The covered warrant market in the UK has gained in popularity over time since first launched in 2002. This has opened up an alternative investment choice which offers derivative securities with a life of typically one to two years. It seems to fulfill many of the functions of a traded options market. Since most research has been focused on options trading, the investigation on covered warrants trading is still very limited. This is also largely due to the lack of readily available data for end-traded covered warrants and the existing covered warrants. A unique set of hand-collected data, supplemented by public and private data from main covered warrants issuer and the financial database are employed, making this thesis possible. The sample periods can be divided into two separate sets. The UK covered warrants trading during the period July 2004 - December 2006 are used to examine the impact of warrant introduction and expiration on the price, volume and volatility of the underlying securities. For the introduction analyses, both the announcement and listing of covered warrants have negative impacts on the price of underlying securities for both call and put features, though the impact of the announcement is more pronounced than that of the listing. These affects are temporary and do not persist much beyond the introduction of the warrants. Negative price impacts of the expiration event are also reported for both call and put covered warrants. However, this study finds no significant impacts on the volume of underlying securities trading from the announcement, listing and expiration of call and put covered warrants. Further evidence indicates an increase in volatility of the underlying securities during the announcement and listing of covered warrants. The results hold true for both call and put warrants cases. On the other hand, a decreasing stock volatility is found as a consequence of the expiration of both call and put covered warrants. The second data set involves the call covered warrants traded in the UK market between April 2007 and December 2008; this was analysed for evidence of the best appropriate covered warrants pricing model. This study suggests default risk as a major concern for the warrant price which is called the Vulnerable warrant price. The reasons behind this arise from concern about the issuer’s creditworthiness due to traders’ fraudulent action and the recent subprime problem, the difficulties of dynamic hedging by issuers because of market imperfections, as well as the no guarantees on covered warrant trading provided by the London Stock Exchange. The most salient findings of the study are the following. The Vulnerable warrant price is generally lower than both the Black-Scholes price and warrant market price throughout the warrant’s lifetime. The evidence suggests an overvalued warrant price in the UK market. Moreover, the in-the-money warrants indicate a higher rate of default in comparison to the out-of-the-money warrants. An additional finding shows that the market becomes aware of the default risk only on a short-term basis. The presentation of negative abnormal returns of both market and the Black-Sholes prices support the assumption that default risk is a relevant factor in pricing the UK covered warrants. These findings add to the literature dealing with the effect of derivatives trading on the underlying securities as well as providing more empirical evidence on a particular covered warrant market. This could be of interest not only for practitioners to widen their investment opportunities but also for regulators to have this as a guideline for their future related policies planning.

This manuscript is composed of three chapters.In the first chapter, I analyze the impact of key European Central Bank’s unconventional monetary policy announcements on inflation expectations, measured by Euro Area five-year Inflation Linked Swap rates five years ahead, since the aftermath of the crisis. I control for market liquidity and uncertainty measures, change in oil price shock and macroeconomic news. The results show that the impact of the European Central Bank’s announcements has been positive during the period under observation. Along the line of the expansionary monetary policy measures implemented, the agents have been revising upwards their long term inflation expectations. This means that the unconventional monetary policy measures were effective. In the second chapter, co-authored with Claudia Pacella, we construct a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with three layers of information: the key drivers of inflation, cross-country dynamic interactions, and country-specific variables. The model provides good forecasting accuracy with respect to the popular benchmarks used in the literature. We perform a step-by-step analysis to shed light on which layer of information is more crucial for accurately forecasting euro area inflation. Our empirical analysis reveals the importance of including the key drivers of inflation and taking into account the multi-country dimension of the euro area. The results show that the complete model performs better overall in forecasting inflation excluding energy and unprocessed food over the medium-term. We use the model to establish stylized facts on the euro area and cross-country heterogeneity over the business cycle. In the third chapter, using confidential firm-level data from the National Bank of Belgium, I document the heterogeneous response of firms’ markups to the 2008 financial crisis. Overall, markups increased in the aftermath of the crisis and the effect was larger for highly financially constrained firms. I show that standard heterogeneous-firm models, featuring monopolistic competition and variable markups, are unable to replicate these patterns. I then introduce endogenous demand shifters which respond to firm investment in market share (e.g. quality). I show that the interaction of an increase in the cost of procuring inputs combined with an endogenous quality downgrading can rationalize the observed changes in firm-level markups. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The evolving nature of the Korean 'chaebol' - both a business group and the founding family who control the corporation - continues to intrigue scholars of corporate governance (Khanna and Yafeh, JEL 2007). In my thesis, I investigate these multi-generational controlling families to explain the chaebol's significance in the historical evolution of South Korea's political economy during the 20th century. My research first describes the origins of chaebol entrepreneurs and details their role in the growth of light industry before the the rise of state-led industrialisation during the social revolution of the 1960s in South Korea. I then consider the specific institutional features which appear to work against family control, even though they would ultimately support its proliferation: 1) progressive politics; 2) inheritance tax; and 3) ownership dispersion. Notably, my analysis of these distinctive institutions provides a clearer understanding of the contemporary behavior of the chaebols and their ability to maintain family control over many decades of growth. In order to better understand the role of controlling families, during the state-led industrialisation period (1961-1988), I analyse their corporate networks and their ability to wield political power. To do so, I employ an unconventional source of evidence: a database of marriages among chaebol families. This research is theoretically grounded in the contact capabilities hypothesis advanced by Amsden (1989) and Guillén (2001a, 2001b with Kock). My scholarly approach complements parallel research on human networks within the state. My findings have implications for: 1) the epochal nature of chaebol-political networks; and 2) the market reaction to such network events, thus demonstrating the economic significance of these informal networks. In my last chapter on the post-1998 era of financial liberalisation, I explore the evolution of the ownership structure within the business group as it relates to policy history. I do this through an analysis of The Holding Company Act of 1999, and show how the controlling families in South Korea found novel ways to use the Act to support their family ownership and corporate control in spite of the original intentions of the regulators. As I show, share buyback programmes, first popularized in Anglo-American financial markets, were crucial to the maintenance of chaebol. As it turns out, liberal policies, imported from the West, proved no more able to limit family capitalism in South Korea than domestic policy had been during the preceding state-led industrialisation era. Nonetheless, activist investor has a special role to play.