Much of the analysis of industrial organization implicitly assumes that firms sell directly to final consumers. However, many firms do not sell directly to the final consumers, but rather use intermediaries, such as wholesalers and retailers to distribute their products. The presence of such intermediaries affects significantly market outcomes. In particular, the contracts between manufacturers and retailers may significantly affect market outcomes, e.g. volumes and prices. Characteristic for these contracts is that they may contain vertical restraints, restrictions on what the retailers may do once they have acquired the products for resell. Another characteristic feature of these contracts is that they are typically devised by sophisticated contracting parties, who have strategic objectives. The reason for manufacturers, or upstream firms to impose vertical restraints on retailers, or downstream firms is that the actions of the downstream firms affect the upstream firm’s profits. While vertical restraints may affect the profitability of the contracting parties, they may also affect other agents, such as consumers and suppliers. In this dissertation I focus on three distinct aspects of vertical relations. I look at how providers of payment cards affect competition between retailers, through the no surcharge rule; how suppliers can expand their output by financing the establishment of new retailers; and how buyer alliances can extract surplus from suppliers through the use of market share contracts. Common to these essays is the strategic behavior by agents on one level affecting market outcomes at another vertical level.

Environmental protection, sustainability, and the combat against climate change are central topics for today’s societies. For reaching policy targets in any of these areas, it will be crucial to achieve far-ranging behaviour change in many respects. Given that a substantial part of environmental problems can be traced back to consumption patterns, involving citizens and impacting on consumer behaviour are of major importance. There is a growing need to design policy programmes which have the potential to succeed in setting the right incentives. Environmental and sustainability labelling is one of the policy instruments increasingly employed to meet this objective. However, to date the market shares of products with environmental or sustainability labels remain low and stated positive consumer attitudes towards labelled products do not consistently translate into buying behaviour. So what are the main obstacles preventing efficient labelling and the factors impacting negatively on the demand side? Contributing to answering this central question is one of the main objectives of this thesis. It consists of three self-contained essays which study various aspects of the potential impact of labelling on the market for food products with a sustainability or ethical background. The first paper takes up the topic of the pricing of labelled products and applies a hedonic pricing framework to the case of Fair Trade labelled coffee in Sweden. The second paper is concerned with the attitude-behaviour gap with regard to purchasing organic food and focuses on various determinants of demand for products with an organic label. The third paper focuses on the analysis of consumer choice in the presence of the growing multitude of environmental and ethical labels used for marking products with a respective background. The results obtained in this thesis present highly relevant empirical results and are of interest to policymakers and scholars alike as they do not only focus on policy advice but also stimulate the academic debate. Its analysis of the impact the existing multiplicity of labels has on consumers contributes to a research front which has not received appropriate levels of attention yet. Findings point to a need to modify the current set-up in the field of environmental, sustainability, and ethical labelling. Focusing on consumers’ needs in trying to make labelling schemes work efficiently and lowering consumer evaluation costs as much as possible should be given high priority in the design of policy measures. Public sector involvement will continue to be of key importance.

Mikael Juselius’ doctoral dissertation covers a range of significant issues in modern macroeconomics by empirically testing a number of important theoretical hypotheses. The first essay presents indirect evidence within the framework of the cointegrated VAR model on the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor by using Finnish manufacturing data. Instead of estimating the elasticity of substitution by using the first order conditions, he develops a new approach that utilizes a CES production function in a model with a 3-stage decision process: investment in the long run, wage bargaining in the medium run and price and employment decisions in the short run. He estimates the elasticity of substitution to be below one. The second essay tests the restrictions implied by the core equations of the New Keynesian Model (NKM) in a vector autoregressive model (VAR) by using both Euro area and U.S. data. Both the new Keynesian Phillips curve and the aggregate demand curve are estimated and tested. The restrictions implied by the core equations of the NKM are rejected on both U.S. and Euro area data. These results are important for further research. The third essay is methodologically similar to essay 2, but it concentrates on Finnish macro data by adopting a theoretical framework of an open economy. Juselius’ results suggests that the open economy NKM framework is too stylized to provide an adequate explanation for Finnish inflation. The final essay provides a macroeconometric model of Finnish inflation and associated explanatory variables and it estimates the relative importance of different inflation theories. His main finding is that Finnish inflation is primarily determined by excess demand in the product market and by changes in the long-term interest rate. This study is part of the research agenda carried out by the Research Unit of Economic Structure and Growth (RUESG). The aim of RUESG it to conduct theoretical and empirical research with respect to important issues in industrial economics, real option theory, game theory, organization theory, theory of financial systems as well as to study problems in labor markets, macroeconomics, natural resources, taxation and time series econometrics. RUESG was established at the beginning of 1995 and is one of the National Centers of Excellence in research selected by the Academy of Finland. It is financed jointly by the Academy of Finland, the University of Helsinki, the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, Bank of Finland and the Nokia Group. This support is gratefully acknowledged.

In Somalia the central government collapsed in 1991 and since then state failure became a widespread phenomenon and one of the greatest political and humanitarian problems facing the world in this century. Thus, the main objective of this research is to answer the following question: What went wrong? Most of the existing literature on the political economy of conflict starts from the assumption that state in Africa is predatory by nature. Unlike these studies, the present research, although it uses predation theory, starts from the social contract approach of state definition. Therefore, rather than contemplating actions and policies of the rulers alone, this approach allows us to deliberately bring the role of the society – as citizens – and other players into the analyses. In Chapter 1, after introducing the study, a simple principal-agent model will be developed to check the logical consistence of the argument and to make the identification of causal mechanism easier. I also identify three main actors in the process of state failure in Somalia: the Somali state, Somali society and the superpowers. In Chapter 2, so as to understand the incentives, preferences and constraints of each player in the state failure game, I in some depth analyse the evolution and structure of three central informal institutions: identity based patronage system of leadership, political tribalism, and the Cold War. These three institutions are considered as the rules of the game in the Somali state failure. Chapter 3 summarises the successive civilian governments’ achievements and failures (1960-69) concerning the main national goals, national unification and socio-economic development. Chapter 4 shows that the military regime, although it assumed power through extralegal means, served to some extent the developmental interest of the citizens in the first five years of its rule. Chapter 5 shows the process, and the factors involved, of the military regime’s self-transformation from being an agent for the developmental interests of the society to a predatory state that not only undermines the interests of the society but that also destroys the state itself. Chapter 6 addresses the process of disintegration of the post-colonial state of Somalia. The chapter shows how the regime’s merciless reactions to political ventures by power-seeking opposition leaders shattered the entire country and wrecked the state institutions. Chapter 7 concludes the study by summarising the main findings: due to the incentive structures generated by the informal institutions, the formal state institutions fell apart.

Growth and Convergence: The Case of China Since the initiation of economic reforms in 1978, China has become one of the world’s fast-growing economies. The rapid growth, however, has not been shared equally across the different regions in China. The prominent feature of substantial differences in incomes and growth rates across the different Chinese regions has attracted the attention of many researchers. This book focuses on issues related to economic growth and convergence across the Chinese regions over the past three decades. The book has eight chapters. Apart from an introduction chapter and a concluding chapter, all the other chapters each deal with some certain aspects of the central issue of regional growth and convergence across China over the past three decades. The whole book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the basic issues involved in this book. Chapter 2 tests economic growth and convergence across 31 Chinese provinces during 1981-2005, based on the theoretical framework of the Solow growth model. Chapter 3 investigates the relationship between openness to foreign economic activities, such as foreign trade and foreign direct investment, and the regional economic growth in the case of China during 1981-2005. Chapter 4, based on data of 31 Chinese provinces over the period 1980-2004, presents new evidence on the effects of structural shocks and structural transformation on growth and convergence among the Chinese regions. Chapter 5, by building up an empirical model that takes account of different potential effects of foreign direct investment, focuses on the impacts of foreign direct investment on China’s regional economic performance and growth. Chapter 6 reconsiders the growth and convergence problem of the Chinese regions in an alternative theoretical framework with endogenous saving behavior and capital mobility across regions. Chapter 7, by building up a theoretical model concerning comparative advantage and transaction efficiency, focuses on one of the potential mechanisms through which China achieves its fast economic growth over the past few decades. Chapter 8 concludes the book by summarizing the results from the previous chapters and suggesting directions for further studies.