1 Abstract Thesis: Protection of customers and investors on financial markets The purpose of my thesis is to analyse and comment an issue of legal tools implemented for the protection of investors on financial markets and customers, clients of financial institutions. The thesis is formally divided into eight chapters. Thesis commences by introductory defining the scope of thesis and tasks given to be commented. Chapter one summarize definitions of terms further used in the thesis with special focus on content of the term "Customer (Client)" and "Investor" and their distinction for purpose of this thesis. Second chapter focuses on historical aspects and inputs for development and improvement of financial regulation. I am attempting especially to highlight the influence of political changes and financial crises to concerns about regulation of financial environment (which usually lead to its modification or tightening of rules) on given samples firstly of development in the Czech Republic after year 1989 and secondly on European Union during the last financial crisis of years 2007 - 2009. Third chapter consists of analysis of the financial markets regulation in the Czech Republic under present legislation mainly and in detail focusing on the role of Czech National Bank. As the Czech National Bank integrated...

This thesis examines the integration of European stock markets, focusing on the affect of the EU and Eurozone. Moreover, the thesis analyses whether increasing integration is a local trend possibly caused by the EU and Eurozone, or whether either the Japanese or American stock market gets more integrated with the European ones as well. We study the integration using weekly data of eighteen European stock markets and stock markets of Japan and the US over the horizon of twenty years. The method used is an extension by Klöessner and Wagner (2012) of a method originally introduced by Diebold and Yilmaz (2009). We find a positive effect of the EU on the integration of the stock markets. Also, the integration is rather local as the American and Japanese stock markets are proved to not have a higher increase in integration with the European stock markets that they have with each other. Finally, we find the Eurozone does not have an immediate positive effect on the integration of the stock markets. Keywords Stock markets integration, Spillovers, EU, Eurozone, Diebold and Yilmaz Author's e-mail vildova.t@email.cz Supervisor's e-mail mp.princ@seznam.cz

Auctions are a key economic mechanism for establishing the value of goods that have an uncertain price. In recent years, as a consequence of the ubiquitous emergence of technology, auctions can reach consumers, and as a result drive market prices, on a global scale. Collection of private information such as past trades exposes more information than desired by market participants. The leaked information can be statistically analyzed to provide auctioneers, or competitors, an advantage on future transactions. The need to preserve privacy has become a critical concern to reach an accepted level of fairness, and to provide market participants an environment in which they can bid a true valuation. This research is about possible mechanisms to carry out sealed-bid auctions in a distributed setting, and provides the reader with the challenges that currently persevere in the field. The first chapter offers an introduction to different kinds of auction, and to describe sealed-bid auction. The next chapter surveys the literature, and provides necessary theoretical background. Moving on to chapter 3, instead of solely focusing on theoretical aspects of sealed-bid auctions, this chapter dives into implementation details, and demonstrates through communication and computational analysis how different settings affect performance. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Financial asset prices reflect investor's perspectives over the current and future situation of a firm, an industry, a country and ultimately, the entire economy. For this reason, how financial asset prices are driven has been a fundamental economic question. Specific market characteristics such as the number of sellers and buyers, investors valuation perceptions, market availability of other assets and legal and technical properties are some of the features that affect asset prices. When the same asset is traded at different venues, these specific characteristics may vary, following a certain degree of heterogeneity across buyers and sellers. The direct consequence is that transaction prices of the same asset differ across markets. However, prices will also not drift apart, since arbitrage opportunities would arise, reducing or even eliminating the differences. Prices of similar securities linked to a single latent price, as derivative markets, for instance, present the same behaviour. Price differences among markets observed at high frequencies are an indication that venues incorporate new information in an unlike way. The structure and design of a market impacts its behaviour, liquidity, effciency, and hence how prices are discovered. The task of identifying the leading markets and understanding how the price dynamics occurs are the main objectives of the price discovery analysis. Chapter 1 introduces the research subject of price discovery, motivating the importance of what this thesis proposes and the results and conclusions obtained. Chapter 2 explains in details the main methodologies used to measure price discovery and the important results in the empirical literature. Chapter 3 motivates the data set this thesis uses, with institutional background details and specific market and firm characteristics. We also present in details the steps we follow to deal with standard issues of high frequency data, such as outliers and errors on a tick-by-tick database and non synchronicity of prices at different markets. Chapter 4 extends the standard price discovery model to estimate the information share (IS) accounting for the information content of both common and preferred non US stocks, their American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) counterparts traded on the New York Stock Exchange and ARCA, and the exchange rate. We gauge the significance of price discovery in the home and foreign markets, through common or preferred stocks. One of the main critiques on the IS methodology is that it does not deliver a single measure when there is contemporaneous correlation among markets. We propose an ordering invariant methodology that delivers a single measure of IS.We find that the foreign market is more important than the home market for the price discovery of Petrobras, the Brazilian stated-owned oil giant, and Vale, one of the largest mining companies in the world. Additionally, the Brazilian market has lost significant importance after the 2008/2009 financial crisis. During this period, common and preferred stocks shared a single common factor, with voting premium being a stationary process. Chapter 5 investigates instantaneous and long-run linkages between common and preferred shares traded at both domestic and foreign markets. We develop a market microstructure model in which the dynamics of the different share prices react to three common factors, namely, the efficient price, the efficient exchange rate, and the efficient voting premium. We show how to identify the structural innovations so as to differentiate instantaneous and long-run effects. First, we obtain dynamic measures of price discovery that quantify how prices traded at different venues respond to shocks on the common factors. Second, we are able to test whether shocks in the efficient exchange rate change the value of the firm. Third, we test whether shocks on the efficient voting premium have a permanent effect on preferred shares. We implement an empirical application using high-frequency data on six Brazilian large companies. We find that, in the long-run, a depreciation of the Brazilian currency leads to a depreciation of the value of the firm that exceeds the expected arbitrage adjustment. In addition, a positive shock on the voting premium yields a positive impact on the value of the firm. Our price discovery analysis also reveals that one trading day suffices to impound new information on all share prices, regardless of the venue they trade at. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes.

This Thesis is dedicated to the variance decompositions from the VAR model un- der the Diebold, Yilmaz (2012) methodology combined with the Baruník, Křehlík (2017) method of frequencies that was used to create traditional and directional spillover tables to be compared under different frequencies. Diverse markets vari- ables were used for the analysis during the period 1/6/1999 to 29/6/2018. The S&P 500 Index represented the financial markets, EUR/USD and YEN/USD rep- resented the Forex markets, and eight types of commodities: Crude Oil, Natural Gas, Gasoline, and Propane represented energy commodities and Corn, Coffee, Wheat, and Soybeans represented food commodities. This analysis contribute to understanding of the dynamic frequency connectedness in case of a differentiated system of markets. The main finding was the strongest short-frequency reaction to shocks in case of all variables, which is opposite behavior than usually observed in banking sector frequency dynamics analyses. JEL Classication: F12, F21, F23, H25, H71, H87 Keywords: connectedness, financial market, forex market, commodity market, systemic risk, spillovers, frequency analysis Author's e-mail: 93414233@fsv.cuni.cz Supervisor's e-mail: barunik@fsv.cuni.cz

The interaction between optimal contractual design and macroeconomic aspects of economic systems is a sensitive issue for contemporary economics, in particular within the framework of the incentive theory. Information problems are crucial for incentives. Typically, in the credit markets lender-borrower interactions are affected by incentive problems and financial intermediation can be helpful. This work deals with financial markets, contracts and asymmetric information, with particular attention on how incentives and competition model the structure of the credit markets when the entrepreneur can simultaneously contract with more than one lender. In these cases we examine the implications of strategic competition on contracts among loans suppliers. Dealing with economies affected by information incompleteness or imperfection, competition on contracts delivers externalities among the players in the credit markets that can be responsible for inefficient outcomes. The issue of whether there could be any welfare-enhancing role of policy intervention, to improve on market outcomes is also analyzed.

This thesis consists of five self-contained papers, which are all related to the financial markets in the three Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.  Paper [I] studies the impact of news from the Moscow and New York stock exchanges on the returns and volatilities of the Baltic States' stock market indices using a time series model that accounts for asymmetries in the conditional mean and variance functions. We find that news from New York has stronger e¤ects on returns in Tallinn. High-risk shocks in New York have a stronger impact on volatility in Tallinn, whereas volatility in Vilnius is more in.uenced by high-risk shocks from Moscow. Riga does not seem to be affected by news arriving from abroad. Paper [II] suggests a nonlinear and multivariate time series model framework that enables the study of simultaneity in returns and in volatilities, as well as asymmetric effects arising from shocks and exogenous variables. The model is employed to study the three Baltic States' stock exchanges. Using daily data, we find recursive structures, with returns in Riga, directly depending on returns in Tallinn and Vilnius, and Tallinn on Vilnius. For volatilities, both Riga and Vilnius depend on Tallinn. Paper [III] studies the link between political news, and the returns and volatilities in the Baltic States' stock markets. We find that domestic and foreign non-Russian political news led, on average, to lower uncertainty in the stock markets of Riga and Tallinn in 2001-2003. At the same time, political risk from Russia increased the volatility of the stock market in Tallinn. There is a weak relationship between political risk and the stock market volatility in the Baltic countries in 2004-2007. Paper [IV] studies the impact of market jumps on the time varying return correlations between stock market indices in the Baltic countries. An EARJI-EGARCH model facilitating direct modeling of the time varying return correlations is introduced. The empirical results indicate that there are quite a large number of identified jumps in the emerging Baltic States' stock markets. Isolated market jumps in one of the markets generally have no or small e¤ects on the time-varying correlations. In contrast, simultaneous jumps of equal sign increase the average correlation, in some cases by as much as 100 percent. In Paper [V] the hypothesis that financial development promotes economic growth is tested for the three Baltic countries using a time series approach that allows for interactions between the countries. We find that economic growth is a positive function of financial development, proxied by the amount of bank credit to the private sector, in the long run. The results also show that there is long run interaction between the three Baltic countries.

Financial market and its various components are currently in turmoil. Many large corporations are devising new ways to overcome the current market instability. Consequently, any study fostering the understanding of financial markets and the dependencies of various market components would greatly benefit both the practitioners and academicians. To understand different parts of the financial market, this dissertation employs time series methods to model causality and structure and degree of dependence. The relationship of housing market prices for nine U.S. census divisions is studied in the first essay. The results show that housing market is very interrelated. The New England and West North Central census divisions strongly lead house prices of the rest of the country. Further evidence suggests that house prices of most census divisions are mainly influenced by house price changes of other regions. The interdependence of oil prices and stock market indices across countries is examined in the second essay. The general dependence structure and degree is estimated using copula functions. The findings show weak dependence between stock market indices and oil prices for most countries except for the large oil producing nations which show high dependence. The dependence structure for most oil consuming (producing) countries is asymmetric implying that stock market index and oil price returns tend to move together more during the market downturn (upturn) than a market boom (downturn). In the third essay, the relationship among stock returns of ten U.S. sectors is studied. Copula models are used to explore the non-linear, general association among the series. The evidence shows that sectors are strongly related to each other. Energy sector is relatively weakly connected with the other sectors. The strongest dependence is between the Industrials and Consumer Discretionary sectors. The high dependence suggests small (if any) gains from industry diversification in U.S. In conclusion, the correct formulation of relationships among variables of interest is crucial. This is one of the fundamental issues in portfolio analysis. Hence, a thorough examination of time series models that are used to understand interactions of financial markets can be helpful for devising more accurate investment strategies.

ABSTRACT Deposit Insurance: Is it good for the development of Financial Markets? BY Kaysia Therese Campbell April 25, 2006 Committee Chair: Dr. Stephen Smith and Dr. James Owers Major Department: Finance The literature on deposit insurance has focused primarily on the role it plays in promoting banking sector stability and growth, while little attention has been placed on its possible effect on the development of other markets. Failure to examine the impact of deposit insurance on other markets could lead to premature conclusions about the full effect it has on total financial market development and, in turn, economic growth. Using panel data and cross sectional averages on 96 countries covering the time period 1975 – 2004 to distinguish between short run and long run effects, and including a host of controls, I find evidence that deposit insurance is associated with greater long run, total financial market development, as measured by the size and activity of banks, equity markets, bond markets and non-bank financial intermediaries. This indicates that it is able to accelerate banking sector development without necessarily retarding the development of other markets so that overall financial market development is improved. It is important to note that this is primarily evident for countries with a strong legal and contracting environment. The results also suggest that the immediate impact of deposit insurance is greatest for middle income economies but over time there is no clear evidence that this persists. Using design features thought to contribute to the generosity and ability of the scheme to curb moral hazard and provide a credible guarantee, I construct two indices to summarize the various design features and examine their impact on financial market development. I find that countries adopting more credible schemes appear to have smaller and less active markets over time. However the results also indicate that more credible and generous design features are better able to promote total market activity in the long run. The hopeful conclusion to be made from this study is that the positive influence of deposit insurance on the banking sector is translated into the entire financial market system over time and may be irrespective of a country’s particular stage of economic development.

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