This thesis includes three essays on the interaction between financial market institutions and market liquidity, and its implications for financial stability. The first essay studies an overlapping generations model of a risky asset market in which some agents face a participation cost. Market participation, by affecting the size of the pool of potential holders of the risky asset, determines the liquidity of the asset market. This essay studies how the frictions that are associated with capital requirements on financial institutions affect their incentives to supply liquidity to the market. The participation decision generates a positive and a negative externality, and the interaction between the two externalities can give rise to multiple equilibria in participation, i.e. to "liquidity cycles". The second essay studies the complementary problem of the optimal design of incentive systems for financial institutions in the context of limited market liquidity. In a contract between a borrower and a lender, financial incentives are provided by requiring the borrower to finance a sufficiently large share of her investment project. In the states of nature in which many projects are liquidated simultaneously, liquidation in private contracts is excessive relative to the efficient (second-best) contract chosen by a planner who internalizes the externality working through the liquidation price. This essay studies whether capital requirements on the borrowers can implement the second best allocation...

Chapter 1 is the product of joint work with Ferhat Akbas and it provides a behavioral explanation for monthly negative serial correlation in stock returns. For the first time in the literature, this work reports that only low momentum stocks experience monthly negative serial correlation. Using a recently collected dataset, this finding provides the basis for a behavioral explanation for monthly negative serial correlation. Chapter 2 uses mean squared error (MSE) criterion to choose the number of instruments for generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) framework. This is a relevant problem especially in financial economics and macroeconomics where the number of instruments can be very large. For the first time in the literature, heteroskedasticity is explicitly modelled in deriving the terms in higher order MSE. Using the selection criteria makes GEL estimator more efficient under heteroskedasticity. Chapter 3 is the product of joint work with Victor Chernozhukov and Konrad Menzel.This chapter proposes new ways of inference on mean-variance sets in finance such as Hansen-Jagannathan bounds and Markowitz frontier. In particular standard set estimation methods with Hausdorff distance give very large confidence regions which are not very meaningful for testing purposes. On the other hand confidence regions based on LR-type statistic and wald type statistic provide much tighter confidence bounds. The methodology is also extended to frontiers that use conditional information efficiently.; by Emre Kocatulum.; Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

The authors study the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private domestic credit and liquid liabilities (for example, Levine, Loayza, and Beck 2000). On the other hand, the banking and currency crisis literature finds that monetary aggregates, such as domestic credit, are among the best predictors of crises and their related economic downturns (for example, Kaminski and Reinhart 1999). The authors account for these contrasting effects based on the distinction between the short- and long-run impacts of financial intermediation. Working with a panel of cross-country and time-series observations, they estimate an encompassing model of short- and long-run effects using the Pooled Mean Group estimator developed by Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (1999). Their conclusion from this analysis is that a positive long-run relationship between financial intermediation and output growth coexists with a mostly negative short-run relationship. The authors further develop an explanation for these contrasting effects by relating them to recent theoretical models...

Combining two unique data sets, this paper explores the relationship between the relative importance of different financial institutions and their average size and firms' access to financial services. Specifically, the authors explore the relationship between the share in total financial assets and average asset size of banks, low-end financial institutions, and specialized lenders, on the one hand, and firms' access to and use of deposit and lending services, on the other hand. Two findings stand out. First, the dominance of banks in most developing and emerging markets is associated with lower use of financial services by firms of all sizes. Low-end financial institutions and specialized lenders seem particularly suited to ease access to finance in low-income countries. Second, there is no evidence that smaller institutions are better in providing access to finance. To the contrary, larger specialized lenders and larger banks might actually ease small firms' financing constraints, but only at low levels of gross domestic product per capita.

Workers' remittances to developing countries have become the second largest type of flows after foreign direct investment. The authors use data on workers' remittance flows to 99 developing countries from 1975-2003 to study the impact of remittances on financial sector development. In particular, they examine whether remittances contribute to increasing the aggregate level of deposits and credit intermediated by the local banking sector. This is an important question considering the extensive literature that has documented the growth-enhancing and poverty-reducing effects of financial development. The findings provide strong support for the notion that remittances promote financial development in developing countries.

In this paper we propose exact likelihood-based mean-variance efficiency tests of the market portfolio in the context of Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), allowing for a wide class of error distributions which include normality as a special case. These tests are developed in the frame-work of multivariate linear regressions (MLR). It is well known however that despite their simple statistical structure, standard asymptotically justified MLR-based tests are unreliable. In financial econometrics, exact tests have been proposed for a few specific hypotheses [Jobson and Korkie (Journal of Financial Economics, 1982), MacKinlay (Journal of Financial Economics, 1987), Gib-bons, Ross and Shanken (Econometrica, 1989), Zhou (Journal of Finance 1993)], most of which depend on normality. For the gaussian model, our tests correspond to Gibbons, Ross and Shanken’s mean-variance efficiency tests. In non-gaussian contexts, we reconsider mean-variance efficiency tests allowing for multivariate Student-t and gaussian mixture errors. Our framework allows to cast more evidence on whether the normality assumption is too restrictive when testing the CAPM. We also propose exact multivariate diagnostic checks (including tests for multivariate GARCH and mul-tivariate generalization of the well known variance ratio tests) and goodness of fit tests as well as a set estimate for the intervening nuisance parameters. Our results [over five-year subperiods] show the following: (i) multivariate normality is rejected in most subperiods...

(cont.) left on the table" due to underpricing in the IPO allocation is not capital the firm could have raised; instead, it is the empirical regularity associated with obtaining a high quality aftermarket, high equity valuation, and higher proceeds to the issuer. We examine the principal-agent problem in a simple continuous time framework when potential agents have heterogeneous priors. We find that the principal prefers agents with priors very different from his own. The principal will create a contract that includes side-bets to exploit gains from trade created by heterogeneous priors despite the distortionary effect on effort choice. In a semi-dynamic labor market, the principal can optimally choose to churn his employees to prevent them from learning about project profitability, even when agents' skills are increasing with job tenure. We develop several empirical predictions, and relate our model to the labor market in the financial industry.; Milton Friedman argued that irrational traders will consistently lose money, won't survive and, therefore, cannot influence long run equilibrium asset prices. Since his work, survival and price impact have been assumed to be the same. In this paper, we demonstrate that survival and price impact are two independent concepts. The price impact of irrational traders does not rely on their long-run survival and they can have a significant impact on asset prices even when their wealth becomes negligible. We also show that irrational traders' portfolio policies can deviate from their limits long after the price process approaches its long-run limit. We show...

This dissertation is composed of three chapters. The first demonstrates that natural gas violates many of the simplifying assumptions frequently used in modeling its behavior. Careful analysis of futures contracts written on gas suggests that gas prices are seasonal while returns are non-Gaussian and evidence stochastic volatility. In addition, examination of options prices indicates the intermittent presence of jumps. We find that models which disregard these properties struggle to recover options prices with any precision. Thus, we propose an alternative nonparametric approach to gas options pricing that captures these salient features while also shedding light on the nature of risk aversion embedded in gas markets. The second chapter offers a parametric approach to pricing derivatives written on natural gas futures designed to overcome the shortcomings of existing parametric schemes. First, it proposes a model of the underlying futures prices that admits stochastic volatility. Second, it makes use of a state-of-the-art Bayesian particle filtering technique to estimate the underlying process parameters along with a simulation-based technique for option pricing. While it trades off some performance relative to nonparametric approaches...

This thesis is composed of three chapters, each includes one paper. The first chapter includes a paper that analyses the impact of terror on consumption and investment. This paper provides evidence on how consumers and investors react to terror attacks based on a new database from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An increase in terror casualties triggers households to alter their perceived personal security and expected future income. Only ex-post do households distinguish a temporary from a permanent increase in terror casualties. A temporary increase in the number of terror casualties causes a bust-boom cycle of durables consumption and irreversible investment; nondurables are affected less. A permanent increase in the number of terror casualties causes a one-time drop in consumption. This is in line with the theory on irreversible investment and durables consumption: terror generates temporary uncertainty about personal security and future income, which in turn causes a bust-boom cycle of durables due to bunching of purchases in later periods. A permanent increase in terror causes neither bunching nor boom. Similar results are obtained for the effect of terror casualties on fixed capital. The second chapter includes a paper titled: "Arbitrage Tests of Israel's Currency Options Markets." The aims of this study are threefold. First...

The first essay finds that the market betas of value and small stocks have decreased by about 75% in the second half of the twentieth century. The decline in beta can be related to a long-term improvement in economic conditions that made these companies less risky. The failure to account for time-series variation of beta in unconditional CAPM regressions can explain as much as 30% of the value premium. In some samples, about 80% of the value premium can be explained by assuming that investors tied their expectations of the riskiness of these stocks to the high values of beta prevailing in the early years. Moving from these findings, the second essay (co-authored with Tobias Adrian) explores in detail the relation between the 'value premium' and the decrease in value stocks' beta. We develop an equilibrium model of learning on time-varying risk factor loadings. In the model the CAPM holds from investors' ex-ante perspective. However, the econometrician can observe positive mispricing, whenever the expected beta is above the true level. Given the finding of a decreasing beta, it is likely that investors' expectation of the beta of these stocks has been above the actual level. Therefore, our model can provide an explanation for the 'value premium'. We present the results of simulations in which the model accounts for up to 80% of the 'value premium' in the 1963-2000 sample.; (cont.) The third essay analyzes the response of stock returns to earnings information. First...

This dissertation is a collection of three essays exploring the impact of incentives on participation in public education and health programs. The first two essays analyze the demand for Special Education (a program for disabled children) in the U.S., while the third essay explores the demand for subsidized anti-malaria products in Kenya. The first chapter attempts to estimate the direct impact of Special Education (SE) placement on students' social and academic outcomes. Despite the fact that one out of every seven U.S. public school students receives SE services, little is known about the impact of this program on future outcomes. I exploit the strategic incentive to increase SE enrollment induced by a 1996 accountability policy in Chicago Public Schools to identify the impact of SE placement on high school completion, absenteeism and GPA. Pre-accountability performance characteristics of the school determined to what extent sanctions could be avoided by increasing SE placement, since SE students' scores were excluded from accountability measures. I construct an instrument that captures the strength of strategic incentives, and show that low-achieving students in high-incentive schools experienced the largest increase in SE placement. Using instrumental variables analysis and a panel of student data from Chicago Public Schools...

This dissertation analyzes the impact of various financial incentives on firm behavior. The first two chapters examine product-market and input-market effects of a firm's capital structure and the incentives they create. The third chapter analyzes how incentives from the tort system affect physician location decisions. Chapter 1 examines the impact of union bargaining on capital structure determination. If a firm maintains a high level of liquidity, workers may be encouraged to raise wage demands. In the presence of external finance constraints, a firm has an incentive to use the cash flow demands of debt service payments to improve its bargaining position. Using both cross-sectional estimates of firm-level collective bargaining coverage and state changes in labor law to identify changes in union bargaining power, I show that firms indeed appear to use financial leverage strategically to influence collective bargaining negotiations. These estimates suggest that strategic incentives from union bargaining have a substantial impact on financing decisions. A firm's financial structure can also impact investments in marketing and operations management. Chapter 2 examines how capital structure affects a firm's provision of product availability - an important dimension of product quality in the retail sector.; (cont.) Using U.S. consumer price index microdata to measure the prevalence of out-of-stocks...

The first chapter studies mass layoff decisions. Firms in the SP 500 often announce layoffs within days of one another, despite the fact that the average SP 500 constituent announces layoffs once every 5 years. By contrast, similar-sized privately-held firms do not behave in this way. This paper provides a theoretical model and empirical evidence illustrating that such clustering behavior is largely due to CEOs managing their reputation in financial markets. The model's predictions are tested using two novel datasets of layoff announcements and actual mass layoffs. I compare the layoff behavior of publicly-listed and privately-held firms to estimate the impact of reputation-based incentives on cyclicality of layoffs. I find that relative to private firms, public firms are twice as likely to conduct mass layoffs in a recession month. In addition, I find that the firms that cluster layoff announcements at high frequencies are also the ones that are more likely to engage in mass layoffs during recessions. My findings suggest that reputation management is an important driver of layoff policies both at daily frequencies and over the business cycle, and can have significant macroeconomic consequences. In the second chapter I present a theory of the safe assets market and make three central points. First...

This paper argues that the fundamental principle of contemporary financial economics is balanced reciprocity, not the principle of utility maximisation that is important in economics more generally. The argument is developed by analysing the mathematical Fundamental Theory of Asset Pricing with reference to the emergence of mathematical probability in the seventeenth century in the context of the ethical assessment of commercial contracts. This analysis is undertaken within a framework of Pragmatic philosophy and Virtue Ethics. The purpose of the paper is to mitigate future financial crises by reorienting financial economics to emphasise the objectives of market stability and social cohesion rather than individual utility maximisation.; Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1210.5390

This short review presents a selected history of the mutual fertilization between physics and economics, from Isaac Newton and Adam Smith to the present. The fundamentally different perspectives embraced in theories developed in financial economics compared with physics are dissected with the examples of the volatility smile and of the excess volatility puzzle. The role of the Ising model of phase transitions to model social and financial systems is reviewed, with the concepts of random utilities and the logit model as the analog of the Boltzmann factor in statistic physics. Recent extensions in term of quantum decision theory are also covered. A wealth of models are discussed briefly that build on the Ising model and generalize it to account for the many stylized facts of financial markets. A summary of the relevance of the Ising model and its extensions is provided to account for financial bubbles and crashes. The review would be incomplete if it would not cover the dynamical field of agent based models (ABMs), also known as computational economic models, of which the Ising-type models are just special ABM implementations. We formulate the ``Emerging Market Intelligence hypothesis'' to reconcile the pervasive presence of ``noise traders'' with the near efficiency of financial markets. Finally...

Latin America has recently experienced three cycles of capital inflows, the first two ending in major financial crises. The first took place between 1973 and the 1982 'debt-crisis'. The second took place between the 1989 'Brady bonds' agreement (and the beginning of the economic reforms and financial liberalisation that followed) and the Argentinian 2001/2002 crisis, and ended up with four major crises (as well as the 1997 one in East Asia); Mexico (1994), Brazil (1999), and two in Argentina (1995 and 2001/2). Finally, the third inflow-cycle began in 2003 as soon as international financial markets felt reassured by the surprisingly neo-liberal orientation of President Lula's government; this cycle intensified in 2004 with the beginning of a (purely speculative) commodity price-boom, and actually strengthened after a brief interlude following the 2008 global financial crash; and at the time of writing (mid-2011) this cycle is still unfolding, although already showing considerable signs of distress. The main aim of this paper is to analyse the financial crises resulting from this second cycle (both in LA and in East Asia) from the perspective of Keynesian/ Minskyian/Kindlebergian financial economics. I will attempt to show that no matter how diversely these newly financially liberalised Developing Countries tried to deal with the absorption problem created by the subsequent surges of inflow (and they did follow different routes)...

Brazil, as the rest of Latin America, has experienced three cycles of capital inflows since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. The first two ended in financial crises, and at the time of writing the third one is still unfolding, although already showing considerable signs of distress. The first started with the aftermath of the oil-price increase that followed the 1973 ?Yom Kippur? war; consisted mostly of bank lending; and finished with Mexico?s 1982 default (and the 1980s ?debt-crisis?). The second took place between the 1989 ?Brady bonds? agreement (which also marked the beginning of neo-liberal reforms in most of Latin America) and the Argentinian 2001 crisis. This second cycle saw a sharp increase in portfolio flows and a rise of FDI, and ended up with four major crises (as well as the 1997 one in East Asia) as newly-liberalised middle-income countries struggled to deal with the problems created by the absorption of those sudden surges of inflows ? Mexico (1994), Brazil (1999), and two in Argentina (1995 and 2001). Finally, the third inflow-cycle began in 2003 as soon as international financial markets felt reassured by the surprisingly neoliberal orientation of President Lula?s government; this cycle intensified in 2004 with a (mostly speculative) commodity price-boom...

This thesis consists of three self contained essays in financial economics where agents interact under asymmetric information about some latent economic fundamentals. The chapter on "Asset pricing under noisy rating signals: Does benchmarking on ratings matter.", demonstrates that, in the presence of noise traders who benchmark their supply of a traded asset to public signals (ratings), informed traders are induced to rationally overreact to news about fundamentals, leading to excess asset price volatility. The analysis also shows that if market participants use public ratings solely for price discovery purposes then, under no circumstances ratings could weaken price efficiency, even in the presence of higher order beliefs. The chapter on "Prudential liquidity regulation and the insurance aspect of lender of last resort" considers prudential liquidity regulation as quid pro quo for emergency liquidity assistance by the central bank. In the presence of bank funding constraints, information-induced bank runs and an objective by the central bank to maintain a balanced budget under its lender of last resort (LOLR) facility, it is shown that prudential liquidity regulation is socially desirable if the banking sector is characterised by sufficient funding constraints...

In this thesis, I analyse the influence of financial economic theory on financial reporting practice. This influence has manifested itself in the increasing use of economic methods introduced into practice by the publication and implementation of certain economics-based accounting standards. I provide three illustrative case studies in the areas of pensions, financial derivatives and contingent liabilities, focusing on projects by the FASB, IASC/B and the ASC/B. To explain the increase in the use of economic methods in financial reporting practice, and their pattern of emergence, I draw on the genealogical and political economy approaches. I supplement these methodologies with a theory of causality by developing a qualitative causal model. This model, which I call the Causal Constellation Model, aims to explain the success of projects to introduce economics-based standards in terms of five individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. These conditions relate to the economic environment, the conceptual aims of financial reporting, the legitimacy of economic methods, the absence of institutional opposition and the effectiveness of advocates on the boards of standard setting institutions. The primary sources of evidence for my research are documents published by standard setting institutions...