The thesis aims to examine the effects of adverse shocks and sectoral growth patterns on poverty. The issue of adverse shocks has recently drawn the attention of academics and policymakers alike, but evidence of the persistent impacts of different types of shocks on poverty is limited due to a...

This dissertation provides some explanations of the causes of poverty in rural India, by investigating poverty determinants that are too often neglected in the literature and in policy debates. It proceeds in three main chapters, each addressing a specific research question. The first chapter...

Do other peoples’ incomes reduce the happiness which people in advanced countries experience from any given income? And does this help to explain why in the U.S., Germany and some other advanced countries, happiness has been constant for many decades? The answer to both questions is ‘Yes’....

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or its composition, while onshore oil has only modest effects on non-oil GDP...

Using nationally-representative linked employer-employee data for Britain this paper considers whether employers are able to influence the organizational commitment (OC) of their employees through the practices they deploy. We examine the association between OC and two broad groups of HRM...

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place either at the industry level or at the firm level; collective bargaining coverage is much higher than union density; and not all employees in a covered firm are necessarily covered. This institutional setup suggests to distinguish explicitly union...

This paper investigates the abnormal share return dispersion occurring when companies announce their interim or final earnings. Whereas, prior research has focused on abnormal returns, little attention has been given to investigating the dispersion of the abnormal returns. We find strong...

It is widely asserted that a high proportion of change initiatives fail (e.g. Kotter, 1996; Author/s to be provided, 2000). Furthermore the success of initiatives involving cultural change is significantly lower (Smith, 2003). However, there is some debate around whether or not change can only be...

This paper explores entrepreneurship from the perspective of emergence, drawing on literature in complexity theory, social theory and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is conceptualised as the production of emergence, or emergent properties, via a simple model of intial conditions, processes of...

In this paper we revisit the gender decomposition of wages in the presence of selection bias. We show that when labor market participation decisions of couples are not independent, the sample selection corrections used in the literature have been incomplete (incorrect). We derive the appropriate...