Si les fonds souverains ne sont pas nouveaux, leur nombre et leur pouvoir financier n’ont cessé de croître depuis le début des années 2000, suscitant de nombreuses inquiétudes, notamment dans les pays développés. Les fonds souverains sont-ils guidés par les mêmes motivations que les investisseurs institutionnels ? Leur pouvoir financier risque-t-il de déstabiliser les marchés? Ces interrogations ont fait des fonds souverains un thème de recherche à part entière dans lequel s’inscrit ce travail de recherche. Le premier essai de cette thèse contribue à identifier les principaux facteurs susceptibles d’inciter un pays à créer un fonds souverain. En outre, les stratégies d’investissement des fonds souverains suscitent de nombreuses interrogations : poursuivent-ils un objectif de rendement financier ou ont-ils des objectifs plus stratégiques? Le deuxième essai met en évidence la complexité du processus de décision des fonds souverains en testant s’ils préfèrent investir dans des pays qui leurs sont familiers et/ou dans des pays dans lesquels ils ont déjà investi par le passé. Dans le prolongement de cette analyse, le troisième essai s’intéresse plus spécifiquement aux déterminants des prises de participations majoritaires des fonds souverains en se focalisant sur un groupe de fonds particulièrement actifs : les fonds des Pays du Golfe. Plus précisément, cette analyse vise à identifier les facteurs qui influencent la décision de prendre le contrôle dans une entreprise donnée. / If Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) are not new, their number and their financial power have grown sharply since the beginning of the 2000's, which raise concerns, particularly among developed countries. Are SWFs' motives comparable to other institutional investors'? May SWFs investments destabilize financial markets? These concerns have encouraged researchers to investigate the issues raised by SWFs and it has now become a subject of research in its own rights. This thesis is in line with this literature. The first essay of this thesis identifies the main factors driving the decision to establish a fund. Moreover, investment decisions of SWFs are not well understood yet. Are SWFs investments driven by the search for financial profits or do they pursue more strategic objectives? The second essay highlights the complexity of the investment decision-making process of SWFs, testing if they rather invest in countries with which they share common characteristics and/or in countries where they have already invested. In line with this second essay, the third essay analyzes more specifically the determinants of majority acquisitions made by SWFs by focusing on some particularly active funds: Gulf Countries' SWFs. More precisely, this analysis aims at identifying both microeconomic and macroeconomic factors driving the decision to acquire a majority stake in a cross-border firm.

O financiamento por meio de títulos negociáveis vem ganhando importância no cenário internacional e concorrendo com meios tradicionais de financiamento, como os empréstimos bancários. No entanto, existem poucos estudos científicos no Brasil que abordam o financiamento das empresas por meio da emissão de títulos de dívida, em especial, os títulos de dívida de médio e longo prazos emitidos no exterior, os eurobonds e euronotes. Dessa forma, este trabalho tem por objetivo analisar e descrever o mercado de eurobonds e euronotes, sua história, características, ferramentas e técnicas, com especial atenção aos títulos brasileiros. Este objetivo será atingido por meio de uma análise descritivo-exploratória e o estabelecimento de relações entre variáveis, revisão de literatura, apresentação e exposição de dados históricos de mercado, análise de volumes de emissões e desenvolvimento intertemporal. Também é objetivo deste trabalho analisar empiricamente, de forma descritiva e exploratória, o perfil das empresas brasileiras que captam no exterior e a utilização de bonds em sua estrutura de financiamento, com suporte das teorias de estrutura de capital do trade-off estático e de peking order. Para isso, foram feitas análises estatísticas de indicadores contábeis e financeiros organizados em forma de painel (painel data analysis). Os resultados empíricos demonstram que, em geral, as empresas que emitem bonds possuem maior alavancagem com capital de terceiros, perfil de dívida com prazo mais alongado, maiores índices de imobilização, maior taxa de rentabilidade derivada do elevado faturamento, o que demonstra também a diferença do tamanho médio das empresas com emissão de bonds com as demais, confirmando a afirmação de Valle (2001) de que apenas as grandes empresas brasileiras possuem atuação ativa na captação no mercado de eurobonds e bonds estrangeiros. Também foi verificado que o comportamento dos indicadores financeiros em relação ao endividamento por bonds está em acordo com as teorias da estrutura de capital, em especial com a teoria do trade-off estático que preconiza que quanto maior a alavancagem da empresa, maior a rentabilidade para os acionistas. O estudo não possui o objetivo de generalização dos resultados, ficando as conclusões restritas à amostra e ao período analisado. / The financing by negotiable securities has been gaining importance in the international scene and competing with traditional ways of financing such as the banking loans. However, there are not many scientific studies in Brazil that approach the financing of companies through debt securities, especially medium and long-run debts issued in international market, the eurobonds and euronotes. Therefore, the objective of this study is to analyze and describe the market of eurobonds and euronotes, its history, characteristics, tools and techniques, with special attention to the Brazilian securities. In order to do that, a descriptive-exploratory analysis and the establishment of relations between variables will be done through an ample revision of literature, presentation and exposition of historical market data, non-statistical analysis of emissions volumes and development. It is also the objective of this study to analyze empirically, through a descriptive and exploratory form, the profile of companies that issued bonds in the international market, and the utilization of bonds in the financing structure of Brazilian companies, supported by the theories of capital structure of the static trade-off and peking order. In order to do that, statistical analysis of panel data was used. Empirical results indicated that, in general, Brazilian companies that issue bonds in the international market show higher leverage, longer term, higher fixed assets / equity ratio, higher profitability derived from high level of sales, which also demonstrates the difference between the average size of companies with emission of bonds and others, confirming the verification of Valle (2001) that only large Brazilian companies issue in the eurobonds and foreign bonds markets. It was also verified that financial indicators and leverage level are related, in accordance with the theories of capital structure and especially with the theory of static trade-off which praises that the higher the company´s leverage, the higher the profitability for the shareholders. It is not an objective of the present study to generalize the results, being the conclusions restricted to the analyzed sample.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2017-03-17T11:54:57Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Andreia Marques Duarte.pdf: 1507570 bytes, checksum: 2c878c80efbb6b35d05ed823e6fdd271 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-03-17T11:54:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Andreia Marques Duarte.pdf: 1507570 bytes, checksum: 2c878c80efbb6b35d05ed823e6fdd271 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-09 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This thesis concerns about the main factors that had influenced capital flows to Brazil during the period 2008-2015, particularly the foreign portfolio investment flows. Highlighting within the internal factors the difference between interest rates, the international reserves increasement and the rise up on investment grade by Credit Rating Agencies, and among external factors, the increase in international liquidity provided by the monetary easing policies adopted in the developed countries. Will be unveiled the context of the international financial crisis that began in the United States in mid-2007 and the repercussion and impacts for Brazil in terms of external financial fragilization from the perspective of Minsky's Financial Fragility Hypothesis / O presente trabalho analisa os principais fatores que exerceram influência sobre os fluxos de capitais direcionados ao Brasil ao longo do período 2008-2015, particularmente os fluxos de investimento estrangeiro em portfólio. Destacam-se dentre os fatores internos o diferencial da taxa de juros, o aumento das reservas internacionais e a elevação ao grau de investimento pelas agências de classificação de risco e entre os fatores externos a ampliação da liquidez internacional propiciada pelas políticas de flexibilização monetária adotadas nos países centrais. Será desvelada a contextualização da crise financeira internacional, iniciada nos Estados Unidos em meados de 2007 e a repercussão e impactos para o Brasil em termos de fragilização financeira externa sob a ótica da Hipótese da Fragilidade Financeira de Minsky

Both economists and policy makers are interested in understanding the welfare effect of economic policies, especially in small open economies such as Turkey and Iran. This knowledge is crucial for priority setting in any informed policy discussion. This dissertation aims to study the impoverishing effect of high levels of out-of-pocket (OOP) payments in the health sector, referred to as catastrophic health expenditure (CHE), and investigates the impact of exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) on both the microeconomic and macroeconomic indicators of a country. For millions of people worldwide, health payments present a huge financial risk. A high rate of OOP health care payments can lead to CHE, which can force households to cut down their consumption, minimize access to their needs, or face poverty. This makes the design of financial risk protection necessary for governments in order to secure people against the financial hardship at the time of incurring CHE. This thesis comprises three essays. The first investigates financial risk protection indicators related to OOP health care payments through CHE mean positive overshoot and incidence and depth of impoverishment. This research observes that in the absence of universal health care insurance in Iran, together with a high share of OOP spending for health care (more than 52%), the Iranian households facing CHE will eventually face poverty. In the second essay, using a difference-in-differences propensity score matching approach, I seek to analyze the degree to which Iranian universal health care insurance protects households from high rates of OOP health expenditure. In this study, I evaluate the effect of the universal health insurance program on Iranian CHE. The results show that the program was successful in decreasing the rate of OOP health expenditures and CHE in Iran during the sample period. The third essay estimates the ERPT using product-level daily data on wholesale prices of imported agricultural products, where the identification is possible by using daily data on the domestic inflation rate. The results of standard empirical analyses are in line with existing studies that employ lower frequencies of data by showing evidence for incomplete daily ERPT of about 5 percent.

This dissertation examines three distinctive issues that concern the regulators and policy makers in the development of financial markets. It contains three stand-alone research projects within the context of law, finance and economic growth. Chapter 2 examines the dynamic relationship between banks and economic growth from the points of view of market efficiency and asset pricing theory. Publicly traded banks are broadly representative of a country???s banking sector, so that banking industry stock prices will broadly reflect the performance of a country???s banking sector. Because previous research has established that the institutional framework, as well as the aggregate size, of the banking sector can significantly affect economic growth, this chapter investigates whether the stock returns on a country???s banking sector contain information about future economic growth, and whether the specific country and institutional characteristics that affect the functioning of the banking system and market efficiency also influence this relationship. Using the data from 18 developed and 18 emerging markets, the chapter finds a significant and positive relationship between bank excess return and future economic growth in both the time-series and panel analyses. The chapter also finds that this positive relationship is significantly strengthened by the enforcement of insider trading law, by banking crises, by bank disclosure regulations and financial development, but is weakened by government ownership of banks. Chapter 3 investigates the role of bank idiosyncratic volatility in economic growth and systemic banking crises. Using the same dataset from Chapter 2, this chapter finds an ambiguous relationship between bank volatility and economic growth in the time-series studies, which suggests that the effect of bank volatility on economic growth is more country-specific. In the panel analyses, the chapter finds a negative but very weak relationship between bank volatility and future economic growth. This negative relationship is magnified by banking crises and bank disclosure standards, but is alleviated by the government ownership of banks, the enforcement of insider trading law and financial development. The chapter goes further to examine whether bank volatility leads to the occurrence of systemic banking crises, and finds that the marginal effect of bank volatility on the probability of banking crises is very weak for the sample of all markets, and this result is mainly driven by the data from the emerging markets. However, bank volatility is a significant predictor of banking crises even after being controlled for macroeconomic indicators, which implies that market forces are more powerful in promoting the soundness of the banking system in developed markets. We also find that those macroeconomic and banking risk management indicators have different impacts on the probability of banking crises for the emerging and developed markets. Therefore, caution needs to be taken in interpreting the cross-country results of the studies on banking crises. Chapter 4 studies the corporate governance issues in China, a significant developing country that has been neglected by the current law and finance literature. Incorporated with the legal environment and ownership structure of China???s listed companies, the chapter develops a simple game model to study a neglected aspect of current corporate governance literature: the expropriation arising from the mixture of weak investor protection, ownership concentration coexisting with ownership dispersion, and the absence of a controlling shareholder. The last two chapters find that government ownership undermines the positive link between bank excess return and economic growth, but alleviates the negative impact of bank volatility on growth as well. This chapter shows that government ownership is also a two-edged sword in corporate governance in China: it leads to a double-agency problem; however, the strong legal protection of State assets also increases the cost of expropriation. Using the data from 1996 to 2003, the chapter finds the empirical evidence consistent with the model. By analysing the puzzles in China???s stock market, the chapter suggests that improving the legal protection of investors is the key issue in the future development of the financial market.

Most financial institutions have not been successful at internationalisation, with some being remarkably unsuccessful. There are fewer occurrences of cross-border mergers and acquisitions than in most other industries. Foreign financial institutions tend to underperform relative to domestic financial institutions. Rugman and others have argued that their internationalisation primarily occurs at the regional rather than global level. Existing theories identify some barriers to firms? internationalisation, but these theories, were developed for manufacturing firms, and were rarely applied to financial services firms. This research seeks to identify barriers to financial institutions' internationalisation and contribute to the under-researched area of services internationalisation. To better understand the barriers to internationalisation, qualitative research techniques were used for an in-depth case-study analysis of one firm and its attempts at internationalisation, followed by detailed interviews of internationally experienced financial institutions executives from other firms. Finally, the apparent preference for regional over global expansion was investigated, through a quantitative analysis of over 12,000 cross-border, financial-services merger and acquisition transactions from 1990 to mid-2005. The research identified thirty-eight barriers to internationalisation, consistent with Rugman's findings on regional expansion, but also with the effects of similarity variables such as language, culture and legal system. The quantitative analysis tested these effects and found that the region effect was high, and was stronger than language and cultural effects individually, but about the same as their combined effect. The legal system similarity is not statistically significant when all effects are combined. This research contributes to this under-researched field. Given that internationalisation supports economic growth in the host and home countries, an improved understanding of these barriers may assist policy makers and enable managers to make better international investment decisions. The findings on the effect of geography versus other factors, such as language and culture, may inform managers' choice of target countries.

Utilizzando un campione di imprese non finanziarie quotate appartenenti all'area euro, analizzo le determinanti della struttura finanziaria aziendale. Coerentemente con il tradizionale approccio teorico, utilizzo una misura dell'indebitamento a valori di mercato, stimato col modello di Black-scholes-merton. alcune variabili analizzate hanno effetti simili nei vari paesi, mentre altre cambiano: il rischio, misurato con la volatilità del valore di mercato dell'attivo, è la variabile più rilevante. Il rischio e l'asimmetria informativa su di esso rendono il debito meno attraente, a causa di maggior costi attesi di fallimento, minore vantaggio fiscale e maggiori costi di agenzia. La nazionalità influenza le scelte finanziarie. l'integrazione dei mercati finanziari nell'area euro cambia significativamente a seconda dei segmenti di mercato considerati: il mercato monetario ed interbancario sono fortemente integrati, il mercato obbligazionario ed azionario mostrano di essere su un percorso di integrazione, il mercato del credito bancario è ancora molto frammentato. le normative fiscali e fallimentari differiscono nei dodici paesi, come anche il contesto economico. / Using a sample of non-financial listed firms located in the Euro area, I investigate the determinants of capital structure choices. In line with the traditional theoretical approach, I use a market-value measure of leverage, estimated with the Black-Scholes-Merton model. I find that some variables have similar effects across countries, while others may play a different role; risk, measured as the volatility of the market enterprise value, is the best predictor of observed leverage ratios. Risk, and asymmetric information about risk, make debt less attractive, because of higher expected bankruptcy costs, lower expected debt tax shield and higher agency costs. National environments are an important determinant of observed ratios. The integration of Euro-area financial markets varies significantly depending on the market segment considered: money and inter-bank markets are highly integrated, corporate bond and equity markets show a clear path of increasing integration, retail banking markets are much less integrated. Fiscal and bankruptcy rules differ across the twelve countries; the economic background varies as well.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Government and Public Administration

The continued funding of America's persistent trade and fiscal deficits has sparked debate among international economists. One controversial explanation argues that East Asia is pursuing "Bretton Woods II" and funding American deficits as part of a greater development policy. This paper examines the Chinese policy response to the global economic crisis and finds that China's policy actions provide evidence for "Bretton Woods II." Furthermore, the Sino-American relationship is now characterized by codependence which has implications for the policy decisions of each country.

This thesis examines the empirical validity of the efficient market hypothesis, currency substitution, purchasing power parity theory, interest rate parity theory and the monetary approach to exchange rate for the foreign exchange markets of Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. The empirical results give support to the efficient market hypothesis, mixed evidence for the existence of currency substitution, a strong indication for the long run purchasing power parity theory, support for the inclusion of expectations variable in the interest parity theory, and rejection of the monetary approach to the exchange rate.