The research looks at the design of fiscal and monetary policy in EMU. The characteristics of the "economic constitution" established in the Maastricht treaty are analysed to test their robustness to different hypothesis about fiscal sustainability and fiscal and monetary policy interaction. Chapter two illustrates how the possibility of default of public debt in one large member country creates interdependence among fiscal positions of all member countries. Chapter three and four show that a similar kind of interdependence between national fiscal position could be determined by the effect that un-funded fiscal expansions have on the level of prices. The theoretical argument, borrowed from the so called Fiscal Theory of Price Determination, is developed both in a closed economy, to illustrate the basic mechanism and its interpretation, and in a two country monetary union model. Chapter five analyses, in a game theoretical framework, how the interdependence between policy instruments should be recognised in full, in order for any policy to be effective. In a situation in which a possible conflict of objectives or preferences between policy makers is present, any institutional arrangements which does not deal with it positively is intrinsically inefficient and can result in the policies cancelling each other out. The last chapter develops an example on how the conflict between policy institutions can be endogenous to an institutional structure chosen to reduce the influence of policy uncertainty on the economy. It is therefore a note of caution about the common belief that is possible with simple institutional solutions to overcome differences in preferences or objectives that are characteristic of the European environment. The analysis suggests that both greater fiscal policies cooperation and decentralisation of policy institutions from national to regional are developments necessary to achieve the policy goals of the Monetary Union.

Doctor of Philosophy / School of Family Studies and Human Services / Maurice M. MacDonald / Since 2008, the effects of the Great Recession have lingered in memory and in public discourse, and have underscored the need to better understand the determinants of financial resilience. Financial resilience refers to the household’s ability to absorb and respond to financial shocks (MacKinnon & Derickson, 2013). A financial shock may be induced by a rapid decline in income or asset values, an increase in expenses, or some combination thereof. Solvency -- the relationship between a household’s assets and liabilities -- is one aspect of financial resilience: maintaining a healthy debt ratio affords a household the opportunity to liquidate assets to meet debt obligations in response to a financial shock. Thus, the practical question which inspired this dissertation was "what is the right amount of debt for the household?" Within the personal finance and consumer economics literature, borrowing and saving -- behaviors which influence household solvency -- are conceptualized in part as functions of individual future orientation. The premise that resources are fungible, however, has led to the characterization of concurrent borrowing and saving as a behavioral anomaly. Corporate finance, by contrast, does not characterize this common practice as an anomaly, but suggests that concurrent borrowing and saving is, in part, a matter of balancing the costs and benefits of debt. However, theories of corporate finance cannot predict or explain how individual future orientation might influence a household’s capital structure. Thus, this dissertation adds to the literature by exploring precisely this question: how does individual future orientation influence household capital structure? The present results suggest, in contrast to the existing body of research, that future orientation is positively associated with an individual’s propensity to use leverage to finance investments; but that within a complex family resource management system, this individual propensity is moderated by the relative bargaining power of the other members of the household.

This thesis investigates impact of pension reforms implemented in the EU27 countries in time period 1993 - 2013 to implicit pension debt. We applied Holzmann's (2004) methodology to calculate implicit pension debt. Primary outcome is that in the investigated period, 21 countries have reduced its im- plicit pension debt in range of 57% to 700% of its GDP. On the other side, in Denmark, Germany and Portugal, implicit pension debt increased in range 10% - 194% of their GDP. Paper also investigated impact of individual components implemented in pension reforms. Largest impact was recorded by change of pension age. In- creasing pension age by 1 year reduced the IPD by 46% of GDP on EU27 level. This was also the most often used measure as it was implemented 42 times in the investigated period. Reforms of indexation have also significant impact on IPD, however, as indexation is linked to chosen variables to decrease IPD it is only possible to change indexation linkage. Possibilities of early retire- ment were also limited, as it was adjusted 13 times. The effect was smaller in comparison to increasing retirement age where increasing early retirement age decreased implicit pension debt by 21% of GDP on the EU27 level. This equals to impact of increasing contribution rate by 1 p.p. The smallest impact was...

Recognizance of a debt The thesis aims to provide overview of judicial and doctrinal solutions of particular issues regarding the recognizance of a debt (as governed by the Czech Commercial Code) and to discuss to what extent the generally accepted solutions could stand up once the Act No. 89/2012 Coll., the Civil Code (hereinafter referred to as the "New Civil Code") becomes effective. Following the general introduction the recognizance of a debt is described together with similar legal instruments. Then the thesis focuses on particular issues associated with the instrument of recognizance of a debt, such as methods of identification of the debt being recognized, relationship between recognizance of a debt and set-off, ways of explicit and implicit recognizance of a debt etc. The thesis emphasizes the judicial solutions of these issues and the respective doctrinal scrutiny. The commercial law regulation (as governed by the Act No. 513/1991 Coll., the Commercial Code) is of the main importance. If appropriate, the civil law regulation (as governed by the Act No. 40/1964 Coll., the Civil Code) is used. As the New Civil Code repeals these laws, the thesis looks into the future and attempts to evaluate to what extent the recent conclusions of practice and theory will be applicable. The thesis also...

Modes of insolvency solution of non-entrepreneurial natural persons The development of credit transaction and associated rising debt of households, led to a non entrepreneurial natural person becoming the typical subject of modern insolvency law. Act No. 182/2006 Coll., on Insolvency and its solution (Insolvency Act) gives consumers the possibility of remediation mode of solution of their insolvency through discharge of debt, which allows debtor to solve his unfavourable economic situation given at least part of his debts is satisfied in such a way that he avoids a devastating impact of his debt and has a chance of exiting the debt spiral and to starting over. The thesis deals with insolvency of these persons and modes of its solution, based not only on the current legislation, but also on judicial practice because a whole range of issues have been solved only within this framework. The change should be brought about by the so called conceptual amendment of the Insolvency Act, prepared by the Ministry of Justice, whose goal is to incorporate disputed issues and issues unsolved in the Insolvency Act. The prime purpose of my thesis is to analyse the process of consumer's insolvency solution, especially focusing on discharge of debt and the slight bankruptcy and its specificity with emphasis on issues...

This essay inquires of retirement system in Slovakia. In the first theoretical part author brings the retirement system in, its evolution and character. Also inform about genesis of reform and introduce its legislative basic. In the second part of essay author analyses period of time when the government was changed twice. Every government set up the pension system according to its ideas. The main target of this essay is to recalculate that changes and point at real impact in form of deficit, public debt or in form of saver.

L’importance du cautionnement pour les sociétés est indéniable. En plus de contribuer à l’essor de ces dernières par l’accès au crédit, le cautionnement s’impose comme un levier de célérité et de simplicité, atouts majeurs dont requiert le monde des affaires. Cependant, son implémentation dans le cadre des sociétés ne va pas sans poser des difficultés. En effet, l’articulation du cautionnement au sein des sociétés suscite une multitude de controverses et d’ambiguïtés. La combinaison des règles du droit des sociétés et de celles des sûretés n’est pas toujours empreinte d’homogénéité. La complexité de la mise en œuvre du cautionnement au sein des sociétés prend un relief particulier quand il s’agit d’ajouter au panel des règles existantes, les multiples productions jurisprudentielles et les innombrables apports de la doctrine. Ces diverses confrontations dépouillent la matière de sa fluidité, de sa cohérence et par là-même, de son efficacité. Son essence première s’en trouve entachée et le seul trait qui semble ne souffrir autant de reproches est son caractère singulier. L’état des lieux actuel révèle que la mise en œuvre du cautionnement dans les sociétés manque de clarté. Les incessantes interventions du législateur, les désaccords entre les acteurs juridiques, tendent à « polluer » son régime et à le compromettre, ce constat étant valable dans ses deux variantes, que le cautionnement soit donné par une personne physique, le dirigeant social, ou par une personne morale, la société. En pareil contexte, il est impératif de redonner son éclat au cautionnement. / The importance of surety bond for companies is undeniable. In addition to contributing to the growth of the latter through access to credit, surety bond is a lever of speed and simplicity, which are major assets required by the business world. However, its implementation in the context of companies is not without difficulties. Indeed, the articulation of surety bond within companies gives rise to a multitude of controversies and ambiguities. The combination of corporate law and security law rules is not always uniform. The complexity of the implementation of surety bond within companies takes on particular importance when it comes to adding to the panel of existing rules, the multiple productions of case law and the countless contributions of doctrine. These various confrontations deprive the material of its fluidity, its coherence and, consequently, its effectiveness. Its primary essence is tainted by it and the only trait of character that seems not to suffer so much reproach is its singular character. The current inventory shows that the implementation of surety bond in companies is unclear. The incessant interventions of the legislator, the disagreements between the legal actors, tend to pollute his regime and compromise it, this observation is valid in these two variables, whether the assurance is given by a natural person, the company director or by a legal person, the company. In such a context, it is imperative to restore the surety bond to its former glory.

Corporate finance theory suggests that bank’s private information about borrowers lets them hold up borrowers for higher interest rates and that hold up power should increase with borrower risk, and if so, banks with private information about borrowers should increase their rates in recessions more than warranted by borrower risk alone. Studies have been concluded in other markets for these propositions, particularly for the US market. This paper has replicated these studies for an emerging economy (Republic of South Africa) to see if the findings will hold across dissimilar markets. Hold up cost is not just a function of information monopoly, Rajan, 1992 posits that firms with a higher probability of failure should suffer more from informational hold-up cost. The risk of failure is more pronounced during recession than in expansion and hence relationship banks with information monopolies are able to extract more rents in recession than warranted by borrower default risk alone. Using literature that suggest that information rents can be mitigated by multiple banking relationships, I investigated further, whether this problem of hold up cost can be mitigated through a different channel by studying credit spreads of firms that have publicly sourced funds, and continued to seek private funds in the South African market.Using LOANSPREAD as the dependent variable in a regression model, I find that loan spreads are higher for bank-dependent firms, rise in recessions and rise by a greater amount in recessions for bankdependent firms. In the context of this study I define bank-dependent firms as those firms who have issued no public bond. The key finding is that, indeed multiple banking relationships can reduce informational monopolies, but issuing public bonds can be another channel that South African firms can use to avoid being taken advantage of by financiers with information monopoly over competing financiers.

Debt and credit markets played a crucial role in recent economic history. This thesis is composed of three chapters, each of which explores some drivers of private and public debt accumulation throughout the past decade. The first two chapters are directly linked, and study some behavioural determinants of household debt accumulation in the United States in the run-up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The third chapter takes a different perspective, and focuses on the political economy of fiscal reforms. In the first chapter, I study whether the growth in US household debt ahead of the 2007-2008 financial crisis can be attributed to shifts in the distribution of personal income across the US population. The underlying theoretical mechanism is based on the idea that if individuals are concerned with status, rising income inequality within a given social group might lead its relatively poorer members to consume a larger proportion of their resources, due to a desire to emulate the consumption levels of richer individuals (Duesenberry [1949]; Frank, Levine and Dijk [2014]; Bertrand and Morse [2016]). I test this hypothesis by exploiting state-level variation in top incomes over time, following the methodology proposed by Bertrand and Morse [2016]. The results I present in this chapter challenge the status-emulation theory of consumer behaviour during the 2000s credit boom. I show that, between 1996 and 2007, only low and-middle-income home-owners increased their expenditure and debt-to-income ratios as a response to an increase in income inequality in their state of residence. I also show that the growth in income inequality was strongly correlated with house prices growth, across US states and metropolitan areas. The positive correlation between inequality and household debt in the pre-crisis US might therefore be simply explained by the wealth and collateral effects experienced by low and middle-income home-owners living in areas where inequality was growing at the fastest rates. The lifting of credit constraints due to rising house prices have been a major driver of household debt accumulation ahead of the 2007-2008 financial crisis (Mian and Sufi [2011]). However, this effect might have been coupled with a generalized optimistic belief that the growth in house prices was likely to continue in the future (Case, Shiller and Thompson [2012]). The second chapter therefore tests whether consumers hold realistic expectations about the housing market, and whether this is a driver of their consumption and saving decisions. Using the Michigan Survey of Consumers, I show that American households have heterogeneous expectations about the future of house prices, which systematically depend upon household characteristics, as well as upon the history of past house price realizations in the local area of residence. I also analyze individual-level forecast errors to show that house price expectations are biased and inefficient. Changes in individual forecast errors are predictable from past house price realizations in the local area of residence: in particular, forecast errors are positively correlated with recent price trends, and tend to become overoptimistic in good times, and over-pessimistic in bad ones. The predictability of forecast errors from public information available at the time the forecast was made suggests a violation of full-information rational expectations theory. This systematic bias in house price expectations matters because consumers make financial decisions on the basis of their house price beliefs. By exploiting an exogenous shift in housing sentiment, I show that when individuals expect the value of their properties to rise, they borrow against the anticipated increase in home equity. The third and final chapter shifts the focus to the political drivers of public debt and deficits. Public debt crises often call for the intervention of international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In this chapter, I introduce a new panel dataset on planned fiscal policy prescriptions included in all IMF loans between 2002 and 2012, and use it to study how domestic politics of recipient countries influence the content of IMF lending agreements. I show that IMF policy prescriptions depend strongly on domestic politics and that fiscal conditions are shaped by a political force often neglected in public choice literature: the threat of extra-parliamentary opposition, or civil unrest. Extra-parliamentary opposition (measured as a populations’ propensity to riot and demonstrate) significantly reduces the stringency of fiscal policy conditions attached to IMF loans. It also reduces the number of reforms in the realms of public employment and labor markets. These results suggest that fiscal policy has a strong political component even during circumstances when domestic politics are commonly assumed to cease to matter, as they do in IMF agreements. Also, they suggest that voting is not the only mechanism through which politics enters the technical realm of economic policy.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Human Ecology-Personal Financial Planning / Maurice M. MacDonald / The 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances was used to investigate the impact of scarcity on the savings motives and debt of middle-class, non-retired households. This project adds to financial planning literature by incorporating previously unobserved variables, financial and time scarcity, in financial decision-making. Its use of the scarcity lens has also provided new insights for serving the middle-class with financial planning. Middle-class household decision-making was impacted by financial and time scarcity. Objective financial scarcity was related to increased odds of saving for basic needs and negatively related to saving for retirement. Objective financial scarcity was negatively associated with household debt, which can be attributed to credit constraints lenders want. Subjective financial scarcity was negatively associated with saving for retirement and at the same time positively associated with saving for esteem or luxury. Objective time scarcity was positively related to higher levels of household debt. Subjective time scarcity had a significant but mixed relationship with household debt. Financial planners and financial counselors working with the middle-class should consider the impact of scarcity for managing debt and shaping goals that will influence saving for retirement.