Thesis advisor: Donald Cox / What fraction of college-age youths in the United States comes from credit-constrained families? Can subjective assessments of financial difficulties inform the debate about pervasiveness of credit constraints in the demand for college education? My dissertation contains two essays addressing these questions. Credit constraints in education may lead to inefficient skill allocations and perpetuate imbalances in the distribution of economic well-being. Unfortunately, empirical evidence regarding their pervasiveness in the United States has not been consistent, in part because constraints tend to be inferred indirectly. The first essay evaluates how a potentially more direct measure can be used to enhance our understanding of the issue. I focus on subjective assessments of financial limitations available in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and find that about 12 percent of college-age individuals expect to underinvest in education because of financial reasons or the need to work. While the measure developed in this paper is noisy and not a precise indicator of credit constraints, it appears to capture important variations in educational choices, beyond these captured by the standard controls, such as parental income. The contribution of the second essay is the use of parents' reports of borrowing limitations in the NLSY79 Young Adult Supplement to evaluate the proportion of constrained college-age youths in the early 2000s. The focus on the 2000s is critical because the sharp increase in tuition costs and gradual erosion of real student borrowing limits over the past two decades have potentially made credit constraints in education more widespread. My analysis sample is limited to children of young mothers who are more likely to be disadvantaged economically and hence are of specific interest to policy-makers. Over one-fifth of youths in the sample come from families where mothers report borrowing limitations. Conditional on scholastic ability, family income, and family background characteristics, parental constraints have a strong negative correlation with children's college attendance. Although my results do not distinguish between alternative explanations for borrowing limitations, they do suggest that researchers interested in the connection between liquidity constraints and education might benefit from paying more attention to direct measures. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Thesis advisor: Richard McGowan / Subsidies have played a significant role in the production of agriculture during the 20 century. While the western world gradually phased out protectionist policies for industrialized sectors of the economy following World War II, agriculture continued to receive significant support from the state until efforts were made to establish more laissez-faire markets in the 1990’s by the World Trade Organization. This paper aims to judge the effectiveness of these policies on one program in particular: export credit guarantees. By examining the effects of credit guarantees on US wheat exports through panel data regressions, this paper hopes to provide evidence of the effectiveness of recent policy in creating egalitarian and free markets for agricultural commodities. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics Honors Program. / Discipline: Economics.

by Ko Wai-Yee. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 54-55). / ABSTRACT --- p.ii / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iii / LIST OF TABLES --- p.vi / PREFACE --- p.vii / Chapter / Chapter I. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Chapter II. --- EXECUTIVE SUMMARY --- p.2 / Chapter III. --- BUSINESS DEFINITION / Nature of Business --- p.3 / Types of Credit Card Credit Card --- p.4 / Charge Card --- p.4 / Affinity Card --- p.4 / Company Card --- p.5 / Cash Card --- p.5 / Smart Card --- p.5 / Functions of Credit Card / Exchange Medium --- p.6 / Source of Credit --- p.6 / Source of Cash --- p.7 / Operations of Credit Card --- p.7 / Chapter IV. --- market and channel definition / Cardholder --- p.9 / Merchant --- p.9-10 / Market Players --- p.11-12 / Chapter V. --- RESEARCH METHOD AND LITERATURE REVIEW / Literature Review / Database Marketing --- p.13 / Direct Mail --- p.14 / Telemarketing --- p.15 / Advertising --- p.15 / Credit-based Promotion --- p.16 / Interview --- p.16 / Research --- p.17 / Secondary Data --- p.17 / Chapter VI. --- RESEARCH ANALYSIS / Objectives / Overview of Credit Card Market --- p.18 / Card Acquisition --- p.18 / Card Utilization --- p.18 / Card Attrition --- p.19 / Research Method --- p.19 / Findings / Higher Utilization rate of credit cards --- p.20 / Bonus Points Scheme is Driving Card Usage --- p.20 / Components of an Ideal Bonus Point Scheme --- p.21 / "Affinity Cards, Especially Co-branded Credit Cards, Will Become a Trend" --- p.21 / Rising Demand for Higher Credit Limit --- p.21 / More Competitive Interest Rate Offer is Expected --- p.22 / Repayment will Become More Custom-made --- p.22 / Stronger Resistance to Annual Fee --- p.22 / Rewards (Card Acquisition) are Evaluated to Dollar Terms --- p.22 / "More Bargaining and Interactions with Card Issuers, and Growing Importance of Telephone Service at Card Centre" --- p.22 / Image of Hang Seng Credit Card Has Been Changed --- p.23 / Interest in Electronic Money is High --- p.23 / Bank Image Perception --- p.23-25 / Chapter VII. --- MARKETING PLAN / Current Situation and Review / Promotions --- p.26 / Brand Image --- p.27 / Competitive Analysis / Market Share Analysis --- p.28 / Product Features --- p.28-30 / Promotions --- p.31 / SWOT Analysis --- p.31 / Marketing Objectives & Strategies / Objectives --- p.32 / Marketing Strategies --- p.32-34 / Promotion Plan --- p.35 / Chapter VIII. --- CONCLUSION --- p.36 / APPENDIX / Major Credit Card Product Features --- p.37-43 / Major Credit Card Promotional Campaign - 1997 --- p.44-48 / Promotional Schedule for Hang Seng Credit Card - 1998 --- p.49 / Focus Group Discussion Guide --- p.50-53 / REFERENCES --- p.54

In these essays, I study how multidimensional private information causes advantageous selection in a highly concentrated consumer credit market. All three chapters are tightly correlated with each other. I first carefully investigate conditional correlations between choices of a loan type, private default risks, and an additional private information on consumption smoothing motives. I find that their conditional correlations appear consistent with advantageous selection being driven by unobserved heterogeneity in consumption smoothing motives. Then I document how moral hazard links two dimensions of private information: consumption smoothing motives and default risks. By separately identifying moral hazard from adverse selection, I show that consumers with stronger consumption smoothing motives exert more effort to prevent default, generating an endogenous negative association between consumption smoothing motives and default risks. Finally, using a dynamic model of loan type choices and following outcome of default, I recover the joint distribution of bi-dimensional unobserved heterogeneity. This structural estimation also suggests a new way to estimate the inter-temporal elasticity of substitution that represents heterogeneous consumption smoothing motives. As well as being consistent with the results of previous chapters, the results of the structural estimation reveal a strong and positive correlation between inter-temporal elasticity of substitution and default risks.

Concerns about the state of public finances in the main advanced economies have increased as a result of the global financial and economic crisis that started in late 2007 - 2008. The fiscal solvency of several euro area peripheral countries has been put under the spotlight of the market participants who started to believe that a sovereign default was likely to happen in an advanced economy member of the euro area. This thesis seeks to investigate the sovereign risk in the euro area countries during the period before, during and after the crisis by focusing on the sovereign bond and credit default swaps spreads and the factors that drive them. In Chapters 2, we investigate the determinants of the government bond yields and sovereign credit default swaps. In our analysis for the government bond yields we find that the macroeconomic fundamentals used in our analysis are highly significant for the periphery countries, while they are less or not significant at all for the core euro area countries. We also find evidence that during the crisis the fluctuations of the government bond yields are not only explained by the macroeconomic fundamentals but also explained by factors related to the uncertainty in the euro area. In Chapter 3, we employ the panel cointegration approach in order to investigate the macroeconomic and financial indicators that impacted the sovereign credit default swaps in the crisis period using data from October 2008 until December 2014. We provide fresh evidence that the financial indicators, proxied by the iTraxx index as well as liquidity indicators, proxied by the bid-ask had a dominant role in explaining the CDS in almost all countries. In Chapter 4, in regard to the study of the price discovery relationship between the government bond yields and sovereign CDS, we suggest the use of cointegration methodology and also test for a structural break using the Gregory and Hanson approach to investigate the linkages between the two instruments. The structural break test suggests that the relation changed during the crisis and that the price discovery took place in the CDS market. Finally, in Chapter 5, we investigate the main factors causing the sovereign defaults. We use a panel of 99 countries to assess the impact that various macroeconomic and political risk indicators have on sovereign defaults on foreign currency bank loans, foreign currency bonds and local currency debt, utilizing an extended database constructed by the Bank of Canada. Our results suggest that the favorable economic indicators, lower debt levels, and higher political stability all reduce the likelihood of default. We also find that the capital outflows restrictions are positively associated with higher probability of default.

The thesis introduces leasing and credit issues on the market of the Czech Republic. The long-term financing by borrowed capital represents a strategic decision that influences the financial state in future years and therefore it is essential to understand and identify all its specifics and details properly. The thesis aims to analyze possibilities of investment financing in particular, to concentrate on definitions, types, advantages and disadvantages, principles of accounting and the current situation on the market regarding leasing and credits. The thesis gives a view of these two types of financing as well as a view of their mutual comparison because each possibility has its positive and negative aspects. The thesis consists of five chapters. The first ones are dedicated to the theoretical background which describes both credit and leasing. The second part of the thesis includes practical model examples demonstrating the comparison of both ways of financing.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 128-130).

Zugl.: Dresden, Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2007.

We analyze the nature of sovereign credit risk for selected Asian and European countries through a set of sovereign CDS data for an eighty-year period that includes the episode of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Our principal component analysis results suggest that there is strong commonality in sovereign credit risk across countries after the crisis. The regression tests show that the commonality is linked to both local and global financial and economic variables. Besides, we also notice intriguing differences in the sovereign credit risk behavior of Asian and European countries. Specifically, we find that some variables, including foreign reserve, global stock market, and volatility risk premium, affect the of Asian and European sovereign credit risks in the opposite direction. Further, we assume that the arrival rates of credit events follow a square-root diffusion from which we build our pricing model. The resulting model is used to decompose credit spreads into risk premium and credit-event components.

Credit derivatives, some of the most significant developments is the financial industry, have experienced significant growth recently. The objective of this study is to examine whether the use of credit derivatives, either buying or selling, has an effect on banks loan pricing behaviour. Minton et al. (2009) propose that the net buyers of credit protection save capital and thus should be able to make loans at rates that are below the rates offered by competitors who do not utilize credit derivatives. In addition, Hirtle (2009) investigates the relationship between credit derivatives and their effects on bank lending activities. She does not find a strong association between the use of credit derivative and the supply of loans and proposes that banks are using credit derivatives mainly to provide longer maturity and lower spread loans rather than to increase the volume of loans. In contrast to previous studies, our study investigates the relation between loan prices, measured by the interest and fee income per dollar of loans, and the use of credit derivatives at BHCs. We propose that if BHCs use credit derivatives to hedge credit exposures, they would charge a lower loan rate to the borrowers since CDs enable banks to transfer the credit risk away from the lenders. However, if credit derivatives are used for purposes other than managing credit exposure, these instruments might not have any impact on loan pricing. Another goal of our study is to investigate the relationship between loan prices and the use of credit derivatives for trading purpose. We expect that during the years when BHCs are net sellers of credit derivatives, they take these positions because they have good quality loans and they are willing to take additional risk. In this case, they would report lower income per dollar of loans. However, if banks sell CDs as part of their speculative strategy, their use of credit derivatives might not have any impact on loan prices. Thus, banks would charge a rate that is similar to other banks with the same level of risk. Another goal of our study is to find, for both users and non-users of credit derivatives, how the interest and fee income generated by the BHCs is affected by the risk of default of their clients. We expect that as the risk of default increases, the prices on loans would increase as well. Banks take additional risk in exchange for higher return. Our final goal of this study is to investigate whether the use of CDs affects the supply of funds or loan rates differently for different types of loans banks hold in their portfolios. Our findings suggest that the loan prices of users of CDs are significantly less than the loan prices of nonusers. This finding may suggest that users are more efficient, competitive and diversified than nonusers and thus can afford to charge a lower rate to their clients. The result may also suggest that BHCs that are using CDs generally have lower risk loan portfolios and these portfolios are generating lower income per dollar of assets. Among the users group, we observe that as the volume of CDs purchased increases the prices of loans also increase. This suggests additional usage of CDs allows users to accept risky loans that they would not accept in the absence of CDs. They are initiating these high-risk loans to generate higher interest and fee income and at the same time they are using more CDs to hedge these risky loans. Our study also finds a significant and positive relationship between the risk of default and BHCs loan prices. Our study further investigates the users of credit derivatives during the years when these banks use CDs and the years when they do not use CDs. We find that the loan prices are marginally lower for the years when CDs are used. In particular, we find a significant decrease in prices during the years when these banks are sellers of CDs. However, we do not find any significant impact on loan prices during the years when they buy CDs. This result suggests that CD-active BHCs that buy CD protection are doing so to reduce some excessive risk they have taken without demanding a high rate to compensate for this risk. Finally, we find that the years when BHCs report both CDs bought and CDs sold, they charge a loan price that is similar to the years when these banks do not report any position in the CDs market. Perhaps the BHCs that report simultaneously CDs bought and CDs sold are selling CDs to generate income and hedging their positions through buying offsetting positions. Our analysis also suggests that the impact of the use of derivatives varies depending on whether the loans are real estate, consumer, commercial and industrial, agricultural, or foreign loans.