<p>1.3. Research Questions.</p><p>With this in mind, the research questions of this work are:</p><p>1. Is the Capital Asset Pricing Model still applicable despite the heavy impact of the financial crisis on the financial systems?</p><p>2. What happens to this model when the risk free rate approaches zero?</p><p>3. Is there a relationship between the riskiness of an asset and the risk-free interestrate when the latter is approaching the zero level?</p>

This thesis contains four chapters, each of which examines different aspects of the uncertainty facing monetary policymakers.''Monetary policy and market interest rates'' investigates how interest rates set on financial markets respond to policy actions taken by the monetary authorities. The reaction of market rates is shown to depend crucially on market participants' interpretation of the factors underlying the policy move. These theoretical predictions find support in an empirical analysis of the U.S. financial markets.''Predicting monetary policy using federal funds futures prices'' examines how prices of federal funds futures contracts can be used to predict policy moves by the Federal Reserve. Although the futures prices exhibit systematic variation across trading days and calendar months, they are shown to be fairly successful in predicting the federal funds rate target that will prevailafter the next meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee from 1994 to 1998.''Monetary policy with uncertain parameters'' examines the effects  of parameter uncertainty on the optimal monetary policy strategy. Under certain parameter configurations, increasing uncertainty is shown to lead to more aggressive policy, in contrast to the accepted wisdom.''Should central banks be more aggressive?'' examines why a certain class of monetary policy models leads to more aggressive policy prescriptions than what is observed in reality. These counterfactual results are shown to be due to model restrictions rather than central banks being too cautious in their policy behavior. An unrestricted model, taking the dynamics of the economy and multiplicative parameter uncertainty into account, leads to optimal policy prescriptions which are very close to observed Federal Reserve behavior. / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 1999</p>

1.3. Research Questions. With this in mind, the research questions of this work are: 1. Is the Capital Asset Pricing Model still applicable despite the heavy impact of the financial crisis on the financial systems? 2. What happens to this model when the risk free rate approaches zero? 3. Is there a relationship between the riskiness of an asset and the risk-free interestrate when the latter is approaching the zero level?

The theme of this dissertation is Ricardian equivalence, and its objective is to examine the effects of government debt on private consumption expenditures (Essay One), on interest rates (Essay Two), on the current account balance (Essay Three), and on individual intertemporal decision-making (Essay Four). The effects of government debt are important if debt is neutral (e.g., if “Ricardian equivalence” holds), then a stabilization program that is based on demand management policy to curtail fiscal deficits will not be operative. On the other hand, if debt is not neutral (or if Ricardian equivalence does not hold), then deficit finance may induce private consumption, boost interest rates, crowd out investment, and retard economic growth. Essay One contributes to the existing literature by taking into account the nature of liquidity constraints in a developing economy in an aggregate consumption function. Previous empirical tests on Ricardian equivalence have not considered the role of a dominant resource aspect of a country. Essay Two and Essay Three incorporate a dominant resource aspect in Indonesia by estimating the oil-macroeconomic relationship. Furthermore, Essay Three takes into account the role of capital inflows by including debt securities. Essay Four uses experimental economics methods to examine the role of distortionary taxes on Ricardian equivalence. There have been only a few studies that use an experimental approach to examine the effect of deficit spending on consumption expenditures, but these existing experimental studies ignore the role of distortionary taxes in affecting subjects’ consumption-saving decisions and focus on the presence of liquidity constraints, myopia, and uncertainty on future income. Essay Four contributes to the Ricardian equivalence literature by taking into account distortionary taxes in a Ricardian institution by levying taxes on savings in an intertemporal individual consumption-savings decision in laboratory experiments. By utilizing the aggregate consumption function and the Euler equation consumption function, Essay One shows that Indonesian consumers tend to behave in a non-Ricardian way. Public debt most likely will lead to crowding out of investment, and will retard capital accumulation and economic growth. The extent to which individuals perceive government expenditures as complements for their consumption is substantial. An increase in government expenditures will increase the marginal utility of private consumption and has an expansionary effect on aggregate demand. The complementarity between private consumption and government expenditures may be partly due to the allocation of government subsidies to basic goods and services such as electricity, fuel, fertilizer, health centers, and education. Liquidity constraints may cause consumption to have an excess sensitivity to income. The short-run and long-run aggregate consumption function estimates show that income affects consumption, indicating that consumers follow a “rule of thumb” of consuming their current income. A high ratio of public debt to gross domestic product (GDP) in Indonesia may also be the culprit of the excess sensitivity of private consumption to income. Due to low salaries in the formal sector, employees have been engaged in moonlighting activities, mostly in the form of self-employment (e.g., opening retail stores or services). This phenomenon may help to explain why private credit−which amounts to 29 percent of GDP−fails to explain consumption behavior. Most loans are made for investment rather than for consumption. Consumers’ behavior is insensitive to taxation, which perhaps is due to the fact that tax enactment is not explicitly revealed in Indonesia (e.g., price tags in the supermarket include the sales tax, and employees are only informed about their after-tax net wage instead of their gross wage). The share of tax collections to GDP averages only about 15 percent. There is still a large portion of the population who do not pay taxes or who pay far below what they should pay. The fiscal authority needs to focus more attention on alternative financing, i.e. taxation, whose system is essential to be enhanced. Essay Two shows that by excluding oil prices, deficits and debt significantly increase the real interest rate, thereby invalidating Ricardian equivalence. The evidence shows some preference for debt and deficit over government expenditures as determinants of interest rates. Inclusion of the oil price weakens the Neoclassical results, providing more support for the Ricardian paradigm. Deficits no longer increase interest rates, yet debt still significantly increases interest rates. This result reflects a loss of momentum for the Indonesian government two decades ago to decrease its dependency on debt. The government could have used the windfall oil revenue to pay off foreign debt; instead, the windfall was spent on import-intensive infrastructure development projects, in order to build domestic industry and to subsidize rice and petroleum products. The importance of oil prices in the interest rate estimation suggests that in modeling the Indonesian macroeconomy, the oil sector should be incorporated. The non-stationary nature of the stock of debt implies the failure of intertemporal budget balance to hold, indicating that the debt-financed deficit is unsustainable. Essay Three shows that around 80 percent of the estimation results provide support for the Neoclassical view, a result that is consistent with the twin deficits hypothesis. The long-run estimates indicate an almost one-to-one relationship between the government budget and the trade balance, while the short-run estimates show a smaller magnitude. When capital inflows are included, the twin deficits phenomenon is less pronounced in the short-run and disappears in the long-run. An increase in the oil price statistically and significantly improves the trade balance in the short-run and in the long-run. Essay Four shows that subjects fully anticipate an increase in future taxation by increasing the amount bequeathed in one-to-one correspondence to the increase in debt. Even under a Ricardian institution, the distorting nature of taxes on savings alters subjects’ consumption-savings decisions. The equality of the change in bequests and the change in deficit spending is not attained under the savings taxes treatment, invalidating Ricardian equivalence. In line with the results of Essays One, Two, and Three, which suggest the vital need to enhance the taxation system, the results of Essay Four entail the importance of taxes on interest income in Indonesia.

本研究探討關係人交易、公司治理與銀行利率之關聯性。根據我國財務會計準則公報第六號規定所揭露之相關關係人交易項目，以多元迴歸模型來解釋銀行在進行授信決策時，如何解讀企業財務報表中之關係人交易，以測試利益衝突假說。同時，為探求關係人交易與公司治理之關聯，將考量公司治理因素加入授信決策後，以多元迴歸模型解釋銀行對原關係人交易解讀是否產生改變。樣本取自於上市櫃公司，實證結果顯示關係人交易與銀行授信利率有顯著關係，且利益衝突假說成立。進一步探討後發現，當迴歸模型加入公司治理變數後，實證結果顯示公司治理變數對銀行授信利率有著非常顯著之影響，而關係人交易對銀行授信利率變成不顯著。 / This study investigates the relationship between the related party transaction and loan interest rate before/after the consideration of corporate governance mechanism. We also explain the effect of related party transaction on interest rate based on the conflict of interest hypothesis. The sample consists of firms listed in Taiwan Stock Exchange and OTC firms. The result shows that the related party transaction has significant effect on loan interest rate. However, this effect disappears after considering the corporate governance.

This paper has tested the efficiency, weak form according to EMH, of the currency future market. The efficiency test has been incorporated in the research question since the market has to be efficient in order for the future to work as predictor of the future spot rate - Can currency futures be used as a tool for predicting futures spot exchange rate? The two sub questions are - Is the prediction power of currency futures stable over time and is the prediction power of currency futures similar for different currencies?   The main theory in the research is the Efficient Market Hypothesis and the Random Walk Hypothesis. The research was conducted with a positivistic philosophy in conjunction with a realistic approach. Since the research question has been deducted from the theoretical framework the research has a deductive approach, a quantitative technique was adapted when the data at hand was mainly future and spot rate data.   Data on 13 currencies ranging from 2005 to 2010 was used. The prices were available in weekly intervals for all currencies except for the Brazilian real, Swiss frank and the Mexican peso. The statistical test that was used is the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test and the Phillips-Ouliaris cointegration test. The test was conducted on the whole timeframe. After that, the data was divided into three sub periods to show if the efficiency where different in the period before the crises (2005-2007), during the crises (2008-2009) and after the crises (2010). The test has also been done on annual and quarterly data to show if the length of the time period tested has an effect on efficiency. The PO test has been conducted on all data and the ADF test has been conducted on the whole timeframe and the sub periods.   The results show that, ten of the currencies which we had weakly data, the future is a good predictor of the future spot exchange rate. This is true when the tests are done on an interval of one year and more. For the three currencies that we had monthly data, the results showed cointegration on the whole timeframe. When shorter time periods were tested the currencies that consisted of monthly data showed no cointegration sooner than the weakly data. When test is done on quarterly data, only one test is cointegrated. It cannot concluded that, the future was not a good predictor for the future spot exchange rate during this time, merely that this particular test might be the true one and that the tests where not able to capture it. Several reasons for this are presented in the analysis chapter, where the statistical tests and their design are mentioned among other reasons.

This thesis is analyzing the development of debt and deficit situation in the Czech Republic and France. Our main research questions are: why the Czech Republic and France have different debt and deficit? What are the effects and causes of debt and deficit? How Czech Republic and France wants to reduce the level of debt and deficit? These are the central questions we try to answer in this thesis. To pursue a systematic analysis, we start with a theoretical section on we described different theories of debt/deficit and budgetary rules effects on the economy in order to understand characteristics of debt issues. From these findings, we have resulted causes and differences of debt situations in our countries, which is part of empirical analysis. This is done by evolution of debt/deficit and factors that affect level of debt/deficit. We analyzed three mains factors and due to this factors that influence debt/deficit we can clearly see why our countries have different levels in debt problem. Regarding this we can say our countries are different in many respects. The major difference is monetary policy due to French member of Eurozone. Also the way how to get from debt issue and find a compromise between government reforms and interests of citizens will vary in the future.

In this thesis, we present two different approaches for the stochastic volatility and stochastic interest rate model with jump and analyze the performance of four alternative models. In the first approach, suggested by Scott, the closed form solution for prices on European call stock options are developed by deriving characteristic functions with the help of martingale methods. Here, we study the asset price process and give in detail the derivation of the European call option price process. The second approach, suggested by Bashki-Cao-Chen, describes the closed form solution of European call option by deriving the partial integro-differential equation. In this one we g ive the derivations of both asset price dynamics and the European call option price process. Finally, in the application part of the thesis, we examine the performance of four alternative models using General Electric Stock Option Data. These models are constructed by using the theoretical results of the second approach.

本論文第一章將 LIBOR 市場模型加入股價動態，並求出其風險中立過程下的動態模型，並利用此模型評價股籌交換契約。第二章將 LIBOR 市場模型擴展成兩國的市場模型，加入兩國股價動態，並求出風險中立過程下的動態模型，並利用此模型評價跨國股籌交換契約。本論文第二部份說明如何實際使用此模型，並使用蒙地卡羅模擬檢驗此評價模型的正確性。 / This thesis includes two main chapters. Chapter 2 is entiled as "Equity Swaps in a LIBOR Market Model" and Chapter 3 is entitled as "Cross-Currency Equity Swaps in a LIBOR Market in a Model". The conclusions of this thesis are made in Chapter 4. In Chapter 2, we extends the BGM (Brace, Gatarek and Musiela (1997))interest rate model (the LIBOR market model) by incorporating the stock price dynamics under the martingale measure. As compared with traditional interest rate models, the extended BGM model is easy to calibrate the model parameters and appropriate for pricing equity swaps. The general framework for pricing equity swaps is proposed and applied to the pricing of floating-for-equity swaps with either constant or variable notional principals. The calibration procedure and the practical implementation are also discussed. In Chapter 3, under the arbitrage-free framework of HJM, we simultaneously extends the BGM model (the LIBOR market model) from a single-currency economy to a cross-currency case and incorporates the stock price dynamics under the martingale measure. The resulting model is very general for pricing almost every kind of (cross-currency) equity swaps traded in OTC markets. The calibration procedure and the hedging strategies are also provided in this paper for practical operation. The pricing formulas of the equity swaps with either a constant or a variable notional principal and with hedged or un-hedged exchange rate risk are derived and discussed as examples.

當保險契約被發行時，保險公司必須被要求盡可能的具備承擔未來不可知的風險的能力。本文將死亡風險、利率風險、脫退風險以及流動性風險引入，並針對生死合險契約進行盈餘分析。在此以 Vasicek (1977) 所提出之隨機利率模型、根據被保險人理性行為作為基礎之脫退模型以及引入簡化後的 Longstaff、Mithal與Nies (2005)流動性風險債券價格來描述各種風險。根據上述模型假設下計算保費及準備金，遂以蒙地卡羅模擬法量化源於各種風險之盈餘。最後，本文計算保險公司之盈餘對各風險參數之敏感度分析，並計算各期破產與發生流動性問題之可能性。 / Once insurance contracts are issued, the insurers should be capable to deal with the unknown conditions in the future as possible. In this paper, we analyze the impact of mortality, interest rate, surrender and liquidity risks on the surplus of endowment contract. We model the interest rate risk by Vasicek model, the surrender rate based on the rational behavior of policyholders and introduce the discounted price of zero coupon bonds as the liquidity risk. Under such assumptions, we compute the premium and reserve, demonstrate the simulated insurance surplus, and finally exhibit the statistics of the surplus from different sources. The simulated results show the sensitivity of the surplus to the parameters of the risks. At the same time, we also show the probabilities of insolvency and illiquidity of the insurer before the maturity date of the contract due to the fluctuating surrender rate and liquidity risk resulting from the stochastic interest rate.