Essays in environmental and happiness economics

A PhD Dissertation, presented as part of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the NOVA - School of Business and Economics

Neolithic transitions: can genetic data help us understand a major demographic event in human prehistory?

Dissertation presented to obtain the Ph.D degree in Biology

Social network analysis applied to knowledge creation and transfer in the portuguese agricultural R&D field: an exploratory study

Paper presented at the 9th European Conference on Knowledge Management, Southampton Solent University, Southampton, UK, 4-5 Sep. 2008. URL: http://academic-conferences.org/eckm/eckm2008/eckm08-home.htm

The role of qualitative data and systems thinking in addressing service decline in market towns

Retail services are a main contributor to municipal budget and are an activity that affects perceived quality-of-life, especially for those with mobility difficulties (e.g. the elderly, low income citizens). However, there is evidence of a decline in some of the services market towns provide to their citizens. In market towns, this decline has been reported all over the western world, from North America to Australia. The aim of this research was to understand retail decline and enlighten on some ways of addressing this decline, using a case study, Thornbury, a small town in the Southwest of England. Data collected came from two participatory approaches: photo-surveys and multicriteria mapping. The interpretation of data came from using participants as analysts, but also, using systems thinking (systems diagramming and social trap theory) for theory building. This research moves away from mainstream economic and town planning perspectives by making use of different methods and concepts used in anthropology and visual sociology (photo-surveys), decision-making and ecological economics (multicriteria mapping and social trap theory). In sum, this research has experimented with different methods, out of their context, to analyse retail decline in a small town. This research developed a conceptual model for retail decline and identified the existence of conflicting goals and interests and their implications for retail decline, as well as causes for these. Most of the potential causes have had little attention in the literature. This research also identified that some of the measures commonly used for dealing with retail decline may be contributing to the causes of retail decline itself. Additionally, this research reviewed some of the measures that can be used to deal with retail decline, implications for policy-making and reflected on the use of the data collection and analysis methods in the context of small to medium towns.

Consumer satisfaction with water, wastewater and waste services in Portugal

While the concept of consumer satisfaction is a central topic in modern marketing theory and practice, citizens' satisfaction with public services, and especially water and waste services, is a eld that still remains empirically rather unexplored. The following study aims to contribute to this area by analysing the determinants of user satisfaction in the water, wastewater and waste sector in Portugal, using a unique survey of 1070 consumers undertaken by the Portuguese Water and Waste Regulator ERSAR. I perform an analysis of the relation between overall service satisfaction and attributespeci c service satisfaction with an ordered logit model. I then explore if subjective consumer satisfaction can be re ected by ERSAR's technical performance indicators. The results suggest that overall consumer satisfaction is driven by consumer's satisfaction with speci c service aspects but unrelated to socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Furthermore, I show that there is no monotonic association between ERSAR's technical performance indicators and consumers' levels of satisfaction.