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1 The Czech Environmental Inspectorate Abstract This Master's thesis describes and analyses the Czech Environmental Inspectorate, a specialized supervisory authority that oversees compliance with legal regulations and administrative decisions rendered by the public administrative authorities in the area of the protection of the environment. The partial aim of this thesis is to introduce the Czech Environmental Inspectorate and to highlight its irreplaceable role at environmental protection in the Czech Republic. The main aim of this thesis is to describe and analyze the supervision activity of this authority and its follow-up measures, which are assigned to this authority by the legal regulation, and to highlight the changes brought by two fundamental legislative changes, namely the adoption of Act No. 255/2012 Coll., on administrative control (Control Code) and Act No. 250/2016 Coll., on administrative offenses, that influenced this authority. This thesis consists of four main chapters. The first and second chapters of this thesis are the introductory chapters. The first chapter highlights the current importance of environmental protection and specifies the role of administrative supervision as an essential tool to protect the environment. The second chapter presents the basic historical context of the...

Thesis advisor: Fabio Schiantarelli / In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2009, academics and policymakers have worked to empirically quantify macro-financial linkages. This dissertation contributes to this debate by covering two broad themes. First, substantial changes in bank regulation and supervision typically follow financial crises. Quantifying the impact of these new policies is of paramount importance to academics and policymakers. To this end, my research in this area sheds light on the ways in which changes in financial stability policy ultimately affect the economy. Bank stress testing has become a major tool of supervisory policy in the past decade. The first chapter, The Real Effects of Stress Testing, uses the introduction of annual stress testing of large U.S. banks in 2009 as a quasi-experiment to examine whether bank supervisory policies affect real economic activity. While stress-tested banks reduced their risk exposure to large corporate loans, foreign banks mostly offset this shock and enabled firms to continue borrowing after the test. However, speculative grade firms that were highly exposed to stress-tested banks borrowed on worse terms after the test, and subsequently reduced fixed investment and employment. In contrast, highly exposed investment grade firms received new loans and expanded intangible investment. This paper provides insights into the effects of stress testing on the reallocation of risks in the financial system and the consequences for real economic activity. The structure of the U.S. mortgage market has experienced dramatic changes in recent years, as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the major government-sponsored enterprises or GSEs) faced substantial reforms to their business practices. An important feature of regulatory reform included changing the pricing of loan guarantees on mortgage-backed securities insured by the GSEs, in particular removing the subsidy paid by small lenders to large lenders in 2012. The second chapter of this dissertation, Lender Cross-Subsidization and Credit Supply in the Fannie Mae MBS Market (co-authored with Igor Karagodsky), shows that the removal of this subsidy resulted in a relative increase in mortgage lending by small lenders. However, states with relatively higher concentrations of large lenders experienced relative reductions in credit following the removal of these subsidies. This research underscores an important link between lender market power and credit supply. Understanding the drivers of the fluctuations in bond returns is a central question in finance. Theoretically, unexpected bond returns should reflect either changes in expectations of future short-term rates or future compensation for risk. The third chapter of this dissertation, Survey Forecasts and Bond Return Decompositions, revisits this question using survey forecasts of professional economists to measure expectations of interest rates and returns, rather than with a statistical model. Two main results emerged from this analysis: (1) News about future short-term interest rates explains relatively more of the variation in unexpected excess bond returns for short-maturity bonds relative to long-maturity bonds. (2) The share of news explained by future short-term interest rates increases with horizon for all maturities. This analysis contributes to the recent academic literature that highlights the importance of subjective expectations in understanding asset-price movements. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Peiguan Wu. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-89). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

The supervisory relationship is reported to be fundamental in determining whether the goals of supervision are met. Its role is said to surpass any methods or approaches used (Kilminster and Jolly, 2000). In educational psychology the supervisory relationship with trainees has not been explored in any depth. This study aims to explore how both trainees and supervisors experience the relationship. An onus is placed on exploring the effective features of the relationship, with a view to enhance practice. In phase 1, interpretative methodology was applied to identify newly qualified educational psychologists’ experiences of their practicum based supervision when they were in year three of their training. Main themes described are participants needing to feel accepted by their supervisor, the supervisor acting from within professional, personal and nurturing based roles, feeling connected with the supervisor, being open and disclosing with the supervisor and how service culture impacts supervision. The power dynamic between trainee and supervisor appeared to significantly impact on key features of the relationship The themes from phase 1 were presented to supervisor participants in phase 2. Interpretative methodology was used to explore supervisors’ perceptions of these themes. Overall, supervisors appeared to like relationships which were mutual and reciprocal. Implications for practice are explored e.g. the need to facilitate authenticity and open dialogue in the relationship. Limitations of the study include 1) piloting the interview process with a non-educational psychology professional who does not have experience of the context of trainee educational psychology supervision 2) possible disadvantages of knowing some of my participants 3) accessing supervisory experiences related to just year 3 of training and 4) inconsistency in criteria for participation, i.e. not all participants had been working with the same supervisor or trainee for year both years 2 and 3 of the training programme.

This thesis examines banking regulation in Nigeria. The thesis has three main objectives; First, to elucidate the role and powers of the Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN) as the apex regulator for the financial system and within the context of banking failures and crises. Second, to engage in a discourse vis-à-vis the law on banking regulation in Nigeria, with a particular focus on the revocation of banking licenses. Finally, to explore the role of other regulatory bodies which work with the CBN. This thesis provides a historical analysis of banking exchanges from the pre-colonial era to modern times, in order to provide an understanding of how political, local and economic settings as well as theories of regulation have impacted and influenced the development of banking regulation in Nigeria. The thesis concludes that the development of banking regulation has been a consequence of the aforementioned factors. The research examines Nigeria's historical experiences with banking failures, including the banking crisis of 2008. The thesis finds that the Nigerian regulator has adopted a reactionary strategy instead of a proactive and pragmatic approach to the various crises, which is imperative for an effective banking regulatory regime. Given the outcome of this examination, the thesis makes a case for reform. In addition, the study examines the banking consolidation, a recapitalization exercise implemented by the CBN in 2004. This mandated all banks to achieve a set minimum capital base. It examines the legal issues which surfaced, including the revocation of banking licenses by the CBN, arguably in 'bad faith', in order to cogitate the overall potential impact on banking regulation. The research embraces the UK and the US as comparator jurisdictions, so as to distill and critique their responses to the global financial crisis of 2007, against the backdrop of the approach adopted in the Nigerian banking crisis of 2008. It finds that the Nigerian response was the least effective of these jurisdictions and that cogent lessons may be drawn from the comparator jurisdictions. Furthermore, the thesis discusses possible reforms to move forward banking regulation in Nigeria.

Exploitation of the knowledge generated by university research can bring social and economic benefits; thus, knowledge transfer between universities and industry is an important aspect of public policy. In many countries, including the United Kingdom (UK), universities have been developing the capacity to support the commercialisation of publicly funded research, typically by setting up centralised Knowledge Transfer Offices (KTOs). Previous studies have revealed that KTOs need a wide range of abilities to support the commercialisation of academic research, but our understanding of how these abilities are developed and have evolved over time remains limited. In order to address this identified gap in the literature, this thesis examines the questions: What do KTOs learn? How do KTOs learn? and Why do KTOs learn? To address these questions, the thesis adopts a practice-based view of organisational knowledge and learning. The conceptual framework developed to investigate learning by KTOs assumes that their commercialisation practice is learnt through the interactions of their staff within communities of practice, within networks of practice and across communities of practice, and that this learning can be initiated by KTO staff or by targeted strategies devised by the KTO and the university's management. This conceptual framework guides the case studies of six purposefully selected KTOs in the UK. The selection of KTOs is aimed at identifying cases with different learning patterns in order to maximise insights gained from cross-case comparisons as well as at literal replication of the findings. The analysis is based on data collected from semi-structured interviews with key staff in selected KTOs and on information from relevant documents, and follows the ‘explanation building' technique (Yin, 2009). The findings reveal that KTOs tend to develop one of two types of commercialisation practice – each of which is based on different implicit assumptions about generating science-based innovation, and associated with a different set of abilities. Moreover, the findings demonstrate the processes by which changes in practice come about, highlighting the interplay between situated learning and strategic practices of management. The results presented address the aforementioned gap in the literature on university-industry knowledge transfer and contribute to the developing situated learning theory by shedding light on how incremental and more radical changes in practice emerge. The findings should be useful to policy-makers who seek to support universities to build capability for knowledge transfer.

Banks, like other business firms, must attract outside funding within competitive capital markets, must face competition in product, and must deal with corporate governance issues deriving from agency problems and asymmetric information. Corporate governance in banks is unique compared to non-financial firms, with factors such as higher opaqueness, heavy regulations, and government interventions, which thus require distinct analysis. Although it is well recognised that corporate governance can affect bank value, in this thesis I combine external and internal corporate governances by considering board composition and ownership structure, as well as trading behaviour on stock markets. The main objective of this thesis is to study empirically the impact of various governance mechanisms on bank stability, in terms of capital strategy, risk-taking and performance. The finding is that there exists a significantly positive relationship between market discipline and bank capital structure. In addition, over-performing banks attract a high level of informed trading, which in turn leads to a higher level of capital buffer held by a bank. Also, banks with strong corporate governance are associated with higher risk-taking. More specifically, banks that have an intermediate board size, a separation between the CEO and the chairman of board, and are audited by the Big Four audit firm, are likely to take higher risks. Banks with more state shareholders also tend to have poorer performances, and banks with higher domestic and private shareholders generally operate more profitably. Ownership type diversity is associated with better bank performance, while banks with concentrated ownership are worse performing. Finally, banks with political connections distribute more credit than nonpolitically connected banks. The results have certain policy implications for understanding the role of governance in affecting bank operations that, in turn, could improve bank prudency and assist the design of an enhanced regulation framework. Regulators should reduce protection, improve banks' asset quality, and strengthen market discipline.