The development literature has long emphasized the critical roles of the real rate of interest and of household saving for mobilizing and allocating financial resources, securing price stability and fostering economic development. However, there is no consensus among development economists with regard to the relationships among these variables. The Chinese economy in recent years has been in a transition from a centrally planned economy to a combined planned and market economy. Economic decentralization, embarked on by the government in the late 1970s, has allowed market mechanisms including interest rates to play more active roles in the saving-investment process. Corresponding to the overall structural adjustments in the economy, China's financial system has also undergone substantial changes. The state budget no longer monopolizes investment financing, and state banks have become primary financial intermediaries. Household saving is now the principal source of domestic savings and has increased rapidly. Against this background, this dissertation presents an empirical analysis of the sensitivity of household saving in China to changes in the real interest rate. The major conclusion of the dissertation is that the real interest rate has substantial impact on the volume of household saving in China, with changes in inflationary expectations playing an important role. Specifically, a positive correlation is found between real interest rates and the growth of household financial savings. Changes in real interest rates are also associated with changes in the composition of households financial savings. This implies that interest rate policies can play an important role in resource mobilization for China's economic development. As households adjust their financial portfolios when faced with uncertainty, a high priority for the government is to set the level of nominal interest rates in line with the public's changing inflationary expectations. This will require that the interest rate policy be more flexible in both its adjustment over time and its term structure. A full-fledged role for interest rates in the efficient allocation of financial resources will not be achieved in China's transitional economy until the demand of the state enterprises for investment financing also becomes sensitive to interest rate changes. This calls for closer coordination between the government's financial and economic policies.

The dissertation investigates the macroeconomic consequences of financial liberalization (FL) in less developed countries (LDCs). The dissertation develops a theoretical and empirical critique of the two dominant paradigms of FL, viz., neoclassical and neostructuralist theories; develops and tests aspects of a dynamic theory of FL, termed the "noise-led" theory of development; and utilizes heretofore unexploited data on stock returns and share prices in LDCs in adapting measures of financial market volatility in order to assess the macroeconomic consequences of FL. The dissertation argues that FL is likely to distort economic development and to induce increased financial market volatility. The main implication of this work is that in the wake of FL investment may be misallocated and the macroeconomy destabilized. Hence, in the context of resource scarce LDCs, FL provides a poor foundation for sustained economic growth. The conclusions reached here contradict those reached by neoclassical and neostructuralist theories. These paradigms are found to be unable to account for the disappointing experiences of the LDCs with FL. The noise-led theory addresses these failures. According to the noise-led theory, while FL does not impede economic growth per se, it does lead to a particular kind of development, termed here noise-led development. Noise-led development is characterized by a preponderance of high risk investment practices, fragile financial structures and ultimately by lower rates of real-sector growth than would prevail in the absence of liberalization. The central proposition of the noise-led theory--viz., that FL discourages long-term real sector investment--is tested for a range of liberalized Latin American and Asian countries. The hypothesis is supported for Colombia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Venezuela. The dissertation argues that FL induces increased financial market volatility. Several types of volatility indexes (VIs) are developed to test this hypothesis. It is found that FL may indeed have induced greater volatility in Chile, Korea, the Philippines, and Venezuela. This evidence suggests that contra the conventional wisdom, the Asian FL experiments may share more of the problems associated with the Latin American experiences than is generally assumed.

My doctoral dissertation is structured into three comprehensive chapters that converge upon the central theme of corporate governance. In the first chapter, we investigate CEO narcissism’s effect on firms’ debt costs. Although this managerial personality trait benefits shareholders, we find that firms face higher debt financing costs as CEO narcissism increases. The results indicate that grandiose narcissistic CEOs further heighten debt costs relative to other forms of narcissism. Using a quasi-natural experiment focusing on a sudden increase in firms’ net income, our analyses indicate that bondholders demand higher yields from firms with narcissistic CEOs than non-narcissists, suggesting a causal relation between narcissism and bond yields. Overall, the results indicate that firms with narcissistic CEOs bear a higher debt cost than firms with non-narcissistic CEOs, providing evidence that managerial narcissism exacerbates the shareholder-bondholder agency conflict. In the second chapter, we examine whether narcissistic CEOs engage more in opportunistic insider trading relative to other types of CEOs. By using a numeric measure of CEO narcissism based on textual analysis, we find that CEOs with a higher level of narcissism engage in opportunistic insider trading more intensely, which is consistent with the exploitative personal benefit hypothesis. We employ numerous approaches to alleviate endogeneity concerns, including the coarsen exact matching, instrumental variable, falsification test, and Heckman’s two-step sample selection model. The cross-sectional analysis shows that the effects of CEO narcissism on opportunistic insider trading are more pronounced for CEOs with less legal knowledge and weaker monitoring pressure. Taken together, our findings highlight narcissism as an important personality trait that drives a CEO’s opportunistic insider trading behavior. In the third chapter, we examine the effect of board gender diversity policies on firm value. First, we confirm the previously documented negative investor reaction to the 2018 CA gender quota requirement (SB 826). Additionally, we find significantly negative cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) following the passage of the 2020 CA board diversity mandate (AB 979) and the 2020 Nasdaq board diversity disclosure rules and significantly positive CARs when AB 979 and SB 826 were legally overturned in April and May of 2022. Second, we examine CARs to director appointments from 2003-2021. While CARs to female director appointments are always economically smaller, the difference in CARs between male and female appointments is not statistically significant. Moreover, the difference in CARs remains insignificant even after #MeToo, when arguably, firms faced greater pressure to appoint female directors. Finally, we examine the qualifications of appointed directors. We find that male directors have more work experience and more CEO experience relative to female directors, but this differential in qualifications across male and female directors does not change significantly in the post #MeToo period. Overall, the results are consistent with the idea that while investors react less positively to female director appointments and negatively to laws that increase or encourage board diversity, the negative reaction does not appear to be driven by a lower supply of qualified female directors. / Business Administration/Finance

As a species of mineral resources industry, jadeite industry has the multiple attributes that mineral resources should have, namely, resource attributes, cultural attributes, and artistic attributes. With the development of society and the progress of science and technology, especially in the context of the increasingly perfect socialist economic system and the increasingly mature socialist economic system in China, the jadeite industry gradually integrates with finance, thus bearing financial attributes, and being increasingly affected by financial attributes.This article intends to stand in the perspective of deep integration of finance and the jadeite industry, focusing on the financial attributes of the jadeite industry, clarify the history and current situation of deep integration of finance and the jadeite industry through multiple dimensions, and summarize and propose the development direction, rules, and characteristics of the integration of the jadeite industry and the financial industry. The path, method, and mode of transformation of the jadeite industry from "natural jadeite" to "humanistic jadeite" provide new ideas for research on the development of the jadeite industry's financialization, and form a unique industrial construction path and structure that deeply integrates the jadeite industry and the financial industry. / Business Administration/Management Information Systems

Unit trust funds are one of the fastest growing areas of the financial sector in South Africa today. There are currently over 1 million unit trust fund investors, with their associated management companies controlling over R20 billion in funds. The growing importance of the unit trust fund industry means that, increasingly, both investors in these funds, and those who judge the performance of fund managers, have heightened incentives to ensure portfolio performance is accurately measured. More specifically, there is a growing need · to measure the performance of the individual fund managers themselves, thus enabling the directors of the fund management companies to suitably reward successful portfolio managers, whilst penalizing those who are less successful. A great deal of research has been done on this topic both in South Africa and worldwide; however most of the studies have made use of Betas and 'benchmark' portfolios, both of which have many inherent flaws. This thesis examines the performance of unit trust fund managers using a 'benchmarlt free measurement technique, thus enabling one to avoid the measurement problems previously encountered. Chapter I gives a brief outline on the South African unit trust fund industry. In Chapter 2 the author looks specifically at the controversies which underlie the measurement of risk, and those surrounding risk-adjusted performance measurement. The flaws in previous studies are noted. Chapter 3 traces the development of the Performance Change methodology which is the method used in this dissertation. Chapter 4 describes the Performance Change methodology as applied to South African data; with the results from the tests presented in Chapter 5. Final conclusions and proposals for future research are put forward in the concluding Chapter 6. The author has shown conclusively that when utilizing the Portfolio Change Measure, unit trust managers in general are not able to consistently outperform the market. The author's findings suggest that trust fund managers do not achieve any significant level of additional return for the particular funds under their control. The Portfolio Change Measure has two further particularly important uses: (1) it can act as an additional management tool to aid the directors of unit trust fund management companies in measuring how efficiently portfolio managers are managing their funds; ·and, (2) it enables investors to make a more 'informed' investment decision because the comparative performance of unit trust funds is better analysed.

This dissertation analyzes the impact of external macro and internal factors on the price of Bitcoin. Employing data from January 1, 2020 to February 28, 2023, this dissertation starts with the system operation of cryptocurrency represented by Bitcoin and uses the Granger causality test of the time series VAR model, impulse response, and variance decomposition to analyze the factors affecting Bitcoin prices. Empirical tests have shown that the price of Bitcoin is affected by both the external macro factors and internal operation mechanism, and there are significant changes in the influencing factors before and after the issuance of the China mining ban in May 2021. / Business Administration/Finance

In my paper, I extended Aggarwal, Bhagat and Rangan’s “The Impact of Fundamentals on IPO Valuation”. I examine IPO valuations over three time periods: 2002-2006, 2007-2011 and 2012-2016. In these time periods, I analyze the first day returns these firms experience along with testing the significance of four variables on their valuations: Total Assets, Previous Year’s Sales, Previous Year’s R&D Expense, and Sales-to-Assets Multiple. The results point to a shift in valuation tactics from valuing in line with investors’ expectations in the early years to undervaluing them in more recent years. Also, Sales and R&D have statistical significance for firm’s valuations over recent years while Total Assets remains constant and the Sales-to-Assets multiple does not have significance.

The intent of this thesis is to explore the effects of small-medium enterprises' (SME) access to capital on country economic performance and examine the differences between the developed world and the developing world. Specifically, two main questions are addressed: whether there are significantly higher barriers-to-entry through a lack of access to credit in developing countries as well as whether SMEs access to credit around the world has changed over time. Using a sample of 46 countries and grouping them two different ways (developed vs developing and free-market vs non-free-market), I find a negative correlation between the SMEs access to capital and country performance for both developed and developing economies. Surprisingly, the free-market and non-free-market economies differ in that free-market economies SME access to funding is positively correlated to GDP per capita and GNI for developed countries, while non-free-market economies SME access to funding are negatively correlated with country growth measurements (real GDP growth and gross fixed capital formation). The data do not, however, confidently support the conclusions that SMEs exert a causal impact on growth. Furthermore, I find that over the last decade, access to finance SME has remained relatively stagnant in developing countries, despite best efforts from the IMF and the World Bank.

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