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published_or_final_version / abstract / Real Estate and Construction / Master / Master of Philosophy

A central concern in economics is explaining the allocation of resources, its consequences for economic activity and the distribution of the associated economic revenues. This dissertation contains three essays examining the average and distributional effects of reallocations resulting from liberalization reforms or trade shocks. Chapter 1 examines the distributional effects of trade liberalization. A vast literature demonstrates that liberalization is associated with higher wage inequality. Nearly the entire literature considers comparative statics or steady states, which ignore dynamics and of necessity feature monotonic changes. I address these limitations by developing a micro-founded model that emphasizes the dynamics of reallocation between heterogeneous firms and workers in the presence of costly labor adjustments. Trade liberalization provides firms both new export markets and new sources of competition. Expanding high-paying firms increase wages to recruit better workers faster. Workers at firms threatened by competition accept wage cuts to delay their employers' exit and keep their job. This provides novel implications for both aggregate and within-firm inequality across a distribution of firm types. I show that key mechanisms of the model are consistent with a wide range of facts, some of which being examined in greater details in chapter 2. Results from the calibrated model suggest an overshooting of inequality on the path to a new steady state. This is consistent with evidence based on an event study of recent liberalization episodes. Inequality appears to peak about six years after liberalization, with one-fourth of the overshooting disappearing in the following ten years. Chapter 2 investigates the effects of firm growth on hiring and separations. I contribute to the literature on worker flows by studying the wages and characteristics of new and separated workers. First, I show that separations are an essential and robust component of firm growth. I argue that this may be the result of a more intense search for better matches at faster growing firms. Second, I find that wage offers to new hires increase with firm hiring rates. This is partly the result of the selection of more experienced workers. However fixed unobservable and variable observable worker characteristics cannot fully explain this relationship: the residual wage of new hires is significantly associated with the firm hiring rate. We interpret this as direct evidence of the firm-level upward-sloping labor supply curve predicted by the canonical models. We provide estimates of the slope of the curve using an instrumental variable approach to control for supply shocks. We find that a 10% increase in the hiring rate results in a wage increase of 1%. In chapter 3 Jaromir Nosal, Jonathan Vogel and I ask the following: What is the contribution of industry reallocation and productivity changes to the economic gains resulting from banking deregulation? How does local industrial structure determine the outcomes of banking deregulation? This chapter uses the staggered reforms of the banking sector in the U.S. between 1977 and 1997 to empirically investigate these questions. In the private sector, we show that the deregulation-induced reallocation of workers was directed towards industries with lower GDP per worker. Moreover, employment gains were associated with a reduction in productivity. Nevertheless we find that these effects are offset by across the board within-industry productivity gains. In addition, total output and aggregate productivity increased because of the reallocation of workers out of unemployment, self-employment and non-private industries towards the more productive private sector. Finally we find that initial industry mix can explain up to one third of the variation in state aggregate responses.

The Nigerian banking system is presently riddled with distress, insolvency, and failure. The system is passing through what might seem the roughest phase in its history. The present bank distress and insolvency have culminated in the failure of many banks. In an attempt to correct this unhealthy development, the regulatory authorities (CBN and NDIC) have devised and implemented many novel policies to check this drift. Despite their efforts, however, the cankerworm continues to eat deeper into the Nigerian banking system. This study seeks to identify significant factors that might explain Nigeria's banking system failure as perceived by bank officials, and to recommend ways to minimize bank failure in Nigeria. The banking authorities, to a large extent, focused on a single cause of bank failure, such as unprofessionalism on the part of bank personnel. The majority of those interviewed accused them of committing fraud. The study showed that during the era of bank deregulation, a wider array of factors might have contributed to bank failure. The factors identified in this study are as follows: 1. The acute shortage of experienced and seasoned banking professionals during the era of banking deregulation led to an increase of forgeries and other abuses. 2. The inconsistent and frequent changes in macroeconomic policies during the period under study have negatively affected other macro-economic indicators. 3. Some factors during the period under investigation led to some banks' inability to meet standards set by the CBN/NDIC in respect to: capital adequacy, asset quality, management profile, earnings strength, and liquidity guidelines. 4. Lack of central bank independence contributed to bank failure. This study is important because the proposed recommendations would be of interest to operators of the banking industry, to regulators in the industry, as well as to the Nigerian government in its efforts to chart a new course in the Nigerian banking industry in the twenty-first century.

We examine how access to bank credit affects trade credit in the supplier-customer relationships of U.S. public firms. For identification, we use exogenous liquidity shocks to supplier firms in the form of staggered changes to interstate bank branching laws. Using a variety of tests, we show that supplier firms with greater access to banking liquidity offer more trade credit to their customers. We also show that when bank branching restrictions are relaxed in the supplier's state, the supplier-customer relationship is more likely to survive. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

<p>Diss. Stockholm :  Stockholm School of Economics, 2013. Introduction together with 4 papers.</p>

This research examines competing theories based on the strategic choice and organizational ecology perspectives by investigating strategic change in the banking industry preceding and following interest rate and product deregulation of financial institutions in the early 1980's. Adaptation theory suggests that the largest, oldest, and most powerful organizations have superior capacities for adapting to environmental circumstances and that organizational variability reflects changes in the strategy and structure of a firm in response to environmental changes. The organizational ecology perspective hypothesizes that a firm's ability to change is inversely related to organizational age and size and that organizations become inert as they grow and age. The propositions and hypotheses in this research examine the relationship between organizational age and size on both absolute and relative inertia. The association between strategic change on firm survival is also explored. Findings demonstrate partial support for both theories. An explanation for the mixed findings is offered which suggests that both adaptation and organizational ecology theories explain continuous change, while the deregulation period under study represented a period of discontinuous change. A third model of strategic change, proposed by Meyers, Brooks, and Goes (1990) is offered as a better explanation of strategic change among U.S. banks during the decade following deregulation. / Ph. D.

The late 1990's was a time of great wealth and prosperity in the United States. With this economic fervor came a new era of deregulation of the financial services industry. During this time, Congress passed the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, otherwise referred to as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GBLA). This law removed the final barrier (contained in Depression-era Glass-Steagall legislation) between mixing investment banking and commercial banking in the United States. The purpose of this report is to explain the intentions of the law's supporters and detractors, to discuss why this period was a particularly ripe time for such a policy, to examine the leadership decisions that contributed to the passage of GLBA, and to understand the motives behind a "new Glass-Steagall" bill today. This paper focuses only on the deregulatory parts of GLBA relevant to Glass-Steagall's repeal. It does not examine the privacy protections, et al. of GLBA at any length. Also contained in the analysis is a brief discussion of whether GLBA's stated intentions have been violated through the mixing of banking and commerce that has emerged in the present day. Finally, this report ends with a discussion on the fidelity of our national debate on banking regulation, and what it means for the federal government to manage risk in American financial markets in support of the public interest. / text

Cette thèse est constituée de quatre articles. Le premier article avec Johan Hombert montre que lorsque les relations bancaires sont affectées, cela réduit le nombre d'entreprises innovantes et conduit également à une hausse de la mobilité géographique des inventeurs, qui quittent les états où les relations bancaires sont dégradées. Le second article est un travail avec Claire Célerier mettant en avant le rôle de l'offre dans le phénomène de non bancarisation des populations pauvres aux Etats-Unis. Le troisième article étudie les externalités d'innovation et montre que lorsque certaines entreprises innovent moins les autres entreprises locales innovent moins en réponse. Cet effet décroit rapidement avec la distance. Le quatrième article, en collaboration avec Olivier Dessaint, montre que les managers répondent systématiquement à des chocs de liquidité proches d'eux en augmentant temporairement leur trésorier. / This dissertation is made of four distinct chapters. The first chapter with Johan Hombert shows that when lending relationships are hurt, it reduces the number of innovative firms and foster inventor mobility who move out of geographical areas where lending relationships are hurt. The second chapter presents a work with Claire Célerier and shows that supply-side factors account for a large part of the unbanked household phenomenon in the US. The third chapter studies spillovers of innovation and shows that when some firms innovate less other firms in the same city innovate less in response and this effect declines sharply with distance. The fourth chapter with Olivier Dessaint presents evidence that managers systematically respond to near-miss liquidity shocks by temporarily increasing the amount of corporate cash holdings.

本研究以美國證券市場為樣本，探討銀行業之法規開放是否對非金融業公司之會計穩健性造成影響。銀行法規開放可使銀行透過併購於州內擴張，借款公司可能面對之銀行議價能力上升，使得銀行要求融資顧客出具高品質之財務報表。另一方面，州際銀行法規開放可能使他州銀行進入本地金融市場，進而提高金融市場之競爭度。由於會計穩健性可降低管理階層與投資人的資訊不對稱，被視為高品質的財務報表，本文推測銀行業法規鬆綁會影響公司會計穩健性。實證結果顯示，州內銀行法規開放與會計穩健性間具有顯著正向關係；然而，州際銀行法規開放與會計穩健性間具有顯著負向關係。額外分析顯示，大型企業更傾向於對銀行法規開放作出反應，而較依賴發行公司債融資方式之公司在面對銀行法規開放時則減少財務報導中認列損失之即時性。 / This study uses US banking deregulation as a research setting to examine whether banking deregulation has an impact on the degree of accounting conservatism of non-financial firms. Since banking deregulation would enable large banks expand within states through merge and acquisition, bank’s bargaining power to lenders may increase. Banks may require their clients to provide higher quality of financial statements. On the other hand, banking deregulation may increase competition in local financial markets by enabling large banks to enter into local markets. As accounting conservatism could alleviate information asymmetry between management and investors, and serves as an indicator of high quality of financial statements, I expect that banking deregulations would have an impact on firms’ reporting conservatism. I find that there is a significantly positive relationship between intrastate banking deregulation and firms’ timely loss recognition. In contrast, interstate banking deregulation has a significantly negative influence on firms’ timely loss recognition. Additional analyses reveal that large firms are more likely to respond to the banking deregulation and that firms that rely more on public debt financing respond to the banking deregulation by decreasing their degree of timely loss recognition in financial reporting.