Thesis advisor: Peter Gottschalk / Thesis advisor: Thomas McGuire / Thesis advisor: Donald Cox / Does managed care send expectant mothers to hospitals they would choose even if their choice of hospital was not limited? I find that Medicaid managed care patients are redirected to hospitals that enrollees of more generous insurance payers with the same personal characteristics do not go to. However, Medicare managed care enrollees do not face an increased risk of having a cesarean delivery at the hospital they attend, which is interpreted as evidence that they are redirected to high quality hospitals. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2003. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

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

A vast literature has identified the importance of childcare for understanding cross-national variation in women’s employment, and has particularly emphasised the role of the state in ensuring the delivery of services. This thesis explores variation within market-based childcare systems in order to understand how systems with less state provision may support or constrain maternal employment. The thesis argues that understanding whether childcare markets ‘work’ or not in supporting maternal employment requires a deep understanding of the interplay between market and state, as the specific policy approach taken can shape the structure of the market in profoundly different ways. This issue is explored via comparative case studies of the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries known for their market-based approach to childcare, but with stark and persistent differences in maternal employment behaviour, especially working time. Drawing on a mix of qualitative (policy documents) and quantitative (national statistics) data, the US and UK systems are compared along a series of dimensions comprising the two key components of the market-based system: the structure of market provision and the policy approach. The similarities and differences of these systems are analysed through the lens of the characteristics of services known to be important for the use of care for employment purposes: availability, cost and quality. The United States and United Kingdom have generally similar childcare systems when compared to other countries which rely more heavily on the state or the family to ensure childcare provision, which is in line with their common characterisation as liberal welfare regimes. However, there are important differences in the structure of their childcare markets which affect their ability to support maternal employment: for example, the US market poses fewer affordability constraints for maternal employment given the availability of relatively low cost care provision (albeit of questionable quality); the UK market in contrast provides care at higher cost, although this is likely of better quality. This variation in market provision is shaped by differences in the policy approach taken by each country: the US approach is primarily designed to soften the rougher edges of the market in what is otherwise considered a private sphere; in contrast the UK approach actively attempts to shape the childcare market into a system in line with policy goals. The consequence of this is that the US approach does not prevent a wide range of market provision from forming to cater to diverse tastes and budgets, but this necessarily includes a substantial degree of lower quality care. The UK approach more actively constrains the types of provision which are available, which on the one hand reduces supply and contributes to higher cost provision, but also sets higher standards for care provision. Together these findings suggest that understanding how market-based care systems do or do not support maternal employment requires not only an appreciation of the broader institutional context in which they are situated, but also the intended and unintended ways that policy-making can shape their structure.

International schools and the concept of an international education are a relatively new phenomenon, but their growth is almost unparalleled by any other service industry. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of international schools has risen over the last forty years from less than one hundred to close to, if not exceeding, two thousand today. At the same time, organisations like the International Baccalaureate are seeing the curriculum programmes they offer, being taken up by national and international schools, as they seek to educate tomorrow’s citizens in the face of ever increasing globalization. However, the growth and increased accessibility of international schools has brought with it a more discerning customer. This study, with the use of segmentation theory, will show that international schools are fully aware of the ‘wants and needs’ of their ‘customers’ and deliberately recruit teachers who will satisfy certain predetermined criteria and, in doing so, ensure their own continued success. Using data drawn from a well established international schools’ recruitment agency and supplemented by information drawn directly from a number of international schools, this study will show that the majority of international schools, whenever possible and finances allowing, look to employ Western trained, English speaking teachers who preferably have previous experience of the curricular being offered.

Financial authorities have traditionally relied on fines, suspensions, and bars to discipline misconduct in financial markets and, in that way, protect public investors and promote financial development. In theory, these sanctions should be sufficiently high to internalize the social cost of wrongdoing and deter future misbehavior. In practice, however, public firms are often criticized for being under-punished. This concern has motivated a line of research, especially in the United States, to examine whether enforcement actions initiated by public authorities generate negative indirect effects for the firms accused of misbehavior and, therefore, whether those effects supplement the regulatory sanction. In general, the answer to this question is positive under certain circumstances. Whether or not firms also suffer collateral effects in emerging financial markets, however, is a question that has received little attention in the literature. The purpose of this work is therefore to make a first step to fill this gap. Addressing this gap is important because emerging markets are smaller, less liquid, and more concentrated than the United States' financial market, which might neutralize the side financial effects of enforcement that prior studies have documented. As a result, the policy recommendations proposed in the prior literature are not necessarily applicable to emerging economies. This work focuses on three specific types of collateral effects: the effect of enforcement on (1) the defendant's stock price, (2) the defendant's operating performance, and (3) the cost of external financing. In terms of types of violations and sample countries, this work focuses on enforcement actions triggered by securities regulation violations in the five countries that form the MSCI-EC-LATAM index (Morgan Stanley Capital International Emerging Markets Index - Latin America). The results indicate that the stock price and operating performance of firms whose insiders were sanctioned for insider trading decline significantly after the imposition of the sanction. These results have various implications for the regulation of official penalties as a tool to promote financial development.

In 1921, 1924 and 1929-1934, markets for the future delivery of wheat went through periods of extreme volatility and/or significant depression, and in all three cases there were significant and long-lasting changes to both the institutional and regulatory framework of these Chicago-dominated grain markets. There was no real change after these key reforms until 1974, while indeed much of the original regulatory and market innovation remains. The result of the severe depression of 1921 was the Futures Trading Act of 1921. In 1924-25, the so-called ‘Cutten corner’ market turmoil was followed by three key institutional innovations brought about in 1926 by US federal government coercion of the grain futures trading industry in collusion with industry leaders. The Great Depression gave birth to the 1936 Commodity Exchange Act. This Act was based on research done by the government and/or with government-mandated evidence that essentially saw the small grain gambler as needing protection from the grain futures industry, and was pushed through by a coalition of farmers’ organisations and the agency responsible for the 1922 Act’s administration. The government demanded information that was begrudgingly provided, and the studies of this data formed the basis of a political and intellectual justification of the usefulness of futures markets to the marketing of farm products that influenced the Act of 1936 and – more importantly - continues to today. My key thesis is that government worked closely with the futures industry to the extent that the agency was captured by special interests for much of the interwar period, and I claim that government intervention was responsible for the essential changes that assured the dominance of futures markets, with the Chicago Board of Trade as their hub. The lasting institutions created in the 1920s and 1930s continue to immensely influence the financial markets of today, including being incorporated into the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. My study differs from the accepted account that sees federal regulation as an irrational ‘populist’ attempt at controlling or even banning the markets, with the new institutions developed during the interwar period as the result of effective industry self-regulation in spite of state interference. The findings are based on a theory-driven reading of archives of the Chicago Board of Trade, its regulator the Grain Futures Administration, and the other key government agencies engaging with the grain trade, the USDA, the Federal Farm Board and the Federal Trade Commission. The approach here differs from the accepted accounts in that it is based mostly on my archival work, including the newly reorganised (in 2014) Chicago Board of Trade archive, rather than on public sources such as Congressional hearings and newspaper stories.

Abstract This thesis analyses the stock market synchronicity of 34 emerging markets and compares the findings with seven developed markets. The study uses weekly stock return data and the final dataset includes approximately 20.8 million weekly observations for 40,014 firms across the world. Morck et al. (2000) are among the first to introduce the topic of stock market synchronisation and argue that stock markets in economies with high per capita GDP move in a relatively unsynchronised manner over time, in contrast to stock prices in low per capita GDP economies. They also suggest that stock synchronicity is associated with macroeconomic indicators including rule of law, inflation, corruption and geographical size. In addition, Skaife et al. (2006) propose a further measure of stock synchronicity based on the proportion of zero returns and argue that the zero-return measure is a superior measure of stock market co-movement. The study uses both measures proposed by Morck et al. (2000) and one measure proposed by Skaife et al. (2006) for synchronicity analysis and extends the analysis to cover a ten year period, a larger sample of shares and more recent measures of country specific characteristics. It is found that stock markets in emerging economies are more synchronous than in developed economies over the sample period using the classical measure. It is also found that over the 10-year study period the synchronicity measure is stationary. There is evidence of a statistically significant negative correlation between stock synchronicity and both government accountability and corruption for the emerging markets using the cross-sectional analysis. The R-square measure of stock synchronicity averages 0.091 for the emerging markets and 0.045 for the developed economies, suggesting that higher stock price co-movement is evident in emerging economies. Further, there is a statistically significant positive correlation between the R-square measure and both corruption and inflation. The study also uses the zero-return measure of stock synchronicity suggested by Skaife et al. (2006). It is found that the zero-return measure for emerging economies is higher than for developed economies. Surprisingly, China and the S&P 500 group of companies exhibit the lowest values for the zero-return measure during this period, which is inconsistent with the classical measure and the R-square measure. Further, panel data analysis shows that GDP per capita and trade openness have a strong effect on the zero-return measure. The Pearson correlation and Spearman rank correlation coefficient indicate that the classical measure and the R-square measure are positively correlated and appear to capture similar aspects of the markets in the study, which is also consistent with cross-sectional analysis results. In contrast, the zero-return measure shows either insignificant or negative correlation with the classical measure and the R-square measure for most sub-period and full period analysis. Finally, there is evidence that emerging stock markets are more synchronous over time than in developed financial markets. It is found that common-law country stock synchronicity is lower than in civil-law countries or post-communist countries using the classical measure and the R-square measure.

The thesis contributes to the study of the relationship between competition and incentives, when asymmetric information is taken into account. Our main focus is the analysis of loan relationships. The first two chapters analyze the relationship between borrowers' financial constraints and endogenous fluctuations. We try to provide a potential departure from the traditional corporate finance theories by showing that the characteristics of firms' capital structure (i.e. their debt-to-equity ratio) can be affected by macroeconomic conditions. We construct a dynamic economy with asymmetric information in the credit market. The features of optimal securities issued at equilibrium are influenced by macroeconomic conditions. As a by-product, the debt-to-equity ratio in the overall economy will evolve according to the dynamics of aggregate variables. The remaining of the thesis develops a theoretical analysis of credit relationships where multiple financiers compete over the loan contracts they are offering to entrepreneurs-borrowers. To this extent, Chapter 3 proposes a unified framework to analyze the so-called literature on competing mechanisms and provides new results in terms of characterizing the equilibria of multi-principal multi-agent games. In the specific context of common agency games, we show that the introduction of a separability requirement on agent's preferences with respect to the contract offers she receives from principals is a sufficient condition to retrieve the Revelation Principle. Importantly, no restriction on principals' preferences is introduced. Chapter 4 investigates credit market relationships when competing lenders are explicitly considered. A reformulation of the traditional credit channel of Monetary Policy is then suggested. When lenders are strategically competing on their credit contract offers, positive-profit equilibria typically arise. Our analysis considers both the exclusive case and the non-exclusive one and it argues that monetary factors may affect the real sector mainly by modifying the structure of markets. The last chapter discusses the welfare implications of contractual externalities that arise in the presence of multiple financiers. We consider a scenario where a Social Planner is subject to the same informational constraints faced by principals in a simple model of the credit market. We identify conditions that sustain constrained-efficiency of market equilibria.

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.

Widespread support for capital account liberalization in emerging markets has recently shifted to skepticism and even support for capital controls in certain circumstances. This sea-change in attitudes has been bolstered by the inconclusive macroeconomic evidence on the benefits of capital account liberalization. There are several compelling reasons why it is difficult to measure the aggregate impact of capital controls in very different countries. Instead, a new and more promising approach is more detailed microeconomic studies of how capital controls have generated specific distortions in individual countries. Several recent papers have used this approach and examined very different aspects of capital controls - from their impact on crony capitalism in Malaysia and on financing constraints in Chile, to their impact on US multinational behavior and the efficiency of stock market pricing. Each of these diverse studies finds a consistent result: capital controls have significant economic costs and lead to a misallocation of resources. This new microeconomic evidence suggests that capital controls are not just "sand", but rather "mud in the wheels" of market discipline