This thesis draws upon contemporary research in economic geography and the social sciences to examine the reconfiguration of rural service space. In particular, the thesis explores the changing nature of mainstream retail financial service provision in rural England and the associated development, structure and use of alternative and diverse economic networks amongst rural communities and households. The thesis critically examines concepts of financial exclusion, and proposes the adoption ·of a more spatially sensitive approach to examine the variegated connectivity of finance to everyday places, through a financial ecologies approach. The thesis is based upon empirical research collected through statistical analysis and mapping of bank and building society branch closures between 1989-2009; ethnographic research with alternative and diverse economic institutions; semi-structured interviews with policy stakeholders, project coordinators and households; and secondary analysis of policy documents. I adopt a case study approach to examine the processes and impacts of service provision within three rural areas. In particular, the thesis explores three aspects of rural financial service change; in order to understand the spatial outcomes and impacts of processes of money and finance on the local financial landscape and everyday practices of financial engagement. First, the research explores the scale, geography and socio-economic variation of bank and building societies in England, and examines the specific local impacts of these broader institutional changes within three rural districts. Second, the thesis draws upon institutionalist perspectives to examine the development and use of alternative and diverse economic institutions in the context of broader social, political, and cultural factors. Third, the research considers the local impacts of financial service change, and examines the everyday engagement practices of rural households in relation to the financial subjectivities that are called forth and assembled in place. The thesis indicates the importance of space and place in determining and shaping the nature of rural service change, the impacts of which depend on the diverse institutional fabric of an area, and the local attitudes, social norms and economic practices of individuals, households and communities in rural England.

This thesis provides three substantial essays that investigate different aspects in relation to executive compensation: the role of monitoring mechanisms, bank performance and riskiness. It extends and contributes to the literature on an intense and ongoing debate among academics, policy-makers and practitioners about executive compensation and corporate governance issues in the banking industry. The current international banking regulators' reform proposals of executive compensation structure, as a consequences of current financial crisis 2007/09, motivates a more in-depth scrutiny of the relationship between corporate governance mechanisms and executive compensation. The general objective of this thesis is to provide an in-depth examination on executive compensation and other corporate governance mechanisms with a particular focus on the impact on performance and risk-taking behaviour of a representative sample of 67 of the publicly-listed commercial and bank holding companies, operating in 13 ED countries over 2000-2010. Specifically, this thesis has presented three essays on bank executive compensation in European banks and is organised as follows. Chapters 3 provides an in-depth analysis of the manually collected data set used for the empirical analysis and explores the relationship between bankers' executive pay and the role of monitoring mechanisms. Chapter 4 focuses on the relationship between executive pay and bank performance, using three alternative measures namely earnings per share, return on assets and stock market returns. Chapter 5 empirically explores the relationship between various compensation components on alternative bank risk-taking measures.

The goal of this study is to determine whether measures of firm-level corporate govemance, level of personal financial literacy and the lending technologies deployed by banks can predict the SME owner and/or manager's perception of bank credit availability. The study samples Chinese SMEs located in the northwestern city of Xi'an. The study finds that the owners and/or managers of SMEs perceive bank credit availability to be limited. Several estimated models using ordinal logistic regression were able to predict perceptions of bank credit availability. Firm size, bank loan demand, corporate governance and a measure of moveable asset lending were found to be significant predictors of how owners and/or managers perceIve bank credit availability. An important implication ofthis research project is that SME owners and/or managers in search of external fmance should enhance their corporate governance, specifically in the area of disclosure and transparency. The owners and/or managers of firms that score high on corporate governance are more likely to perceive financial obstacles to be low compared with other owners and/or managers. Another important implication is that financial literacy training may be necessary to increase banle credit availability. Education, a proxy for fInancial literacy, provides indirect evidence that financial literacy has a positive bearing on the perception of bank credit availability. Education was found to have a positive effect on corporate governance.

The 2007-9 financial crisis followed exponential growth in bank assets that, together with increasingly cross-border operations, may have exacerbated the later downturn. Observing changes in the financial markets since 1945 using both a chronological and a themed perspective, we find many other financial crises with similar features, together with recurring issues such as short selling and reserve currencies. We show how the Basel minimum capital requirements changed in response to those events. Our conclusion is that crises reflect similar underlying issues which require adaptable methods to ensure the stability of the wider economy. Having reviewed the criteria for aggregating a bank's exposure to credit risk and market risk, we demonstrate an alternative approach. We show theoretical calculations for a share, a bond and a forward and find that regulatory results tend to overestimate the short-term and underestimate the long-term time horizon. Applying this analysis to audited annual financial statements of banks in Europe, U.K and the U.S., selected according to NYU Stern's SRISK measure, we allocate their income into the major banking activities. Factors affecting risk are used in fixed effects panel regressions for each return. We then simulate annual factor returns using GARCH models and forecast bank returns for the following year. We find that our method explains a large proportion of these returns for our sample.

This thesis is an attempt to examine the activities of the London merchant bankers Frederick Ruth & Company in Anglo-American trade and finance between 1835 and 1850. It does not purport to offer a full inquiry into the world-wide interests of the house at this time nor to provide an exhaustive analysis of the economic relationships between Great Britain and the United States. Its more modest aims are therefore firstly to state the facts, which my research has revealed, of Ruths business with America, and secondly to try, through an examination of the house's papers supplemented by more general reading, to interpret Ruths activities in the wider context of Anglo-American trade and finance in general. The result can claim to be novel in that only Hidy's study of the Baring's at present offers a similar account in any detail. The story is presented for the most part in chronological. order so that the ebb and flow of the house's enthusiasm towards America, measured not only by the sentiments expressed in correspondence but by the volume of acceptances and the aggregates of outstanding balances, can be utilised to provide a central theme. In the course of the narrative however certain important topics stand out including the types of role which Ruths chase to adopt in diverse transactions, their attitude towards American securities, the nature and quality of their contacts across the Atlantic and so on. Moreover of particular interest are the individual. case histories of specific investments made for clients and also in effect for themselves, especially in the light of contemporary criticisms levelled at the merchant bankers with regard to their association with American stocks. Finally a statistical appendix is provided together with a number of synopses outlining those transactions with which the house was most preoccupied.

This thesis assesses the implications of financial deregulation and financial innovation on the following aspects of monetary policy transmission and bank portfolio behaviour in Indonesia. Chapter 4 investigates monetary policy transmission by employing bank balance sheet (loans, deposits and securities) and main macroeconomic variables (exchange rates, stock market index, output and consumer price index). Furthermore, the chapter investigates empirically, using V AR systems, the existence of each channel in the changing financial environment are evaluated for aggregate data (all banks) and disaggregate data across five groups of banks (foreign banks, private banks, mixed banks, regional banks and state banks) by investigating their impulse responses, variance decompositions and accumulated effects. Our observation covers the period of January 1980 to December 2001. In order to capture the effect of financial deregulation which assumed to bring innovations in monetary policy and the effect of 1997 financial crisis, we divide the whole period into three sub period: Period 1 (1980:01-1988:12) in which captures the first 1983 financial deregulation; Period 2 (1988:01-1996:12) in which covers the second big 1988 financial deregulation; and Period 3 (1997:01-2001:12) which include the 1997 financial crisis. In Chapter 5, we examine the role of Non Performing Loans (NPL) in Indonesian monetary transmission mechanism following the methodology employed in Chapter 4. In general, the results, both in Chapter 4 and 5, indicate that monetary policy contraction is not effective in the short run (three months); In the long run (60 months), money is super-neutral as proposed by Friedman (classical view) for the whole observation; while the results across three periods indicates various results in the short-run. Based on the results in Chapter 4 and 5, we investigate further the way Indonesian monetary transmission operates by examining bank portfolio behaviour across five groups of banks (foreign, mixed, private, regional and state banks) in Chapter 6. This chapter focuses on the effect of monetary policy, third party funds and NPL in affecting Indonesian banks behaviour toward loans and other liquidity assets, such as Certificate Bank Indonesia (SBI) and inter bank call money for impact, interim and total effects. We employ a dynamic mean-variance expected utility approach that enables us to calculate the multiplier responses of the choice items to unit changes in exogenous variables. The multiplier effects involve three kinds effects: impact (current), interim (ensuing periods) and total (cumulative) multipliers. The econometric technique employed in the estimation of this chapter is Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML). The findings confirm that monetary policy has the greatest impact effects on the banks' portfolios. In regard to the interim effects, all three factors affect those portfolios. In the long run, however, the variable NPL has the greatest influence. Consequently, it can be suggested that Bank Indonesia has to set prudential regulations on, and introduce some stringent supervision of, the banks to reduce the hindrance to the transmission of its monetary policy.

This research explores attitudes to and uses of control processes in four commercial banks in Malaysia. The research was conducted at Head Offices in Kuala Lumpur (capital city) and selected branches of four banks in one region of Peninsular Malaysia. The research method involved a "triangulation" between questionnaires (sample of 100 branch managers out of a total of 149 in the four participating banks), interviews with selected branch managers (sample of 41 in participating banks) , interviews with Head Office personnel, and secondary sources. Analysis was conducted at four levels: (1) organisational performance and survival; (2) interpersonal processes in the use of control systems; (3) the psychic environment of individuals and (4) racial and cultural influences. The main findings are as follows: First, the main independent variable in the Hopwood-Otley theory, the supervisor's budgetary style, proved impossible to measure satisfactorily I and the Job-Related Tension (JRT) variable proved not to have the unitary structure that Hopwood and Otley supposed. This casts some doubt on both the instruments and the constructs. Second, the triangulation method found contradictions between certain questionnaire results and interview results but found ways to reconcile most of these. It also allowed validation of the interview findings on some unforseen issues. Third, inter-bank differences may be mainly explained by interracial differences. This is because it is mainly the same variables that differ between races and between banks, and because the banks differ in their racial mix. Further, racial differences and bank differences are difficult to dichotomise since both can act either as cause or as effect. Fourth, the correlation structure of the responses is similar between the three races which suggests they share an underlying social and cultural structure. Fifth, the study found strong influence of personality and inter-personal, conflicts, and formation in the participating banks. sixth I the integrative contingency framework which assumes that corporate survival is market driven, needs in the context of commercial banks in Malaysia to be generalised in subtle but far reaching ways. Control systems clearly have many functions other than "control", and control per se can have several appearances and several realities in the context of a joint market-political-social environment.

The managerial issue being addressed in this research is perceived environmental uncertainty (experienced by corporate strategists) and its implications for strategy development processes at the strategic business unit level (or business-level strategy) across Barclays Bank PLC. The objectives of the research are achieved through: an extensive review of the strategy and uncertainty literature (Project 1); a series of semi-structured interviews with fifteen members of the Group Executive Committee at Barclays (Project 2); and the completion of 731 selfadministered questionnaires covering the seventeen strategic business units within the Barclays portfolio (Project 3). Through its findings, this research concludes that any link between perceived environmental uncertainty (at the corporate level) and strategy development processes (at the business unit level) across the Barclays portfolio is largely irrelevant. Strategists at Barclays are concerned mainly with the maximisation of shareholder value and concepts such as uncertainty, change and complexity are not within the managerial lexicon. Based on this observation, strategy development at Barclays does not involve a carefully managed reciprocal relationship between the firm and its environment, or a skilfully manipulated balance of the degree of change and the level of complexity with which the organisation is deemed able to cope. Strategy development involves the dedicated and ruthless stewardship of a highly successful and resilient business model that could not fail within the economic environment experienced during the period of this research (1999–2005). Consequently, the Bank’s strategic capability (e.g. people) and assets (e.g. brand and technology) are geared towards protecting and developing the business model, or in simpler managerial terms, ‘defending the money-printing machine’.

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