L’objectif global de cette étude est de déterminer l’impact de la crise de la dette souveraine européenne sur les titres boursiers des six banques d’importance systémique (D-Sibs) canadiennes et celles des pays PIIGS (Portugal, Irlande, Italie, Grèce & Espagne). À cet effet, nous avons échantillonné nos données entre le 1er janvier 2002 au 31 décembre 2015 pour séparer notre fenêtre temporelle en cinq sous-périodes et ce, dans le but d’isoler certains événements d’envergure systémique. Un des sous-objectifs vise à déterminer s’il y a eu un effet de contagion transfrontalier entre les institutions canadiennes et européennes. Pour chacune des cinq sous-périodes, nous avons donc construit des réseaux basés sur les relations de cointégration entre les prix hebdomadaires des titres boursiers des D-Sibs étudiées. Le second sous-objectif consiste à détecter la présence d’un comportement grégaire auprès des investisseurs, en temps de crise, à l’aide de régressions basées sur la dispersion moyenne entre les rendements de chaque titre et ceux d’un portefeuille de marché composé des D-Sibs canadiennes et des pays PIIGS. Cette étude démontre que la crise financière de 2008-2009 a davantage impacté les banques d’importance systémique intérieure canadiennes et des pays PIIGS, contrairement à la crise de la dette souveraine européenne. En effet, l’effet de contagion transfrontalier est davantage notable lors de la faillite de Lehman Brothers, alors que les turbulences de la crise européenne se sont, en général, limitées à ses frontières. De plus, le comportement grégaire est uniquement détectable lors de la crise des subprimes. Ceci implique que les investisseurs n’ont pas perçu les D-Sibs comme étant menacées par la situation financière précaire de la zone euro.

The objectives of this thesis are: first, to investigate the impact of investor sentiment in UK financial markets in different investment intervals through the construction of separate sentiment measures for UK investors and UK institutional investors; second, to examine institutional herding behaviour by studying UK mutual fund data; third, to explore the causal relation between institutional herding and investor sentiment. The study uses US, German and UK financial market data and investor sentiment survey data from 1st January 1996 to 30th June 2011. The impact of investor sentiment on UK equity returns is studied both in general, and more specifically by distinguishing between tranquil and financial crisis periods. It is found that UK equity returns are significantly influenced by US individual and institutional sentiment and hardly at all by local UK investor sentiment. The sentiment contagion across borders is more pronounced in the shorter investment interval. The investigation of institutional herding behaviour is conducted by examining return dispersions and the Beta dispersions of UK mutual funds. Little evidence of herding in return is found, however strong evidence of Beta herding is presented. The study also suggests that beta herding is not caused by market fundamental and macroeconomic factors, instead, it perhaps arises from investor sentiment. This is consistent between closed-end and open-ended funds. The relation between institutional herding and investor sentiment is investigated by examining the measures of herding against the measures of investor sentiment in the UK and US. It suggests that UK institutional herding is influenced by investor sentiment, and UK institutional sentiment has a greater impact as compared to UK market sentiment. Open-end fund managers are more likely to be affected by individual investor sentiment, whereas closed-end fund managers herd on institutional sentiment.

The objective of this thesis is to examine cross-border contagion effects during the 2007-09 crisis in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and from all the possible propagation channels, it chooses to focus on cross-border bank loans. It tries to discover which global and local factors had significant influence on the changes in bank loans from banks in source (lending) countries to banks, as well as households, corporations and government in host (borrowing) countries. The main research method is a panel data regression model. The empirical results suggest that both local and global factors had influence on the changes in cross-border loans, i.e. helped to spread the 2007-09 crisis to CEE. The significant local factors were macroeconomic and financial characteristics of both source and host countries, such as their GDP growth differential, interest rate differential, FDI, or profitability and health of the banking sector. The significant global factors were the expected market volatility and investors' risk appetite/aversion which was an indicator of "pure" contagion. The main contribution of this thesis lies in its focus on CEE and the analysis of investors' behavior based on their changing risk appetite.

The importance of international trade cannot be neglected as it represents an important channel of wealth creation in the actual globalised world. Thus, the present writer aims to identify how the commercial flows have changed after the adoption of Euro and once the financial crisis has burst. Furthermore the main factors that influence trade are researched by using the gravitational econometric model and employing panel data for 14 EU member countries. The results show that the intensity of commercial exchanges are highly influenced by the level of development (GDP) of the country and the amount of FDI that are attracted, while the use of a common currency appears to be not too significant. At the same time, indicators are more sensible during the crisis period than the stable one, hence even small changes in independent variables can lead to higher decrease in trade. Key words: European trade, liberalization, competitiveness, financial crisis, contagion, Euro, gravitational model.

v Abstract The aim of this thesis is to assess the effect of central bank communication on joint occurrence of extreme returns and on extreme movements shared by two stock markets. The research concentrates on the following aspects: predictability of increased share of countries experiencing extreme returns in the eurozone based on the nature of policymaker's statement and also a set of control variables, change in probability of extreme returns joint occurrence after president's speech, determinants of joint occurrence when non-standard measures were announced and finally, effect of crisis period. Additionally, determinants of shared extreme movements between particular countries are examined. The results suggest that communication nature or crisis are not significant predictors of extreme returns joint occurrence. Moreover, markets seem to react jointly to ECB president's speech only when they have extremely high returns. Furthermore, markets jointly react on days of nonstandard measures announcement differently. We also found that in the first quantile dovish statements tend to increase returns above their mean in case of Greece and Germany, and Greece and the UK. Rest of the pairs of countries have opposite reaction to dovish tone and communication is significant in the 95th quantile for the pair...

This work analyzes the contagion effects between energy and CEE financial markets during the two crisis periods (global financial crisis 2008-2009 and energy market crisis 2014), using a sample of daily data from 2004 till 2015. We detect contagion by observing the degree and structure of two dummy variables for specified crisis periods included into the quantile regression models on the basis of a dependence measure called "coexceedances". Our results show that there are significant contagion effects present between the gasoil and CEE stock markets during the 2008-2009 period and mixed evidence of contagion between crude oil market and CEE stock markets. CEE stock markets do not appear to exhibit significant contagion effects with energy markets during the recent energy market crisis. These results substantially differ from those found in the developed European markets. In particular, our results indicate that energy markets and stock markets in developed Europe seem to display significant contagion effects during the 2014-2015 period. Keywords: Central and Eastern Europe, contagion, energy market, quantile regression

The dependence structures in financial markets count among the most frequently discussed topics in the recent literature. However, no general consensus on modeling of the cross-market linkages has been reached. This thesis analyses the dependence structure and contagion in the financial markets in Central and Eastern Europe. Tail dependence, symmetry and dynamics of the dependence structure are examined. A conditional copula framework extended by recently developed dynamic generalized autoregressive score (GAS) model is used to capture the conditional time-varying joint distribution of stock market returns. Considering the Czech, Croatian, Hungarian, Austrian and Polish stock market indices over the 2005-2012 period, we find that time-varying Student's t GAS copula provides the best fit. The results show, that the degree of dependence increases substantially during the global financial crisis, having a direct impact on portfolio optimization.

We examine how access to bank credit affects trade credit in the supplier-customer relationships of U.S. public firms. For identification, we use exogenous liquidity shocks to supplier firms in the form of staggered changes to interstate bank branching laws. Using a variety of tests, we show that supplier firms with greater access to banking liquidity offer more trade credit to their customers. We also show that when bank branching restrictions are relaxed in the supplier's state, the supplier-customer relationship is more likely to survive. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The first part of this dissertation examines the presence of the financial contagion across European stock markets with respect to the Greece sovereign debt crisis by estimating the time-varying conditional correlations of stock returns between Greece and other European countries over 2001 to 2012. We find that the correlations vary over time and reach the peaks in the late 2008 during theU.S.subprime crisis, and in the beginning of 2010 of the height of European debt crisis. Further, the correlations between stock index returns of Greece and Spain, France, Ireland, Netherlands are significantly increased by Greek sovereign credit rating downgrade announcements. The second part of this dissertation examines the correlations of gold, dollar and U.S. stock returns over 2001 to 2012 using ADCC-GARCH model. The conditional correlations of gold-dollar returns are negative during all sub-sample periods and significantly increase in magnitude during both subprime crisis and sovereign debt crisis. The conditional correlations of gold-stock returns are positive on average over time. However, gold-stock correlation falls below zero during subprime crisis and sovereign debt crisis. Gold-stock correlation is significantly negatively affected by positive CPI announcements. And gold-dollar correlation is significantly negatively affected by negative GDP announcements and positive unemployment announcements. The effects of macroeconomic announcements are stronger during economic recessions.

Management of systemic risk in financial markets is traditionally associated with setting (higher) capital requirements for market participants. There are indications that while equity ratios have been increased massively since the financial crisis, systemic risk levels might not have lowered, but even increased (see ECB data 1 ; SRISK time series 2 ). It has been shown that systemic risk is to a large extent related to the underlying network topology of financial exposures. A natural question arising is how much systemic risk can be eliminated by optimally rearranging these networks and without increasing capital requirements. Overlapping portfolios with minimized systemic risk which provide the same market functionality as empir- ical ones have been studied by Pichler et al. (2018). Here we propose a similar method for direct exposure networks, and apply it to cross-sectional interbank loan networks, consisting of 10 quarterly observations of the Austrian interbank market. We show that the suggested framework rearranges the network topol- ogy, such that systemic risk is reduced by a factor of approximately 3.5, and leaves the relevant economic features of the optimized network and its agents unchanged. The presented optimization procedure is not intended to actually re-configure interbank markets, but to demonstrate the huge potential for systemic risk management through rearranging exposure networks, in contrast to increasing capital requirements that were shown to have only marginal effects on systemic risk (Poledna et al., 2017). Ways to actually incentivize a self-organized formation toward optimal network configurations were introduced in Thurner and Poledna (2013) and Poledna and Thurner (2016). For regulatory policies concerning financial market stability the knowledge of minimal systemic risk for a given economic environment can serve as a benchmark for monitoring actual systemic risk in markets.