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.

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Submitted by Rodrigo dos Santos Barbosa (rdsbar@gmail.com) on 2016-06-13T19:54:58Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese.pdf: 895418 bytes, checksum: 64d50c7a9b78e9d3f89b6737e052eb58 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Letícia Monteiro de Souza (leticia.dsouza@fgv.br) on 2016-06-13T21:06:35Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese.pdf: 895418 bytes, checksum: 64d50c7a9b78e9d3f89b6737e052eb58 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-13T22:04:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese.pdf: 895418 bytes, checksum: 64d50c7a9b78e9d3f89b6737e052eb58 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-05-17 / My dissertation focuses on dynamic aspects of coordination processes such as reversibility of early actions, option to delay decisions, and learning of the environment from the observation of other people’s actions. This study proposes the use of tractable dynamic global games where players privately and passively learn about their actions’ true payoffs and are able to adjust early investment decisions to the arrival of new information to investigate the consequences of the presence of liquidity shocks to the performance of a Tobin tax as a policy intended to foster coordination success (chapter 1), and the adequacy of the use of a Tobin tax in order to reduce an economy’s vulnerability to sudden stops (chapter 2). Then, it analyzes players’ incentive to acquire costly information in a sequential decision setting (chapter 3). In chapter 1, a continuum of foreign agents decide whether to enter or not in an investment project. A fraction λ of them are hit by liquidity restrictions in a second period and are forced to withdraw early investment or precluded from investing in the interim period, depending on the actions they chose in the first period. Players not affected by the liquidity shock are able to revise early decisions. Coordination success is increasing in the aggregate investment and decreasing in the aggregate volume of capital exit. Without liquidity shocks, aggregate investment is (in a pivotal contingency) invariant to frictions like a tax on short term capitals. In this case, a Tobin tax always increases success incidence. In the presence of liquidity shocks, this invariance result no longer holds in equilibrium. A Tobin tax becomes harmful to aggregate investment, which may reduces success incidence if the economy does not benefit enough from avoiding capital reversals. It is shown that the Tobin tax that maximizes the ex-ante probability of successfully coordinated investment is decreasing in the liquidity shock. Chapter 2 studies the effects of a Tobin tax in the same setting of the global game model proposed in chapter 1, with the exception that the liquidity shock is considered stochastic, i.e, there is also aggregate uncertainty about the extension of the liquidity restrictions. It identifies conditions under which, in the unique equilibrium of the model with low probability of liquidity shocks but large dry-ups, a Tobin tax is welfare improving, helping agents to coordinate on the good outcome. The model provides a rationale for a Tobin tax on economies that are prone to sudden stops. The optimal Tobin tax tends to be larger when capital reversals are more harmful and when the fraction of agents hit by liquidity shocks is smaller. Chapter 3 focuses on information acquisition in a sequential decision game with payoff complementar- ity and information externality. When information is cheap relatively to players’ incentive to coordinate actions, only the first player chooses to process information; the second player learns about the true payoff distribution from the observation of the first player’s decision and follows her action. Miscoordination requires that both players privately precess information, which tends to happen when it is expensive and the prior knowledge about the distribution of the payoffs has a large variance. / A presente tese concentra-se em aspectos dinâmicos de processos que envolvem coordenação entre agentes em ambientes com interação estratégica. Propomos utilizar os chamados global games para estudar a capacidade de uma Tobin tax elevar a probabilidade de sucesso em um ambiente em que investidores internacionais sujeitos a choques de liquidez precisam coordenar suas decisões de investimento (capítulo 1), e reduzir a vulnerabilidade de uma economia aberta a fluxos internacionais de capitais a sudden stops (capítulo 2). Também, investigamos o problema da aquisição de informação em jogos sequenciais com informação incompleta e complementaridade em ações (capítulo 3). No capítulo 1, agentes estrangeiros decidem se entram ou não em um projeto, cujo sucesso depende em parte da capacidade dos mesmos em coordenarem suas escolhas. Uma fração λ desses investidores é afetada por restrições de liquidez no segundo período do modelo e é forçada a se retirar do projeto ou impedida de entrar, dependendo de suas respectivas escolhas no primeiro período. Agentes não afetados pelo choque de liquidez possuem a opção de reavaliar decisões tomadas no primeiro estágio do jogo. É assumido que a probabilidade de sucesso do projeto de investimento é crescente no volume total de capital que a economia recebe, mas decrescente no volume de capitais que deixa a economia no segundo período. Na ausência de choques de liquidez (λ = 0), o volume de capital que é recebido em um estado pivotal para o sucesso do projeto de investimento independe da existência de um imposto sobre capitais de curto prazo. Como tal imposto sempre desestimula saídas de capitais, uma Tobin tax sempre favorece as chances de sucesso em uma economia em que λ = 0. Contudo, na presença de choques de liquidez, o volume total de investimento que a economia recebe torna-se decrescente em um imposto incidente sobre capitais de curto prazo. Neste caso, uma Tobin tax pode prejudicar as chances do processo de coordenação ser bem sucedido, caso o benefício de reduzir o volume de saída de capitais não seja suficientemente grande. O capítulo 2 estuda os efeitos de uma Tobin tax no mesmo cenário do capítulo 1, porém considera que a extensão da restrição de liquidez a que os agentes podem estar sujeitos é aleatória. Neste modelo, identificamos condições sob as quais uma Tobin tax reduz a probabilidade de se observar um sudden stop e eleva o bem estar no único equilíbrio de uma economia onde a probabilidade de ocorrência de um choque de liquidez é pequena, mas a magnitude de tal choque pode ser significativa. O capítulo final investiga o problema de aquisição de informação em um jogo sequencial com 2 agentes, externalidade informacional e complementaridade em ações. Demonstramos que, quando o custo de aquisição de informação é pequeno relativamente ao incentivo que os agentes possuem para coordenarem suas ações, apenas o primeiro jogador escolhe adquirir novas informações a respeito da distribuição dos payoffs, e o jogador 2 sempre segue a ação escolhida pelo jogador 1. Probabilidade positiva de se observar divergência em ações requer que ambos os jogadores processem informação privadamente, o que tende a ocorrer quando o custo de aquisição de informação é baixo e a distribuição a priori dos payoffs possui variância elevada.