Submitted by Renato José Rodrigues Fernandes (renatojrf87@gmail.com) on 2013-05-01T19:50:58Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Mestrado - Renato José Rodrigues Fernandes.pdf: 706316 bytes, checksum: c3ec791ac990f327104c8e50900f5641 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Suzinei Teles Garcia Garcia (suzinei.garcia@fgv.br) on 2013-05-02T13:17:31Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Mestrado - Renato José Rodrigues Fernandes.pdf: 706316 bytes, checksum: c3ec791ac990f327104c8e50900f5641 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-05-02T13:36:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Mestrado - Renato José Rodrigues Fernandes.pdf: 706316 bytes, checksum: c3ec791ac990f327104c8e50900f5641 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-04-09 / This work aims to investigate the quantitative implications of a fiscal policy rigidity model developed by Gonçalves e Guimaraes (2012) and to answer if it is able to generate more defaults in equilibrium without using a strong ad hoc assumption about the costs in terms of product of a default on sovereign debt in order to be able to generate the desired results according to what is observed in economic data, i.e., that defaults tend to occur in bad times. The main hypothesis of this model is that the government cannot commit to a fiscal adjustment to repay the debt that is coming due because it chooses the tax rate in the previous period. Thus, when facing a low product in a given period, the sovereign cannot adjust its revenue to meet his obligations and has to decide either to increase the level of debt or to repudiate its debt and not repay. In the results, we have that the fiscal rigidity increases the occurrence of defaults in at least one order of magnitude in comparison to other quantitative models of sovereign debt and helps to explain the occurrence of defaults in periods of low product in the Economy. / Este trabalho tem como objetivo investigar as implicações quantitativas do modelo de rigidez de política fiscal desenvolvido por Gonçalves e Guimaraes (2012) e responder se ele é capaz de gerar mais defaults em equilíbrio sem se utilizar de uma forte hipótese ad hoc acerca dos custos em termos do produto de um calote na dívida soberana, a fim de conseguir gerar os resultados desejados de acordo com o que se observa nos dados econômicos, isto é, que os calotes tendem a ocorrer em tempos ruins. A principal hipótese deste modelo é que o Governo não pode se comprometer com um ajuste fiscal para repagar a dívida que está vencendo porque ele escolhe a alíquota de imposto no período anterior. Logo, ao se deparar com um produto baixo em determinado período, o soberano não pode ajustar a arrecadação a fim de fazer frente às suas obrigações e se vê diante da decisão de aumentar o nível do endividamento ou de repudiar sua dívida e não pagá-la. Nos resultados, tem-se que a rigidez fiscal aumenta a ocorrência de defaults em pelo menos uma ordem de magnitude comparado a outros modelos quantitativos de dívida soberana e ajuda a explicar a ocorrência de calotes em períodos de baixo produto na Economia.

This study explored the legal parameters of sovereign immunity and its waivers for employees of public institutions of higher education in the state of Texas. This empirical study examined the decisions of the Texas Judiciary concerning public university litigation in the area of sovereign immunity, with a review of major state court decisions. Legal research methodology was used in this study. The data for this study included case study review of six cases decided by the Texas judiciary. Information about each of the cases and the important legal inferences from the cases was discussed. A review of the history of sovereign immunity and the current status of the application of the Texas Tort Claims Act was also included. Based on the review of the relevant case law and scholarly commentary, the study findings suggest that a) Texas courts recognize and apply the doctrine of sovereign immunity, unless the application of the doctrine is restricted by the Texas Tort Claims Act; b) the Texas Tort Claims Act establishes limited waivers to sovereign immunity applicable only under specified circumstances and subjects; c) Texas courts were consistent in applying the circumstances by which an institution or its actors waived sovereign immunity. Practice recommendations are included for education professionals at Texas state institutions of higher education.

La thèse examine le cadre juridique de la restructuration de la dette souveraine vis-à-vis des créanciers privés et le rôle joué par le droit international public. La problématique est la suivante : Quel est le rôle actuel et potentiel du droit international public dans la restructuration de dettes souveraines ? Le cadre juridique actuel est fragmenté, avec une multitude d'acteurs et de pratiques. Le contexte politique influence le processus plus que des coutumes ou des principes généraux. La jurisprudence révèle les défis pour les cours nationales et les tribunaux internationaux. L'approche contractuelle incite les créanciers à un contentieux créatif, qui perturbe les négociations. L'arbitrage relatif aux investissements s'est révélé inadéquat. Les incohérences entre les différents fora entraînent des résultats insatisfaisants pour les créanciers et les débiteurs, au détriment de la sécurité juridique. Pour les perspectives d'avenir, les concepts de dette odieuse et d'état de nécessité ne peuvent offrir que des améliorations limitées. Leur contenu apparaît trop peu défini pour protéger une restructuration. La réforme du cadre juridique de la restructuration de la dette souveraine a mis en concurrence les approches fondées sur le droit international public et sur le droit privé. Cela a été le plus évident avec le processus à l'Assemblée générale des Nations Unies et la modification concomitante des clauses contractuelles. Un cadre futur pourrait inclure une réduction de l'accès au contentieux, un rôle plus important reconnu aux droits de l'homme de la population débitrice et une action de l'Union européenne à mi-chemin entre les deux approches. / This thesis considers the legal framework of sovereign debt restructuring in relation to private creditors and the relevant rules of public international law. The research question is : What is the actual and potential role of public international law in sovereign debt restructurings ? The current legal framework is fragmented, and a multitude of actors and practices coexist. Political expediency governs the process and the outcomes, with little room for customary rules or general principles of law. The case law reveals the challenges for both domestic courts and international tribunals in dealing with sovereign debt restructurings. The contractual approach provides incentives for creditors to attempt creative litigation, which disrupts negotiations. Investment arbitration has proved an inadequate response. The inconsistencies among the different fora bring about unsatisfactory results for creditors and debtors alike, let alone the implications for legal certainty. For the future prospects, the concepts of odious debt and state of necessity can provide limited improvements, at best. Their content and contours appear too ill-defined to be relied upon by States wishing to shield a restructuring. The reform of the legal framework for sovereign debt restructuring has set a competition between approaches based on public international law and on private law. This has been most evident with the process at the United Nations General Assembly and the concomitant modification of contractual clauses. A future framework could potentially feature less avenues for litigation, a focus on the human rights of the debtor population, and a middle ground shaped by the European Union.

Les XIVe et XVe siècles sont une époque de bouleversements des valeurs spirituelles et morales accompagnés d’un éveil de l’opinion publique. L’État se construit et autour du roi une société politique se constitue : ce sont les principaux protagonistes des chroniques. L'étude du scandale aux XIVe et XVe siècles d'après les chroniques contemporaines offre un panel d'exemples variés permettant l’analyse de pratiques ou de discours que l’on peut qualifier d’émotionnels. Ces recherches se tournent vers une histoire politique plus attentive aux acteurs qui jouent un rôle important dans l’histoire des pouvoirs. Les textes permettent de retrouver la définition du scandale donnée par les chroniqueurs. Elle sort des cadres officiels pour devenir celle de l'auteur, lui-même se faisant le reflet des sensibilités. C’est un événement qui choque, sort de la norme et provoque du bruit et du tapage. Il heurte la morale et cause l'indignation lorsque les affaires sont mises au grand jour. Les chroniqueurs partagent avec leurs contemporains une peur réelle du scandale et de ses conséquences. Il faut le dénoncer et y mettre fin pour échapper à la colère divine qu'il peut susciter. L'analyse du vocabulaire et de la communication construite autour de cette notion permet de comprendre comment le scandale est perçu et défini par ses acteurs. Le rôle joué par le pouvoir royal dans la gestion de ces affaires montre que celui-ci, à la fin du XVe siècle tend vers une institutionnalisation du scandale. / The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are times of upheavals in spiritual and moral values followed by a wakening of public opinion. The State is arising as well as a political society which represents, along the king, the main actors in chronicles. The study of scandal in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries according to contemporary chronicles offers a range of diversified examples which enable the study of practices or speeches that can be qualified as emotional. These studies are part of a political history more attentive to the actors who seem to play an important role in the history of powers. Texts allow to find the definition of the scandal given by the chroniclers. It goes beyond official frameworks to become that of the author who reflects himself the sensibilities. Scandal appears to be shocking and it represents what oversteps the norm and triggers rumour and fuss. It goes against all conventions and causes indignation when the light is thrown on. Chroniclers share with their contemporaries a real fear of scandal and its consequences so it has to be denounced and ended in order to avoid the divine wrath that can be lead to.The analysis of the vocabulary and the communication built around this notion allow to understand how the scandal is perceived and defined by the actors. The role played by the royal power in the management of its affairs shows that this one, at the end of the fifteenth century, moves towards an institutionalization of the scandal.

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 led to a large increase in the government debt of all advanced economies. In the United States, the debt burden reached levels not seen since the Second World War. In Europe, high fiscal stress evolved into a sovereign debt crisis. My thesis focuses on debt dynamics in advanced economies and the design of policies that can stabilize their fiscal burden. In the first chapter, I provide new evidence and theory on US debt dynamics and their relation with long-term growth forecasts. In the second chapter, I document a novel dataset on the maturity structure of sovereign debt of Euro Area (EA) countries and study the effect of the maturity composition on debt dynamics. Finally, in the third chapter, I analyze empirically the role of debt management in stabilizing the fiscal burden of countries in the EA.<p><p>Chapter 1: Sovereign Debt in the US and Growth Expectations<p><p>This chapter studies the effect of changes in expectations of long-term GDP growth on US government debt and deficits. Long-term growth expectations are an essential determinant of expected future revenue growth and fiscal solvency. I present evidence that US government debt and deficits are positively correlated with long-term GDP (and revenue) growth forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office between 1984 and 2012. This is robust to controlling for current growth and to using à-la-Kalman estimated forecasts for a longer time span. This stylized fact is novel in the macroeconomics literature and I develop a new model of government behavior that explains it.<p>My model features endogenous (forward-looking) purchasing behavior for the government. This distinguishes my model from standard macro theories that assume exogenous government purchases, or ad-hoc backward looking policy rules for government purchases. It builds on the recent ‘long-run risks’ literature by assuming shocks to the trend growth rate of total factor productivity. The model matches the observed positive correlation between fiscal deficits and the trend growth rate, based on the government’s desire to smooth public consumption over periods of higher (or lower) long-run productivity growth. <p><p>Chapter 2: Government Debt Maturity and Debt Dynamics in EA Countries<p><p>This chapter presents a new comprehensive database on sovereign debt stocks and yields, at all maturities, for six EA countries: Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Spain between 1991 and 2013. I constructed this database by combining information from different sources (treasuries, national central banks and statistical offices), on a security-by-security basis. A recent literature has shown the importance of debt maturity management in the US - e.g. Hall and Sargent (2011) - however, due to lack of data, this key issue remained unstudied for the EA. Thus, I use my database to study the effect of debt maturity management on the evolution of government debt in EA countries. <p>My main finding is that debt maturity also had an important effect in debt dynamics of the EA. The debt maturity structure affects debt dynamics because longer maturity shields the government budget from changes in interest rates. In general, interest rates in the EA have fallen since 1991 while treasuries in the region extended debt maturity. Thus, an increasing number of long-term bondholders experienced large capital gains. Counterfactual simulations show the impact of a different maturity structure on the evolution of debt and suggest that extending debt maturity in 2014 and 2015 would result in lower debt ratios by 2022. I also estimate the debt-to-GDP erosion induced by higher current and future inflation and find that inflation would lower the fiscal burden in EA countries much more than in the US.<p><p>Chapter 3: Quantifying the Role of Debt Management for Fiscal Self-Insurance in the EA<p><p>The last chapter provides evidence of debt management being an effective tool for protecting the government budget from fiscal spending shocks in the EA. In particular, I document that sovereign bonds of EA countries had a significantly lower real return in response to government spending shocks between 1991 and 2013. Importantly, longer bond maturity generally implied a larger drop in returns. This is in line with theories claiming that long-term debt provides fiscal self-insurance. However, my finding suggests that medium-term debt is more effective in hedging against spending shocks. <p>I identify government spending shocks in a Structural VAR model estimated with both aggregated quarterly fiscal data for the EA and stacked data from individual countries. I also use a simple FAVAR model to distinguish between common and idiosyncratic (country-specific) shocks and document that the former risk was hedged more effectively. The introduction of the Euro reduced the absorption of idiosyncratic shocks (relative to common shocks) by bond returns. However, the European debt crisis brought the degree of fiscal self-insurance against country-specific shocks back to pre-Euro levels. Finally, debt maturity seems to play a minor role in the absorption of country-specific shocks by the return on sovereign bonds. <p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Depuis son éruption en septembre 2009, la crise de la zone euro a été au centre de l'attention des économistes et des décideurs politiques. L'objectif principal de cette thèse est de développer des modèles théoriques pertinents afin d'analyser les facteurs à l'origine de la crise jumelle des banques et de la dette souveraine dans une union monétaire avec une architecture institutionnelle globalement similaire de l'Union économique et monétaire avant 2012. Tout en mettant l'accent sur la vulnérabilité financière, nous explorons la relation entre le secteur bancaire, l'économie réelle et le budget du gouvernement dans le contexte d 'une union monétaire. Cette thèse se compose de quatre modèles théoriques de la crise bancaire, avec le premier illustrant la crise financière qui avait éclaté en 2008 dans les petites économies européennes en dehors de l 'UEM et les trois modèles suivants élucidant la situation de crise dans la zone euro en2009 jusqu'en 2012. / In this Ph. D. thesis, we analyze the conditions for the emergence and the aggravation of the recent crisis in Europe from 2008 to 2012. The major objective of this Ph. D. thesis is to develop theoretical models which will be effective in investigating the twin banking and sovereign debt crises in a monetary union with a broadly similar institutional design to the EMU before 2012. Different from 'traditional' financial crisis models that shed light on the role of the central bank in crisis policy response, the models developed in this thesis investigate and underline the importance of fiscal crisis management. White accentuating financial vulnerability, we explore the relationship between the banking sector, the realeconomy and the public budget in the context of a monetary union. This thesis consists of four theoretical models of the banking crisis, with the first framework depicting the financial crisis which burst in 2008 in small European economies outside the EMU and the next three models elucidating the crisis situation in the Eurozone from early 2009 until August 2012.

Over the past five years, Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) have become a prominent phenomenon in contemporary capitalism. Described as government investment vehicles that invest state wealth in financial markets, the majority of the world's 60-plus funds have been established since the year 2000. Despite extensive treatments of SWFs' geopolitical and international significance, ethical and domestic level analyses are sparse. In response, this thesis interrogates three key normative questions raised by the funds for the domestic citizen-state relationship: (1) How (and by whom) should sovereign funds be managed? (2) How should sovereign wealth be invested? (3) How should the earnings of sovereign fund investment be distributed? In answering these questions, this thesis aims to dispel ambiguity over the ownership status of sovereign funds, evident in popular and academic discourse and within communities that establish these entities. For this task, it draws on recently revived fiduciary theory of the citizen-state relationship to argue that the rightful owner of these funds is the citizenry - not states or governments who enjoy physical and legal possession of SWFs. It goes on to examine the implications of this fiduciary state conception of SWF ownership, asking how citizen-owners should enjoy control over and benefit from the distinct constituent parts of their SWF property: the institution of the fund, the underlying sovereign wealth and the financial returns earned on the investment of its assets. The model of citizen ownership defended demands substantially increased popular control over SWF management and the investment of sovereign wealth, as well as direct benefit rights for citizen-owners to fund income through individualised distribution of investment returns. Examination of existing practice among SWFs demonstrates that this normative ideal is far, although not impossibly distant from current institutional practice.

Thesis deals with the attraction of Czech government bonds from the perspective of foreign investors in relation with the current economic development in CEE region, and further in the rest of the world. Analysis is targeted to issue of the Czech government bonds in turn of 2009 and 2010. After the analysis and description of foreign investors representing huge part of the entire demand for the Czech government bonds on the domestic and foreign markets the paper further covers individual pros and cons of the instrument. The empirical analysis is conducted as the comparison of the yields and risk of Czech goventment bonds with the similar instruments issued by Hungarian and Slovakian governments. Separate part of the thesis covers the characteristics of used instruments (Czech T-Notes and T-Bills) and legal adjustments of the auctions through which these instruments are placed on the domestic market. Thesis also contains a separate chapters covering the results of former issues of the Czech government bonds abroad and the analysis of tax consequences resulting from holding and selling the Czech government bonds by foreign investors.

This dissertation thesis focuses on complex analysis of the problem, which is the sovereign debt crisis in the Euro area. The aim of this paper is to provide a complex overview and analysis of the current sovereign debt crisis, from the theoretical definition of the term, through an analysis of the causes and consequences of this crisis to outline the economic policy response to it. The text is divided into two parts. The first part deals with theoretical problem solving. In the second part is analyzed and described course of sovereign debt crisis. This section also analyzes in detail causes and consequences of the sovereign debt crisis in certain countries. This section is completed by an analysis of economic policy response to the sovereign debt crisis and an expert estimate of the future development of public debt countries analyzed.

The master thesis focuses on the European debt crisis. It first studies the development of monetary integration on the continent. It is followed by the detailed analyses of the debt crisis, how it started, what were the triggers, how it unfolded and at what point is it now. It identifies the fundamental issues of the crisis and the reasons of it. Lastly, it analyzes the implications of the crisis in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The master thesis contains 73 pages, 25 figures or tables and 1 annex.