Birational Geometry of moduli spaces of pointed curves

This is the authors doctoral thesis written at the Humboldt-University Berlin. It contains material from the three separate papers: "On the Kodaira dimension of the moduli space of nodal curves", "On quotients of $\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{g,n}$ by certain subgroups of $S_n$" and "The moduli space of hyperelliptic curves with marked points".