School of Management (SoM)

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Browsing School of Management (SoM) by Course name "PhD in Economics and Finance"

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    Essays on contemporary issues in the South Korean economy
    (Cranfield University, 2023-02) Saade, Ahmed J.; Alexiou, Constantinos; Belghitar, Yacine
    This doctoral thesis sheds light on some issues that are characteristic of the South Korean socioeconomic landscape today. In a series of three papers, I empirically address important questions faced by policy makers of this country, whilst also contributing to major debates currently taking place within the Economics discipline. In the first chapter, I investigate the effects of robotization on Korean workers’ labor supply from the lens of dynamic monopsony. I show that an increase in the density of industrial robots is associated with manufacturing workers becoming more responsive to a change in wages in their decision to quit to non-employment, and that the opposite is true for non-manufacturing workers. The second chapter contributes to the discussion on youth unemployment in South Korea, in tandem with the question of the high turnover rate within the nation’s Nursing profession. I find that the unemployment rate at time of graduation has scarring effects on Nurses’ wages, workhours, and subjective wellbeing. The final chapter of this dissertation tackles the problem of social isolation among Korean elders and contributes to the very small literature on the economic determinants of this phenomenon. I offer the first set of causal evidence linking the social isolation of elders with their adult children’s inheritance expectations.
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    On the relationship between fiscal consolidation (austerity) and income inequality. Novel empirical evidence.
    (Cranfield University, 2023-02) Okeke, Angela Ifunanya; Alexiou, Constantinos; Nellis, Joe
    Equity concerns regarding increases and persistence of adverse distributional outcomes tend to rear up during instances of austerity consideration since increasing inequality levels tend to have material significances on a people’s way of life as well as a nation’s economic growth by disproportionately affecting economic opportunities for the lower and median incomes. Motivated by the lack of empirical clarity and conflicting evidence in the extant austerity-inequality nexus literature this thesis enriches our understanding of the effect of fiscal consolidation programmes on output and income inequality. More specifically, by engaging in a systematic literature review, this study explores the relationship between austerity and income inequality. Furthermore, by employing different empirical model specifications1 for a panel of 16 OECD countries for the period 1980 to 2019, this research work explores the dynamic distributional effects of fiscal consolidation programmes as well the role of public debt in determining distributional outcomes during austerity implementation. The novel evidence obtained suggests that: adverse distributional effects persist for 15 years following adjustment implementation through both revenue and expenditure channels; furthermore – point estimates for the Bottom 40% of the income distribution are higher by the 15th year than previous peak periods; distributional impacts arising from influences of public debt levels are amplified during instances of fiscal adjustment with adverse distributional effects on average, manifesting from medium debt levels.