Cette thèse comporte six articles répartis en quatre chapitres. Les trois premiers chapitres sont constitués chacun d'un article théorique alors que le quatrième chapitre est composé de trois articles empiriques. Le premier chapitre envisage un cadre avec deux catégories d'agents, l'un souhaitant vendre alors que l'autre souhaite acheter. Sont analysés les problèmes liés aux signaux spéculatifs et est également estimé le risque auquel sont confrontés les opérateurs en excès de confiance. Le second chapitre étudie le rationnement du crédit et met en évidence une situation où la prise de décision est associée à une échelle fixe dans l'investissement. Le troisième chapitre aborde la théorie des mécanismes d'incitation et met en évidence une condition de tri en théorie des incitations. Le principal est confronté à un dilemme car il ne peut pas maintenir un risque identique lors de l'analyse de la statique comparative de l'investissement. Le quatrième chapitre est segmenté en trois articles empiriques, à savoir une étude de la liquidité systémique de l'investissement, la régulation des banques de petite dimension, et, enfin, le lien entre la taille des économies, la viabilité de la dette et les inégalités de détention de capital à la Piketty. / This thesis contains six articles gathered in four chapters. The three first chapters each consist of a theoretical article while the fourth chapter is composed of three empirical articles. The first chapter addresses a framework where a trader wants to buy white another trader wants to sell, these two traders standing in parallel. It seems plausible, yet it requires further examination on aggregate measures of fundamentals, to estimate the risks faced by overconfident agents. The second chapter is devoted to the analysis of credit rationing and illustrates a situation requiring decision-making measured by some fixed scale in investment. In the third chapter, the model shows a sorting condition in the theory of incentives, the principal having the dilemma that he cannot maintain risk preference according to the comparative statics of investment. In the fourth chapter, three empirical articles are presented : the first relates to systematic liquidity in the investment, the second the regulation of small banks and the third analyzes economic size and the viability of the debt while providing an articulation with the capital inequality emphasized by Piketty.

The objective of the "The Probihition of Riba and the alternative methods of home financing: a case study of Malaysian Muslim home buyers" thesis is to analyze the Islamic home loan financing offered by banks and financial institutions in Malaysia and the characteristics of Malaysian home buyers and/or home owners towards the product. In the thesis, consideration has been given to economic, social and environmental parameters which selection and factors influencing have been ranked accordingly. This study uses quantitative study similar to what was employed in previous researches. A self-administered survey questionnaire to 320 respondents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was held in October 2007 which 301 respondents returned the survey with a response rate of 89 percent. In this study, the results were presented from mean analysis, indepedent t-test, ANOVA and logistic regression analysis. The study presents interesting findings on Al-Bay Bithaman Ajil (BBA) concept of home loan financing to the alternative Musharakah Mutanaqisah (MM) home loan financing, which MM home loan financing has more benefit than BBA home loan financing. Currently, only BBA home loan financing has been widely used within bank and/or financial institutions in Malaysia. The study also indicated that despite of religion or race, every respondent has their own view provided they were given sufficient information and/or know of the Islamic home loan financing. The logit model developed in this study identified "education" and "sources of Islamic home loan financing" as having an influence on purchasing home behavior with "home cost" variable taken into account. Hitherto with Bumiputra privileges and certain pro-Bumiputra policies in Malaysia, Malays community has more opportunities than non-Malays community in buying homes due to Bumiputra Laws which have been established in the Malaysian New Economic Policy (NEP) since 1971. The NEP adopts the goal of poverty eradication and economic restructuring so as to eliminate the identification of ethnicity with economic function. Bumiputra privileges and quotas are based on Article 153 of the Constitution that provided special rights for the Malays. With all privileges given by the Government abovementioned, it may affect the socio-economic characteristics which influence to the decision to purchase a home. Nevertheless, regardless of ethnicity or religion, Islamic banks have greater social and moral responsibility to ensure that their principles of financing are fair to everyone. The Malaysian Islamic financial sector is seen as one of the most progressive and atrractive in the world given the numerous incentives planned and further liberation in the coming years. Malaysia has a comprehensive regulatory and supervisory framework that caters to the unique charactertics of Islamic finance with the strong financial standards, such as that corporate governance, transparency, disclosure, accountability, market discipline, risk management and customer protection. With these elements, new attractive schemes can be developed to meet Malaysian bank customers' needs. This study provides various views of Islamic home loan financing in Malaysia as an alternative to conventional home loan financing.

This thesis contains three empirical studies on the US corporate bond market; each chapter is self-contained and can be read independently. Chapter 1 studies the impact of credit rating changes on corporate bond returns. This study uses a large dataset of corporate bond transactions from the TRACE database for the US corporate bond market, combined with credit rating changes from Fitch, Moody's and Standard and Poor's (S&P), to analyse over 22,000 bonds, coupled with approximately 28,400 rating events over nearly six years. The results show that the bond market responds to news on credit quality asymmetrically: credit rating downgrades, representing bad news for bond holders, produce the strongest response in returns, whilst upgrades do not generate a statistically significant increase in returns. Chapter 2 analyses how order flow (investor "buy" and "sell" trades), impacts corporate bond prices. Order flow plays an important informational role, acting as a conduit through which private information about fundamental value is aggregated into prices. Using intraday transaction data from the TRACE database, I analyse over 1,000 of the most liquid corporate bonds, a total of 9.5 million trades. Drawing on similar studies of other markets, the relationship between returns and order flow is modelled using a vector autoregression, and the information content of a trade is measured as the long-run price impact of a shock to order flow. Price impacts are particularly strong and significant for order flow from institutional investors and for bonds with higher default risk, higher volatility and lower liquidity. Chapter 3 provides novel evidence on the importance of high frequency measures of volatility and correlation for the corporate bond market. Realized measures of volatility have been shown to be important in modelling and forecasting equity, exchange rate, and Treasury bill return volatility. We merge the NYSE's TAQ database of high frequency equity prices with the TRACE database, and show that the information contained in high frequency data is valuable in modelling the dynamics of the firm-level covariance matrix of bond and stock returns, for over 100 individual U.S. firms.

No description available.

In this research project, we introduced an agent-based banking system based on systematic trust. The features of the model and attributes of the agents are defined and analyzed precisely, and the results are explained. Some of this model's features include but are not limited to considering the savings system, insurance deposits, the impact of the Central Bank loans, and correlated regional shocks in a banking system. Different Scenarios are applied. The results indicate that by having the Central Bank loans in the model, the banking system experience dramatically fewer failures. Even if some correlated regional shocks occur, the system can be more stable than when the Central Bank does not exist. Moreover, the trust system establishes and forms during different financial periods based on the bank's clients’ point of view about the bank's performance as an intelligent system to attract more capital for the system by providing some information for the agents to join the more prestigious banks. Conclusively, in the early financial periods, banks need more financial supports to support the clients’ deposits and to make their reputation for attracting more clients; hence the Central Bank is an essential parameter to help the banks to be more stable and supports the banks in their early stages of growth. The Central Bank loans would be significantly important in panic times, such as regional correlated preference shocks. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

This thesis consists of three empirical essays in financial economics, with particular focus on the European Union and the Eurozone. The thesis investigates topics related to market liquidity and integration. In particular, it covers the transmission of liquidity shocks across Eurozone markets, the role of market liquidity in the repurchase programme and integration of Eurozone economies in terms of welfare gains from trade. Liquidity and integration have received considerable attention in recent years, particularly within the context of global financial and macroeconomic uncertainty over the last decade. In the first empirical essay, we investigate static and dynamic liquidity spillovers across the Eurozone stock markets. Using a generalised vector autoregressive (VAR) model, we introduce a new measure of liquidity spillovers. We find strong evidence of interconnection across countries. We also test the existence of liquidity contagion using a dynamic version of our static spillover index. Our results indicate that the transmission of shocks increases during periods of higher financial turbulence. Moreover, we find that core economies tend to be dominant transmitters of shocks, rather than absorber. The second essay investigates the role played by market liquidity in the execution of open-market share repurchases in the UK which is the most active market within the EU for this payout method. Using a unique hand collected data set from Bloomberg Professionals, we find that the execution of share repurchases does not depend on the long-term underlying motive, but it rather relies on market liquidity and other macroeconomic variables. We also provide a methodological contribution using censored quantile regression (CQR), which overcomes most of the econometric limitations of the Tobit models, widely employed previously within this literature. The third essay quantifies the welfare gains from trade for the Eurozone countries. We apply a trade model that allows us to estimate the increase in real consumption as a result of trade between countries. We estimate welfare gains using two sufficient aggregate statistics. These are the share of expenditure on domestic goods and the elasticity of exports with respect to trade cost. We offer a methodological contribution for the estimation of elasticities by applying the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) using a gravity model. PPML allows the estimation of gravity models in their exponential form, allowing the inclusion of zero trade flows and controlling for heteroskedasticity. Previous studies present several econometric limitations as a result of estimating gravity models in their log-linearised form. Our results indicate that joining the euro did not significantly increase trade gains for member countries. Nevertheless, differences across countries are significant and Northern economies experience a higher increase in welfare gains trade as compared to Southern economies.

The recent financial crisis has raised serious questions about the effectiveness of corporate governance (CG) in monitoring management and protecting investors’ interests. There is concern that ‘poor’ CG was, to a certain extent, a major cause of the current financial crisis. This thesis, therefore, investigates the crucial policy question of whether the quality of CG has any effect on financial performance, information asymmetry and on block shareholders’ investment decisions. This is achieved and presented in the form of three essays on CG practices in UK with a particular focus on the periods before and during the 2007/2008 financial crisis. The first essay aims to investigate the impact of firm-level CG on block shareholders’ investment decisions for a large sample of UK non-financial firms over the period 2005 to 2009. Using a panel data analysis, the results revealed the importance of CG for block shareholders’ investment decisions. Furthermore, the study results indicated that only institutional block shareholders consider CG to be important criteria for their investment decisions. Moreover, when the effect of CG on block shareholdings in both periods before and during crisis was examined, a significant difference in results appeared: an insignificant positive relationship in the pre-crisis period turned out to be significant during crisis. The result thus indicates that block shareholders viewed CG as particularly important during the crisis period. The second essay aims to examine the effect of CG on firm performance before and during the financial crisis. It also investigates the mediating effect of agency costs on the association between CG and firm performance. The results revealed that CG affects firm performance only in the period before the crisis, but no significant effect was found during the crisis period. Moreover, agency cost was proved to fully mediate the relationship between CG and performance in the pre-crisis period. The results point to an important issue, which is the need to re-evaluate CG not only in stable periods but also during turbulent times, and to evaluate its ability to perform effectively in such different conditions. The third essay investigates the effect of both CG and block ownership on information asymmetry. Further, the effects of CG in lessening the positive association between block ownership and information asymmetry is considered. The results revealed that CG affects information asymmetry only in the pre-crisis. In addition, block ownership was shown to have a significant and positive effect on information asymmetry during crisis periods suggesting that block shareholders benefit from their information advantage during crisis period which in turn worsens the information asymmetry problem. This suggests that block shareholders engage more in their private benefits rather than in efficient monitoring. The results also proved that CG is insignificant during turbulent period in lessening the negative effect of block ownership.

Energy markets feature a wide range of unusual price behaviour along with a complicated dependence structure between electricity, natural gas, coal and carbon, as well as other variables. We approach this broad modelling challenge by firstly developing a structural framework to modelling spot electricity prices, through an analysis of the underlying supply and demand factors which drive power prices, and the relationship between them. We propose a stochastic model for fuel prices, power demand and generation capacity availability, as well as a parametric form for the bid stack function which maps these price drivers to the spot electricity price. Based on the intuition of cost-related bids from generators, the model describes mathematically how different fuel prices drive different portions of the bid stack (i.e., the merit order) and hence influence power prices at varying levels of demand. Using actual bid data, we find high correlations between the movements of bids and the corresponding fuel prices (coal and gas). We fit the model to the PJM and New England markets in the US, and assess the performance of the model, in terms of capturing key properties of simulated price trajectories, as well as comparing the model’s forward prices with observed data. We then discuss various mathematical techniques (explicit solutions, approximations, simulations and other numerical techniques) for calibrating to observed fuel and electricity forward curves, as well as for pricing of various single and multi-commodity options. The model reveals that natural gas prices are historically the primary driver of power prices over long horizons in both markets, with shorter term dynamics driven also by fluctuations in demand and reserve margin. However, the framework developed in this thesis is very flexible and able to adapt to different markets or changing conditions, as well as capturing automatically the possibility of changes in the merit order of fuels. In particular, it allows us to begin to understand price movements in the recently-formed carbon emissions markets, which add a new level of complexity to energy price modelling. Thus, the bid stack model can be viewed as more than just an original and elegant new approach to spot electricity prices, but also a convenient and intuitive tool for understanding risks and pricing contracts in the global energy markets, an important, rapidly-growing and fascinating area of research.

This study aims to generate a more robust understanding of public attitudes regarding non-renewable natural resource markets. Employing a comparative-historical case study method, it analyzes three waves of widespread fear that swept the United States over the course of the twentieth century regarding an imminent, irreversible shortage of oil. Each of these periods of fear over oil supply availability coincided with a significant rise in the price of crude oil, only to be followed by a sudden collapse as new production came onstream in response to higher prices. The study utilizes process tracing and pattern matching techniques to examine the linkages between fundamental supply-demand conditions in the crude oil market, oil price movements, and expert predictions of and other public expressions of belief that oil in the United States would become scarcer and more expensive in the future. This dissertation’s core arguments contribute to existing theoretical debates in three ways. First, by providing a comparative historical portrait of cyclical patterns in public and expert beliefs regarding non-renewable resource availability and long-term price behavior, the study puts contemporary debates over the future of oil supply in historical perspective. It allows the rampant claims of, and widespread belief in, a global shortage of oil that have gained popularity over the last decade—most notably, in the so-called “peak oil” movement—to be situated within a broader chronological context. It also extends and deepens earlier historical work analyzing oil shortage scares in the United States, both in terms of their underlying dynamics and their effect on federal government policy relative to the oil industry. Second, the study establishes the link between fundamental supply-demand conditions in the oil market, generally reflected in oil prices, and the degree of media attention given to, and apparent public belief in, an imminent, irreversible shortage of oil in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. In so doing, it demonstrates the applicability of Shiller’s (2000, 2005) conceptualization of new era economic theory formation and popularization to observed phenomena in the oil market, but with a crucial difference. Rather than new era economic thinking taking the form of unbounded optimism about the future, in the case of the oil market new era thinking has tended to be manifested as the pessimistic belief that an impending, irreversible shortage of oil would lead to a long-term, even perpetual, rise in oil prices. The study suggests two modifications to the concept that enhance its greater explanatory leverage with regard to exhaustible resource markets: one, that often the new era predictions most widely cited during shortage scares were actually made prior to the boom in prices, to little fanfare, but subsequently deemed prophetic by new era proponents; and two, that the new era narratives often contained normative elements. Moral judgments—in particular, condemnation of the oil economy’s degradation of the natural environment—have often intertwined with predictions that the oil supply was more limited than widely believed and that prices were destined to continue rising. Third, the study demonstrates that the concept of narratives of decline, as described by Bennett (2001) and Lieber (2008), constitutes a powerful theoretical lens through which to understand trends in popular opinion with regard to non-renewable resource availability, and to asset prices more generally—a link that has heretofore gone unrecognized. It finds that a positive feedback loop tended to exist between popular fears of a new era of oil shortages, marked by a long-term rise in prices, and related narratives of the environmental and relative political-economic decline of the United States.

This thesis demonstrates that consumer leverage can contribute to financial crises such as the subprime mortgage crisis characterised by increased bankruptcy prospects and tightened credit access. A recession may follow even when the leveraged sector is not a production sector and can be triggered by seeming positive events such as a technological innovation and a relaxation of borrowing conditions. The first preliminary chapter updates the Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) approach with financial frictions in the production sector to a two-sector model with consumption and housing. It shows that credit frictions in the capital financing decisions of housing firms are not sufficient to capture the negative consumer experience with falling housing prices and relaxed credit access during the recession. The second chapter brings the model closer to the subprime mortgage crisis by shifting credit constraints to the consumer mortgage market. Increased supply of houses lowers asset prices and reduces the value of the real estate collateral used in the mortgage which in turn worsens the leverage of indebted consumers. A relaxation of borrowing conditions turns credit-constrained households into a potential source of disturbances themselves when market optimism allows them to raise their leverage with little downpayment. Both cases demonstrate that although households are not production agents, their worsening debt levels can trigger a lasting financial downturn. The third chapter develops a chained mortgage contracts model where both homeowner consumers and the financial institutions that securitize their mortgage loan are credit-constrained. Adding credit constraints to the financial sector that provides housing mortgages creates opportunities for risk sharing where banks shift some of the downturn onto indebted consumers in order to hasten their own recovery. This consequence is especially evident in the case of relaxed credit access for banks. Financial institutions repair their debt position relatively fast at the expense of consumers whose borrowing ability is squeezed for a long period despite the fact that they may not be the source of the disturbance. The result mirrors the recent subprime mortgage crisis characterised by a sharp but brief decline for banks and a protracted recovery for mortgaged households.