Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (February 17, 2010) Includes bibliographical references (p. 21)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-172). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-172). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references.

<p>This dissertation comprises two essays on over-the-counter (OTC) markets, covering both the primary and secondary markets for municipal bonds.</p> <p>In the first chapter, I explore a novel channel through which exchange-traded funds (ETFs) improve pre-trade price transparency and thereby retail investors' bargaining power in OTC markets. ETFs are required to daily disclose their full holdings, often along with their constituents’ end-of-day prices, which are good timely references for investors to negotiate with broker-dealers, particularly when the securities have not traded recently. I find that ETF-held bonds have significantly lower retail markups than those of bonds not held by ETFs. This effect cannot be explained by selection or ETFs' own trading activity but is driven by the daily disclosures by ETFs holding the bonds. During 2010--2021, retail investors saved over $200 million when trading ETF-held bonds. There is also a spillover effect to the primary market---when municipalities have outstanding ETF-held bonds, their new issues have lower yields and smaller price dispersion.</p> <p>In the second chapter, I both theoretically and empirically document a non-monotonic relation between local municipal bond mutual funds, or informed investors, and underpricing in the municipal bond market. Empirically speaking, offering yields are higher in states that have open-end municipal bond funds, and with larger aggregate fund size. However, holding local fund size constant, yields decrease in the number of funds. Such relations hold when local funds' primary market participation is instrumented with the similarities in characteristics of new issues and existing bonds in their portfolios. I further confirm my empirical findings with a security underpricing model that incorporates the imperfect signals available to informed investors. Despite facing higher borrowing costs, issuers benefit from local funds' certification resulting in both institutional and retail investors' higher demand in the primary market.</p>

Legal Aspects of Derivatives This thesis deals with derivatives and their legal aspects. The purpose of the thesis is to focus on the main characteristics of derivative contracts and try to find their legal nature. The main reason for choosing the topic was the lack of information about legal problems regarding derivatives. It seems to be an interesting paradox. Billions of derivatives contracts are traded every day but not much has been written about them from the law point of view. Although there are many books dealing with their economic characteristics their accounting and tax aspects, it is hardly possible to find a monograph dealing with their legal base. This thesis is divided into five main parts. The first one describes derivatives in general, offers a definition and divides them into basic categories. The second part encompasses history of derivatives and their regulation. This part is mainly connected to common law rules since derivatives have developed mostly within Anglo-American law systems. The third part concentrates on problems arising from the fact that although derivatives are traded all over the world their legal basis remains unclear. The question arising is whether to treat derivatives as wagers, insurance policies or as some different type of contract. In this part I offer my...

University of Macau / Faculty of Business Administration / Department of Management and Marketing

The world bond market is nearly twice as large as the equity market. The goal of this dissertation is to study the dynamics of bond price. Among the liquidity risk, interest rate risk and default risk, this dissertation will focus on the liquidity risk and trading strategy. Under the mathematical frame of stochastic control, we model price setting in U.S. bond markets where dealers have multiple instruments to smooth inventory imbalances. The difficulty in obtaining the optimal trading strategy is that the optimal strategy and value function depend on each other, and the corresponding HJB equation is nonlinear. To solve this problem, we derived an approximate optimal explicit trading strategy. The result shows that this trading strategy is better than the benchmark central symmetric trading strategy.