This thesis explores how perceived risk, which has been primarily developed in Western contexts, may help understand consumers' action in relation to the Chinese Internet banking services market. This market is new and acknowledged as having great potential, but there is insufficient information regarding potential consumers and their perceptions or decision-making. The theory of perceived risk is a key construct influencing Western consumers' decision making; whether it is applicable in the current context is unknown. A wider customer perspective is therefore important to improve both our understanding of perceived risk theory and its usefulness in the Chinese Internet banking services market. The thesis reviews the major research perspectives on perceived risk within consumer behaviour literature. It provides a comprehensive understanding of the concept itself, to identify research gaps, and also develops a research model to evaluate consumers' risk perception within the context of Chinese Internet banking services. This research is conducted through the application of a critical realist approach, utilizing mixed methods. This approach enables the research to address a main controversy in the perceived risk field by evaluating the two common measurement models. It also develops an understanding of Chinese consumers' risk perceptions and how consumers' perceptions are formed and influenced by considering a range of contextual issues. This approach highlights the importance of obtaining social and cultural meanings to understand the measurement of risk perception- this is seldom addressed in the majority of perceived risk research. Results are thoroughly analysed, compared and contrasted to relevant Western research. Perceived risk, as a construct, is meaningful in helping to understand potential Chinese Internet banking services users. The principle risk dimensions identified in this research are consistent with those detailed in Western studies. However, the underlying relationships between the risk variables are different. Such differences can be attributed to the specific The measurement of risk is best operationalised through the application of one of the commonly used models - the multiplicative. This model produces results that are more consistent with the qualitative patterns derived from the application of mixed methods research. Whilst this research advocates the use of the multiplicative model, it also contends that future researchers should evaluate both common models- as the impact of context needs to be addressed sensitively,and this would also be consistent with the application of a critical realist perspective. Further, when considering perceived risk measurement, this research has found that the application of multiple variables is useful to test validity and reliability. These two issues are seldom considered or evaluated in previous perceived risk studies. This application also lends itself to the development of greater depth in data analysis, and therefore provides a more specific perspective to understand risk perceptions through detailed measurement. Future research in perceived risk should also address risk evaluation by considering the purchase stages, as consumers risk perceptions may be influenced and subject to change at different stages. Without such an approach results generated may be misleading, and may not provide an adequate basis for understanding consumers and developing appropriate marketing strategies to meet these concerns.

The thesis is composed of three chapters which analyze the monetary and macro-prudential policy using a New Keynesian DSGE model with the banking sector. The first chapter evaluates the effectiveness of time-varying macro-prudential tools and their interaction with monetary policy using the model framework of Gertler and Karadi (2011) which emphasizes the role of bank capital and endogenous leverage constraint due to the moral hazard problem. We consider the following three types of countercyclical macro-prudential tools: (i) capital requirements (CAR), (ii) deposit-based reserve requirements (DBRR), and (iii) asset-based reserve requirements (ABRR). The main findings are as follows. First, all three types of macro-prudential policy tools reacting to the financial condition (credit to output gap) are effective to mitigate the fluctuation of credit and business cycle by weakening the pro-cyclicality of banks' net worth and the counter-cyclicality of the endogenous leverage and external finance premium. Second, the effectiveness of each instrument differs by the source of shocks to the economy. In response to a TFP shock, the counter-cyclical CAR is the most effective to mitigate the fluctuation of credit and output and the ABRR is relatively more effective in response to capital quality shocks (credit supply shock). Third, all types of macro-prudential tools are welfare improving in combination with monetary policy, but the use of macro-prudential policy is relevant in response to the credit supply shock (financial shock). Finally, when the economy is hit by a financial shock, a relatively direct tool like asset-based reserve requirement (ABRR) can be the most welfare-improving and the relationship between monetary and macro-prudential policy can be complementary each other. The second chapter examines the role of banks' endogenous reserves and capital and the usefulness of financial condition (credit aggregates and external finance premium) as an indicator for setting up a relevant monetary policy rule. For the task, I construct an extended version of Goodfriend and McCallum (2007) model which is characterized by banks' loan production function with inputs (collaterals, monitoring works and bank capital buffer) under the households' deposit in advance (DIA) constraint. Main findings are as follows. First, banks' endogenous reserves can mitigate the variation of external finance premium by substituting costly monitoring works for lending. However, the effect of endogenous reserves on output and credits depends on types of shocks (credit-demand vs credit-supply shock), which reflects the role of external finance premium (EFP) as a banking attenuator (pro-cyclical EFP) or financial accelerator (counter-cyclical EFP) respectively. Second, the effect of banks' endogenous reserves can be limited when banks can adjust their capital flexibly compared to when banks' keep their capital to asset ratio (leverage) stable. Third, considering the role of money and the frictions on the credit-supply side, monetary policy reacting actively to the financial condition is welfare improving. These results imply that quantitative easing (QE) policy during the crisis was effective but the effectiveness of QE can be limited when banks can lower their leverage in a pro-cyclical manner. And monetary policy should pay more attention to the financial condition and prevailing interest rates as well as inflation and output gap in the presence of substantive financial frictions on the credit supply side in particular when the banking shocks dominate the economy. In the last chapter (co-authored with Professor Jagjit S. Chadha), we investigate the question facing many emerging economies: the extent to which a workhorse advanced economy model can yield important insights for monetary policy-making. We note that the standard sticky-price, monopolistically competitive model does not allow analysis of money and credit dynamics and led to a concentration of research on simple interest rate reaction functions. However, time-varying financial frictions tend to act as a tax on intermediation activities and so can vary output in a significant manner. In this chapter, we consider the implications of financial frictions for baseline monetary policy using a model calibrated on Indian data and find that a simple interest rate reaction function may not be welfare maximizing when banking shocks are dominant in the economy.

This thesis is based on a case study of the design and use of management control systems (MCS) in a post-merger organisation. The study, which is motivated by the lack of literature on management control systems under mergers and acquisitions, is based on a Nigerian bank that has gone through a merger under the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) directives to consolidate the banking sector. Data for the analysis was gathered from two sources. Firstly, semi-structured interviews were conducted with managers at various levels of the bank. Secondly, various internal and external documents were examined to corroborate the findings from the interviews. Theoretically speaking, the study drew on different strands of institutional theory to provide an understanding and interpretation of the results. First, new institutional sociology (NIS) provided an explanation of the impacts of external institutions on the merger as well as the design and use of post-merger controls. Old institutional economics (OIE) and power framework were also drawn on to explain the impact of internal institutions and power relations on the merger and the design and use of post-merger controls. The study found evidence of how various coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphic forces as well as intra-organisational power relations contributed to the institutionalisation of controls as rules and routines in the post-merger organisation. The study contributes to knowledge by extending our understanding of the management controls literature on mergers and acquisitions.

This thesis consists of three essays examining different aspects relevant to the banking sectors of developing economies. The first two essays focus on Emerging Europe a region with one of the highest foreign bank presence in the world - to study the impact of foreign bank ownership and bank organizational structure on the cost of financial intermediation and terms of loan contracts. The last essay focuses on Kenya which is home to M-Pesa the mobile-phone based money trans-fer and financing service initially launched in Kenya in 2007 and subsequently in other emerging countries such as Albania, Romania, India, Egypt and several other African countries - to examine its impact on the performance and outreach of commercial banks. The first essay investigates the impact of foreign bank entry, home and host country conditions on net interest margins (NIMs), using a newly collected panel dataset with ownership information for 265 banks operating in nine Southeast European countries over the period 1995 2011. As the banking sector of many emerging markets and in particular the European transition economies have been dominated by foreign banks understanding the impact of such reforms on host country banking sectors is important for designing supportive policies. We do not find evidence of foreign bank entry having a beneficial effect for host countries in terms of reducing the cost of financial intermediation in the long run, as foreign banks change their behaviour over time. We show that foreign banks have initially lower NIMs compared to domestic banks, however this effect weakens the larger the foreign presence and the more established foreign banks become. We find that home country regulation and supervision have an effect on bank behaviour, with foreign banks coming from countries with stricter regulation having higher NIMs in host countries. The second essay studies the impact of institutions on bank organizational hierarchy. Studying the internal organizational structure of banks is important as it determines the type of information acquired and used in lending decisions and consequently the type of borrowers banks lend to. This is important not only for bank's loan portfolio composition and their financial soundness but also for borrower's ability to access funds on favourable terms and the overall financial system stability and economic development. Using a unique bank-level survey dataset covering 32 countries and 611 banks, we introduce a new and direct measure of organizational hierarchy and exploit the distinctive feature of multi-national banks which face different institutional environments in the countries they operate. We find that the same parent bank is more likely to grant decision-making authority to its foreign affiliates operating in countries with stronger institutions compared to those operating in weaker institutional environments. Combining the bank- with firm-level data we further find that a strong institutional environment which favours a decentralized organizational structure leads to better lending terms to SMEs decentralized banks grant loans with longer maturities, lower interest rates and are less likely to require collateral compared to their centralized counterparts. These findings further our understanding of bank organizational structure as a channel through which law affects lending. In the last essay we use the advent of the mobile money innovation in Kenya in 2007 as an interesting laboratory to investigate the impact of a financial innovation on the performance and outreach of commercial banks. Providing more insights about this link is important as it helps inform the debate among policy-makers and regulators on the impact of a non-traditional source of competition on the service provision of formal financial institutions. Given that financial inclusion is a major problem in developing countries, detailed micro-level evidence on this issue is important for promoting household welfare. Combining the 2006, 2009 and 2013 FinAccess household surveys with bank financial statement and branch penetration data at the county level we find that banks more exposed to the competitive pressure induced by the mobile money innovation improved their performance and expanded their outreach towards households traditionally excluded by formal financial institutions. Additional results further show that households report less supply side barriers to financial access in counties more exposed to the advent of the mobile money innovation. These results highlight the importance of increasing the contestability of banking markets in order to promote financial inclusion and a more competitive banking sector.

This dissertation contributes to the global political economy of finance by examining the historical evolution of the German financial system. The origins of Germany's nonmarket financial structure are consistently identified as path-dependent influences of its system of “patient” rather than “speculative” financial capitalism. This thesis revisits the historical evolution and crystallization of German corporate banks on universal, as opposed to specialized, financial practices. In stark contrast to the existing literature that relies on efficiency-based explanations, it emphasizes the political nature of bankers' financial practices, and the role of social power in shaping financial structure. Examining universal banking in this way stands its significance upside down by showing its roots in speculative practices and the politics of industrialization rather than patient finance and efficient calculation. The thesis consists of three parts: Part I delineates the intellectual riddle posed by the received scholarship: “despite obvious connections,” between economics and politics, orthodox political economists have been mystified by the role of power in universal banking's development. It therefore outlines an historical sociology of financial development to reassemble this puzzle. Part II charts the developmental path of German banks from the 18th to mid 19th century. This section first stresses how early universal banking—“mixed-banking”—was an unintended product of the speculative practices of Rhenish financiers engaged in a political struggle over industrialization. It further demonstrates that the adoption of “mixed-banking” practices by corporate banks must similarly be understood in terms of power rather than as a solution to market failure. Part III charts the historical narrative to 1914 highlighting how the early speculative character of “mixed-banking” engendered a transformation into the concrete form of universal banking following social struggles around the introduction of deposit banking. The thesis underscores the general importance of examining economic institutions from the perspective of power.

There is a wide variation in central bank policy stances across developing countries: Some central banks emphasise stability, in both prices and the financial system; some emphasise financial deepening; and some place equal emphasis on both goals. This thesis explores the argument that those who control the sources of finance on which countries rely for investment shape central bank policy stances. The argument has its roots in the theory of the structural power of capital; a theory which has remained under-explored for developing countries. This thesis seeks to contribute to the literature on structural power by further developing and probing the structuralist theory in the context of developing countries, notably those dependent on aid and natural resource rents. Combining insights from the literature on structural power and on the economic and political correlates of aid and natural resource dependence, I explore whether and how those who control the sources of finance on which countries rely for investment shape central bank policy stances. To explore these questions the thesis employs a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. First, I use case studies from Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda to shed light on the mechanisms through which variations in a country's major sources of investible funds induce changes in the stance of central bank policy. Second, I explore the relationship between dependence on aid and on natural resources and the stance of central bank policy econometrically, using crossnational statistical analysis. The statistical analysis contributes to theory-building by developing quantitative measures of key theoretical concepts and probes structuralist theory by examining the generalisability of the findings of the case studies. Collectively, the evidence presented in this thesis suggests that power rooted in the control of capital helps to account for central bank policy stances. The results of my research contribute to extending the theory of the structural power of capital to finance in developing countries and to the debate about the costs and benefits of different economic development strategies.

Due to the reform of payment systems from netting settlement systems to Real Time Gross Settlement systems (RTGS) around the world in recent years, there is a dramatic increase in the interest in modeling the large-valued interbank payment system. Recently some queueing facilities have been introduced in the response to the liquidity management within the RTGS systems. Since stochastic process models have been wildly applied in social networks, and some aspects of which have similar statistical properties with the payment system, therefore, based on the existing empirical research, a Markov type model for RTGS payment system with queueing and collateral borrowing facilities was developed. We analysed the effect on the performance of the payment system of the parameters, such as the probabilities of payment delay, the initial cash position of participating banks and the probabilities of cross bank payments. Two models were proposed; one is the simplest model where payments were assumed to be equally distributed among participating banks, the other one is a so-called "cluster" model, that there exists a concentration of payments flow between a few banks according to the evidence from empirical studies. We have found that the performance of the system depends on these parameters. A modest amount of total initial liquidity required by banks would achieve a desired performance, that minimising the number of unsettled payments by the end of a business day and negligible average lifetime of the debts. Because of the change of large-valued interbank payment systems, the concern has shift from credit risk to liquidity risk, and the payment systems around world started considering or already implemented different liquidity saving mechanisms to reduce the high demand of liquidity and maintain the low risk of default in the mean time. We proposed a specified queueing facility to the "cluster" model with modification with the consideration of the feature of the UK RTGS payment system, CHAPS. Some of thepayments would be submitted into a external queue by certain rules, and will be settled according an algorithm of bilateral or multilateral offsetting. While participating banks's post liquidity will be reserved for "important" payments only. The experiment of using simulated data showed that the liquidity saving mechanism was not equally beneficial to every bank, the banks who dominated most of the payment flow even suffered from higher level of debts at the end of a business day comparing with a pure RTGS system without any queueing facility. The stability of the structure of the central queue was verified. There was evidence that banks in the UK payment system would set up limits for other members to prevent unexpected credit exposure, and with these limits, banks also achieved a moderate liquidity saving in CHAPS. Both central bank and participating banks are interested in the probability that the limits are excess. The problem can be reduced to the calculation of boundary crossing probability from a Brownian motion with stochastic boundaries. Boundary crossing problems are very popular in many fields of Statistics. With powerful tools, such as martingales and infinitesimal generator of Brownian motion, we presented an alternative method and derived a set of theorems of boundary crossing probabilities for a Brownian motion with different kinds of stochastic boundaries, especially compound Poisson process boundaries. Both the numerical results and simulation experiments are studies. A variation of the method would be discussed when apply it to other stochastic boundaries, for instances, Gamma process, Inverse Gaussian process and Telegraph process. Finally, we provided a brief survey of approximations of Levy processes. The boundary crossing probabilities theorems derived earlier could be extended to a fair general situation with Levy process boundaries, by using an appropriate approximation.

How do policymakers make decisions during financial market uncertainty? I develop a straightforward framework of policymaking in uncertainty. To overcome uncertainty, policymakers gather information using strategies discussed across a variety of political science disciplines. Policymakers need information to be able to make goal-oriented decisions. The information strategies actors choose are conditioned on the uncertainty problems they face. In turn, the information they receive impacts their policy decisions. My three empirical papers investigate what strategies are likely to be chosen in different types of uncertainty and how these choices affect policy decisions. My first paper, co-written with Mícheál O’Keeffe, develops a signaling game that policymakers play when they perceive data uncertainty, i.e. uncertainty about economic fundamentals. The model is supported empirically with analytic narratives of recent crises in Korea and Ireland. My following two papers deal with situations of increasing causal uncertainty, i.e. uncertainty about how actions cause outcomes. In both of these papers I use Multi-state Event History Analysis. I find that when there is high causal uncertainty policymakers tend to use learning strategies that start with international-level policy recommendations. These recommendations are then updated with the experiences of regional peers who have adopted them. Beyond creating and finding evidence for a parsimonious framework of decisionmaking in uncertainty, I make a number of other contributions to political economy. I extend the empirical tools researchers can use to understand decisions in complex choice environments. I provide evidence that making financial bureaucrats “independent" does not ensure positive outcomes. Specifically, it does not guarantee that financial bureaucrats will provide accurate information needed for effective policymaking.

The aim of my thesis is to investigate the effect of competition on financial intermediaries in light of the conflicts of interest and perverse incentive structures that exist in the financial system. The first chapter of my thesis, Credit Rating and Competition investigates the conflict of interest arising from the issuer pay compensation model of the credit rating industry using a theoretical model of competitive interaction. Rating agencies balance the benefits of maintaining reputation (to increase profits in the future) and inflating ratings today (to increase current profits). Our results suggest that, unless new entrants have a higher reputation vis-a-vis incumbents, rating agencies are more likely to inflate ratings under competition relative to monopoly, resulting in lower expected welfare. The second chapter, Market Frictions, Interbank Linkages and Excessive Interconnections, studies banks' decision to form financial interconnections. I develop a model of financial contagion that explicitly takes into account the possibility of crisis. This allows me to model the network formation decision as optimising behaviour of competitive banks. I show that regulatory intervention in the form of deposit insurance and more implicit too big to fail type perceptions of government guarantees creates a wedge between social and private optimality. In the presence of these implicit and explicit guarantees, competitive banks find it optimal to form socially suboptimal interconnections in equilibrium. The final chapter, Competition, Premature Trading and Excess Volatility, attempts to explain the empirically observed excess asset price volatility as a consequence of competitive interaction between market participants. Our model shows that in the presence of competitive pressures, market participants find it optimal to act prematurely on unverified, noisy information. This premature reaction leads to lower total profits, excess market volatility and spike in volatility at the closing time of the market.

This thesis seeks to understand how shifts in global economic power affect the policies and practices of multilateral development banks (MDBs). The study proposes three hypotheses. First, the “business” of development lending has changed radically in recent years as a result of the rise of middle income economies that now have a variety of options for sovereign borrowing—a reality thus far largely overlooked in academic research on MDBs. Second, a key factor defining the operational characteristics of the 20-odd MDBs in existence is the relative balance of power between borrower and nonborrower shareholders in MDB governance. Third, the financial pressures inherent in MDBs’ organizational models limit the options for MDB operations and shape how they will react to evolving market conditions. To test these hypotheses, the study examines several inter-related areas of MDB history and current operations, using as cases the World Bank (controlled by non-borrowing countries), the Inter-American Development Bank (control divided between borrowers and non-borrowers) and the Andean Development Corporation (controlled by borrowing countries). The analysis of the MDBs is complemented with case studies of Colombia and Ecuador, two countries with extensive borrowing histories with all three MDBs, to understand the demand side of development lending from the point of view of borrowing country government officials. The thesis finds compelling evidence in support of all three hypotheses, which suggests that the prevailing academic view that MDBs can be understood by focusing on the organization itself while ignoring the views of borrowers is not sufficient to understand the complexities of multilateral lending. MDBs are not all-powerful, but rather one resource among many at the disposal of governments to further their development, with varying competitive characteristics that impact the demand for their loans by borrowing countries in the current global context.