restrictions due to data limitations, and consequently the model proved to be weakly identified. The chapter concluded that the “uncorrected” OLS subsample is the more appropriate model to be used for analysis given that these estimates are more robust compared to a sample selection model without exclusion restrictions.

This thesis contains three studies. They are connected by the idea that "no man is an island": each individual contributes to shaping, and is constrained by, the social and economic structures of the organization or the society that the individual is embedded in. The first study, Chapter 2, examines optimal networks with weighted and directed links under complementarities. A group of agents take actions that are endogenously determined by which network the planner implements. Complementarities mean that the best-response action of each agent is increasing in the actions of those who have a link with positive weight pointing to the agent (representing the direction and intensity of influence). Optimal networks are those maximizing the planner's objective function which is an increasing function in the effort of each agent, subject to the constraint that the total weight of the links of the network does not exceed a certain level. The agents' best-response function and the planner's objective function can be convex or concave. We show that every optimal network exhibits dramatic concentration of influence so that a very small number of agents impose significant impact on the productivity of the whole organization. The second study, Chapter 3, investigates how cooperative norms emerge and evolve over time. I construct a stochastic dynamic model based on the idea that cooperation in one-shot interactions is sustained by endogenous social norms. The model shows how cooperation and punishment of defectors co-evolve. It reveals the conditions under which cooperation emerges and persists in the long run. In particular, recent empirical studies find that cooperation in one-shot interactions is positively correlated with law enforcement across societies, and that cooperation is higher in large, modern societies with higher degrees of market integration compared to small-scale societies. I extend the model to explain these regularities. I show that the ability to “vote with feet” is the key to understanding the difference in cooperation between small-scale societies and large, modern societies. The third study, Chapter 4, is an experimental project, a joint work with Lucas Molleman and Dennie van Dolder. Previous studies suggest that whether individuals perceive a behavior as fair depends on its frequency in the population. Using a prisoner's dilemma game, we test experimentally whether informing individuals of a higher proportion of cooperators in the population affects the fairness perception about free riding and changes individuals' punishment of free riders. Different from previous studies, we use the strategy method to obtain each participant's complete punishment strategy. We find a remarkable heterogeneity among participants: some participants increase punishment of free riders as the proportion of cooperators increases, suggesting that they consider free riding to be more unfair when more cooperators are around; yet, many others punish independently of the proportion of cooperators. We show that the heterogeneity cannot be captured by any single existing theory.

Organisations today are investing significant amounts of time, money, and resources on workplace self-paced e-learning, yet employees seem to be having problems even getting these e-learning courses completed, bringing into question the true value of workplace self-paced e-learning. In an attempt to improve understanding of factors contributing to success in workplace self-paced e-learning, this study investigated how employee learners’ motivation, self-regulated learning, and organisational contextual factors affected outcomes in workplace self-paced e-learning. A quantitative study was conducted to investigate the research questions. Participants of the study were 119 employees enrolled in workplace self-paced e-learning courses provided by Hong Kong organisations. Data were collected using online questionnaires and analysed using the partial least squares structural equation modelling technique. Findings revealed significant relationships between learners’ motivation, self-regulated learning, organisational contextual factors, and training outcomes in workplace self-paced e-learning. Motivation to learn, time management, metacognitive self-regulation, perceived choice, workload, and organisational support were found to positively correlate with training outcomes as expressed in terms of course completion rate, learner satisfaction, and perceived learning performance in workplace self-paced e-learning. Findings also revealed learners’ autonomy in learning participation, level of workload (negative), and supervisor support (negative) moderate the relationship between learners’ time management strategy use and completion rate of workplace self-paced e-learning courses. Unfortunately, the results failed to support the expected relationship between supervisor support and training outcomes. The significance of the findings is discussed, along with implications for researchers and practitioners, limitations of the current study, and opportunities for future research.

The goal of this thesis is to study and understand the informal employment in China. With the rapid growth of informal employment, this thesis challenged the conventional view of informal sector that it is a hub for the poor who need work but cannot find employment in the formal sector. It analysed informal sector employment in China. It focused on three aspects: (1) the pattern and determinants of what constitutes employees, casual workers and employers, (2) the reasons for employment change between the formal and informal sectors, and (3) remuneration differences between formal sector employees and informal sector self-employed workers/employers. This analysis used CHIPs data from 2008, 2009, and 2014. The findings suggest that informal employment is a hub for the more vulnerable who are less able to compete, such as women, less educated, not healthy and disabled. However, it not necessarily applied to self-employed and small business owners. They are competitive with longer working experience and financial capital to start up own businesses. Running one’s own business can provide benefits in terms of job flexibility to accommodate the need to take care of children or elderly relatives. The findings also suggested that labour force engaged in the informal sector are more likely to be induced by personal career pursuing, rather than enforced unemployment. Finally, we have find that changing jobs from formal employment to either self-employment or entrepreneurship can increase monthly disposable income. The results found in this study contribute to the existing literature on China’s labour markets. We comprehensively dissected employment status by recognizing casual workers who either have no contract or a temporary contract under one year in length, which was neglected by the authorities and researchers. It has contributed to a richer understanding of employment status, where informal sector self-employed workers and employers are better off compared to formal employees. Indeed, casual workers have the worst working conditions when considering the number of hours worked and social protections received. These findings contribute to the existing literature on the informal sector as well as provide a comprehensive understanding of China’s labour market that the government can use when considering the establishment of new policies.