The objective of this research is to investigate the role of geography in the venture capital investment in the US biotechnology industry. Data include 4,409 quarterly investment deals from the MoneyTree Survey during 1995 and 2008. Strong spatial concentration patterns are identified. Using both ordinary squares regressions and geographically weighted regressions, we find that as the geographic distance between biotechnology firms and their investors decreases, deal size increases. Location in established biotechnology clusters, such as New England and California, helps to bring a larger deal into individual firms as well. Also, the impact of distance decay in these two clusters is more significant than that in other regions. In addition, we find that a global venture capital investing syndication network brings large deals. Furthermore, firms in later stages of development, and/or with few financing rounds, tend to receive more capital per deal.

The joint hypotheses of informationally efficient markets, transparent financial statements, and adequate accounting disclosure suggest that announcements of changes in the accounting treatment of employee stock options from footnote disclosure to expense recognition should not trigger stock price reactions because free-cash-flows will not change. Event study results from a sample of 241 firms that announce such changes reveal statistically significant negative price changes followed by positive price changes about equal in magnitude. We propose the learning, sophisticated investor, neglected firm, and firm size hypotheses to explain the observed announcement-period stock price reaction.

This work finds that Managerial and Investor Sentiment are determined by differing sets of economic variables, that share some common factors: inflation, liquidity and the term premium. Decomposing the Sentiment Indices, it is found that the Investor Sentiment Model Component and the Managerial Sentiment Residual Component are primarily responsible for the predictive power of predicting cross-sectional stock returns that is much stronger than previous results. Evidence is presented that part of the predictive power is due to the components predicting priced market factors. Overall, there is strong evidence that the predictive power of Managerial Sentiment is driven primarily by private information, while the predictive power of Investor Sentiment is driven by public information.

Using a panel data set of 62 countries from 1995 through 2013, the effects of financial openness on changes in entrepreneurship rates in the economy are estimated for emerging and developed markets. Controlling for the effects of political risk in conjunction with capital controls, capital controls have a negative effect on entrepreneurialism in emerging market countries, but can have a positive effect on entrepreneurialism in developed markets. The imposition of financial controls have a greater effect in magnitude in developed markets than in emerging markets, indicating that development of the internal financial system plays a role in extenuating the effects of capital controls. The effect of the imposition of financial controls is not uniform across the various financial instruments. In particular, the imposition of capital controls on derivatives and real estate in developed markets is associated with a negative effect on entrepreneurialism, unlike for other financial instruments in developed markets. However, in emerging markets, the effects on entrepreneurialism of financial controls seems to be more uniform when controlling for the interaction of political risk and financial controls. In controlling for the effects of political risk on financial liberalization, the effects of financial controls between emerging markets and developed markets are not the same. In general, the imposition of financial controls in emerging markets is associated with a decline in entrepreneurialism, while the imposition of such controls in developed markets is associated with an increase in entrepreneurial activity.

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

This work consists of five separate essays that examine the banking industry from a number of viewpoints. In the first essay, I consider how the ratchet effect interacts with workers' ability to cooperate to determine effort provision in teams. I show how the dominant constraint varies with both the size of the team and the members' ability to monitor each other's effort. Small teams tend to have their effort provision constrained by the ratchet effect; large teams are instead constrained by the inability of the team members to demand effort from each other. In the second essay, I examine the phenomenon of large team transfers in professional service firms, especially investment banks. I argue that large team moves occur because employees benefit by working with the most talented coworkers. Above-average teams may move together to effectively exclude younger, less-talented workers. These team transfers are optimal when employees are remunerated with team-based bonuses, which may explain their significance in investment banking. In the third essay, I consider the securitization market. First, I provide an explanation for equilibrium credit ratings inflation that does not require investor irrationality. Second, I argue that moral hazard in securitization results in banks either selling the entirety of securitized products, or none at all. Finally, I consider a number of possible government interventions in the market and conclude that many proposed interventions are either ineffectual or counterproductive. In the fourth essay, we design an improved LIBOR reporting mechanism. This mechanism, which we name the "whistleblower mechanism," uses the revealed preference of other banks to determine the borrowing rate of a given bank. Truthful reporting is the sole equilibrium of the mechanism that we design; the mechanism is budget-balanced. In the fifth essay, we consider the analogy between systemic risk and pollution. We argue that an ex post tax cannot replicate capital regulation because of a 'polluter cannot pay' problem. Secondly, we show an equivalency result between ex ante taxation and capital regulation. We then show that unless the ex ante tax is levied in capital, however, it may perversely increase the amount of debt in the financial system. We argue for further capital regulation.

published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Recursive estimation is an essential procedure in econometrics which appears in many applications when the underlying dataset or model is modi ed. Data arrive consecutively and thus already estimated models will have to be updated with new available information. Moreover, in many cases, data will have to be deleted from a model in order to remove their effect, either because they are old (obsolete) or because they have been detected to be outliers or extreme values and further investigation is required. The aim of this thesis is to develop numerically stable and computationally efficient methods for the recursive estimation of large-scale linear econometric models. Estimation of multivariate linear models is a computationally costly procedure even for moderate-sized models. In particular, when the model needs to be estimated recursively, its estimation will be even more computationally demanding. Moreover, conventional methods yield often, misleading results. The aim is to derive new methods which effectively utilise previous computations, in order to reduce the high computational cost, and which provide accurate results as well. Novel numerical methods for the recursive estimation of the general linear, the seemingly unrelated regressions, the simultaneous equations, the univariate and multivariate timevarying parameters models are developed. The proposed methods are based on numerically stable strategies which provide accurate and precise results. Moreover, the new methods estimate the unknown parameters of the modi ed model even when the variance covariance matrix is singular.

Estimating risk premia has been at the forefront of the financial economics' literature due to their informational content. Risk premia are of particular interest to academics, policymakers and practitioners given the information they disclose on expected asset returns for a given level of risk, their contribution in asset pricing and their ability to disentangle the different sources of risk. However, risk premia are unobserved and their estimates strongly differ from one study to another, as they are highly sensitive to the specification of the underlying model, sparking hence a strong interest in their analysis. The aim of the thesis is to estimate risk premia in a dynamic term structure model setting. The first part of the thesis comprises of an overview of a particular class of dynamic term structure models, namely affine term structure models. The overview will include important concepts and definitions. The second part of the thesis uses a risk-averse formulation of the uncovered interest rate parity to determine exchange rates through interest rate differentials, and ultimately extract currency risk premia. The method proposed consists of developing an affine Arbitrage-Free class of dynamic Nelson-Siegel term structure models (AFNS) with stochastic volatility to obtain the domestic and foreign discount rate variations, which in turn are used to derive a representation of exchange rate depreciations and risk premia. The third part of the thesis studies both the nominal and real UK term structure of interest rates using a Gaussian dynamic term structure model, which imposes the non-negativity of nominal short maturity rates. Estimates of the term premia, inflation risk premia and market-implied inflation expectations are provided.

The first chapter assesses the impact of the cohort size on labour market outcomes. Using exogenous variation and micro-level data for France, the UK and the US, we study the effect of supply shocks measured at different ages on unemployment rates and wages during a cohort's life cycle. The results from an IV estimation show that the largest magnitude of the effects is found when the cohort size is measured at age 25. The impact of both wages and unemployment rates are temporary, however, both decreasing with time. The second chapter analyses the effects of large inflows of foreign students on English undergraduates. Our results confirm previous findings that there is no overall effect, but we identify changes in the distribution of natives. We find that top performing English students are crowded in by foreign students. It is also mainly English-born males, natives who do not have English as their mother tongue and those of Asian ethnic origins that are crowded in by foreign students. In chapter three, we aim to understand the short-term effects of changes in the level of the tuition fees charged by English universities on students' geographic mobility. Our results suggest that the increase in tuition fees in 2006/07 charged by English universities led students to enrol into universities that are closer to home, with a larger effect experienced by men and White students. Moreover, we find that students are less likely to move to universities located in rich areas.