Thesis (M.A.E.T.)--Covenant Theological Seminary, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-90).

Thesis (M.A.E.T.)--Covenant Theological Seminary, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-90).

This thesis elaborates on a complex, multilayered gender perspective of mineral exports in the conflict of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The focus lies on the Dodd-Frank Act and its implications for sexual gender-based violence, both conflict and non-conflict related, as well as socioeconomic dimensions. The in-depth analysis of these factors indicates, that after the initiation of the well-intended Act, the occurrence of sexual gender-based violence has increased and socioeconomic situation for women have worsened. Possible reasons can be found in the sole focus on Western narratives and the neglect of local perspectives.

This dissertation studies three topics in financial economics. In the first chapter, "ESG Investing in Emerging Markets: Betting on Firm Fundamentals or Riding Investor Preferences?", we examine the relation between firms' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices and the pricing of corporate bonds in emerging markets, which is an important yet understudied market for ESG-related issues. Firms with different ESG scores can have different costs of capital, either because ESG scores help forecast future cash flows -- the "fundamental" channel -- or because investors have non-pecuniary preferences for high-ESG-score assets -- the "preference" channel. We identify the existence of a preference channel with a natural experiment -- the historical opening of the Chinese onshore bond market -- that leads to an increase in the proportion of international investors, who are more ESG-conscious. Consistent with theory, we find that the bond yield of companies with high ESG scores decreases more than that of companies with low ESG scores. By focusing on firms that also have bonds traded in the offshore market, which, as opposed to the onshore market, does not experience any change in regulation, we can control for issuer-time fixed effects in a triple difference design, hence reducing considerably the influence of the fundamental channel. In the second chapter, "Watch what they do, not what they say: Estimating regulatory costs from revealed preferences", we show that distortion in the size distribution of banks around regulatory thresholds can be used to identify costs of bank regulation. We build a structural model in which banks can strategically bunch their assets below regulatory thresholds to avoid regulations. The resulting distortion in the size distribution of banks reveals the magnitude of regulatory costs. Using U.S. bank data, we estimate the regulatory costs imposed by the Dodd-Frank Act. Although the estimated regulatory costs are substantial, they are significantly lower than those in self-reported estimates by banks. In the third chapter, "Fuzzy Bunching", we introduce a new fuzzy bunching approach that is robust to noise. The existing bunching approach identifies the extent of bunching from a sharp spike in the probability density function. In many finance settings, however, the sharp spike could be diffused by data noise. The key idea behind our fuzzy bunching estimator is to identify bunching from the area of a bulge in the cumulative distribution function. The fuzzy bunching approach also avoids density estimation, which makes it easy to implement in sparse data. We provide the theoretical foundation of this approach and illustrate the advantages by using simulated and real data.

The thesis is focused on economic capital management of top-ranked world banks. A basic theoretical framework is summarised at the beginning. The theoretical framework is then utilised in the main - empirical part. Since economic capital is not a figure commonly reported in any available database, we have created our own database based on annual reports of top fifty world banks of the year 2008. Based on this database we provide an extensive empirical study focused on years 2007-2010. Even though one third of the banks disclose economic capital only, thanks to our approach combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis we were able to study the topic in detail. Within quantitative part the development of economic capital and its allocation is studied, the differences between regulatory and economic capital in time is measured, a relationship between quality of economic capital disclosure and rating is searched for and relationship between the value of economic capital and changes in profits during financial crisis is studied. The qualitative part consists of case studies of fourteen banks. It is focused on special and unique features of economic capital management of individual financial institutions.

This correlation research study was used to investigate the impact of the Dodd-Frank legislation on the U.S. bank industry. The economic crisis of 2007-2009 had a global and significant financial impact, some of which still reverberates. In the United States, the reaction was The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which took effect July 21, 2010. This act has recently been the subject of academic research and remains debated in congress, with discussion focused on its repeal. The publicly available, secondary data set from banks' quarterly filed regulatory reporting provided the data used in this study. Every FDIC insured bank in the United States was included in the study. The research question for the study examined the unintended consequences of Dodd-Frank legislation as posited by the theories of Bexley (2014) and Barth, Prabha, and Swagel (2012) that Dodd-Frank was a regulatory overreaction and could have a long-term impact on a substantial number of financial institutions. From 2007 through 2013, the number of banks declined by over 1,753 institutions; a 19.82% decline. The structure of the research presumed that banks that relied heavily on consumer fees for depository services would be negatively impacted by rule changes and regulation regarding such fees. There were two research questions. The first focused on the role of the new rules in the decline of the number of banks. The second explored the role of the legislation in the financial performance of banks. Regression results resulted in not being able to reject the null hypotheses. The implication of the study for social change is that policy makers who understand these relationships may construct better regulation to mitigate unfair and deceptive consumer fees for banking services.

No description available.

The thesis elaborates on the development of the rating at capital markets and its regulation in the context of the global financial crisis. The first part focuses on the definition of the rating, the kinds and types of grant, explanation of the symbols in the rating scale, the rating process and activities of credit ratings agencies. The second part compares the different development of credit rating industry in the United States of America and in the European Union. It also deals with the participation of credit rating agencies in the financial crisis. The last part is concerned with the Dodd -- Frank Act and Regulation 1060/2009 on credit rating agencies as two different measures granted after crises. The thesis analyzed also their impact on the credit rating industry.

The aim of the thesis is to analyze the evolution of hedge funds and their regulation, especially in the context of the global financial crisis. The first part focuses on defining the term "hedge fund", then it is compared with another institutional investor, mutual fund. The history and description of basic investment strategies of hedge funds are also analyzed. The second part overhauls the market of hedge funds, including its quantity, assets under management and performance. The last part is mainly devoted to the theoretical aspects of regulation and supervision of hedge funds, it analyzes the legal status of regulation and supervision of these funds in selected countries before the global financial crisis, the AIFM Directive requirements are discussed and their possible implications are analyzed; the AIFM Directive is compared with the Dodd Frank Act's requirements at the end.

As already the title of the diploma thesis is saying " Conflict minerals and the Democratic republic of Congo" aims at discussing issues around conflict minerals produced in DRC, including illicit trade, exports, smuggling minerals from DRC and committing crimes such as human rights abuses including rapes, sexual violence, executions, forced recruitment, abduction, child work etc. The militarisation mostly in eastern parts of the country leads to escalated conflict, in which rebel groups are warring in order to obtain power and control over rich natural resources in country. Long lasting conflicts, insecurity in the country, failed governance, wide-spread corruption, illegal exploitation of natural resources and of miners as well have reach the level of poverty, economic weakness, as well as political inability to lead the country and control its own natural wealth and prevent from any kind of foreign touch, mostly by armed or rebel groups. This thesis presents measures, which have to be taken in order to mitigate rebel groups power in the country, enhance transparency, remove corruption and exercise due diligence for responsible supply chain and thus strengthen economic and political development as well as human right