Institutions from the G-SIBs category have been under greater scrutiny not just by regulatory authorities since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008. Insufficient regulation in OTC derivatives combined with moral hazard expressed in the highly speculative behaviour by G-SIBs were major factors contributing to the development of the financial crisis. The regulatory bodies in the USA responded to the situation by adopting the Dodd-Frank ACT with the aim to introduce additional rules for the market with OTC derivatives and regulate the activities of G-SIBs significantly. The paper analyses selected indicators related to the OTC derivative exposure and the overall financial condition of the selected G-SIBs. The thesis analyses the development of the monitored indicators following the implementation of the DFA to confirm that the risk arising from speculative derivative deals by G-SIBs was reduced, the financial condition of the selected institutions was strengthened, and the systemic risk was thus suppressed during the period 2010-2015.

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

The study at hand aims at understanding the "twisted fate" of the EU's initiative to provide transparency of payments in oil, gas, and mining deals. The European Commission in October 2011 followed the lead of the US Dodd-Frank Act in establishing strict disclosure requirements for businesses in the extractive industries. Its initiative demanded annual reporting of any payments made by such enterprises to public authorities of commodity exporting countries, in order to mitigate corruption of public officials via transparency of payments. Praised by NGOs, the initiative was heavily opposed by the German government and experienced efforts by the very same to water its efficacy down. Germany's uncompromising position prolonged the search for an agreement between Council of Ministers and European Parliament until April 2013. It is hypothesized that the German opposition originates in highly effective interest representation of influential domestic actors, dismissive of a tight transparency regime. To validate this, Moravcsik's Liberal Intergovernmentalism is the theoretical framework of choice. At its core lies a genuine two-step of domestic societal actors, upgrading their particular interests to "national preferences" and the subsequent agency of their governments in rational bargaining with others. However, in order for this to apply in European everyday politics, theoretical amendments have to be made. Namely, the originally disregarded influence of supranational institutions as well as a shift of bargaining arenas has to be sufficiently respected by the theoretical frame.

Den europeiska marknaden för värdepapperisering punkterades av den senaste finanskrisen och har fortfarande inte återhämtat sig trots att ett decennium har passerat. För att få igång marknaden igen har EU tagit fram den nya värdepapperiseringsförordningen som gäller sedan årsskiftet 2019/2020. Värdepapperiseringsförordningen har sin amerikanska motsvarighet i Dodd Frank Wall Street and Consumer Protection Act. Sakinnehållet i de respektive regleringarna är mycket likt men den största skillnaden ligger i motivet till att regleringarna instiftades. Värdepapperiseringsförordningen instiftades med syftet att harmonisera reglerna kring värdepapperisering och på så sätt skapa bättre förutsättningar för de bolag som vill bidra till marknadens återuppbyggnad. Dodd-Frank instiftades redan 2010 som en helreformation av finansmarknaderna som under finanskrisen 2007-2008 visats vara i stort behov av återreglering. Finanskrisens påverkan på finansmarknaderna visade att den avreglering som löpande gjorts av marknaderna sedan 1980-talet hade skapat en ohållbar situation där finansmarknadsaktörerna kunde verka relativt ostört av myndigheter och lagstiftning.  En annan aspekt som finanskrisen synliggjorde var riskerna kopplade till det globala finansiella systemet. Finanskrisen innebar konkurser för europeiska banker och insolvens för europeiska stater, trots att krisen hade sin början i en amerikansk investmentbank. Den systemrisk som uppdagades har lagstiftare både i USA och EU försökt reglera. Delvis genom förbud mot vissa verksamheter, investeringar och avtal, men även genom krav på bland annat transparens och due diligence. Inom EU återfinns dessa förbud och regler främst i kapitaltäckningsförordningen och kapitaltäckningsdirektivet som båda syftar till att säkerställa att bankerna har kapitalbuffertar. I och med det nya Baselregelverket som också genomgick en omarbetning efter finanskrisen kan kapitaltyperna lätt identifieras.  Kapitaltäckningsregleringarna och värdepapperiseringsförordningen är de viktigaste verktygen för EU:s arbete med att återställa värdepapperiseringsmarknaden inom unionen. Uppsatsens komparativa analys av värdepapperiseringsförordningen och Dodd-Frank Act visar på att just motivet till värdepapperiseringsförordningen, att den ska möjliggöra för marknaden att växa men också reglera marknaden så att en finanskris kan undvikas, skulle kunna hindra tillämpningen från att bli sådan som lagstiftaren åsyftat.

This dissertation aims to study the behavior of intermediaries under market imperfections and the consequences of that for the financial market's functioning. To do so, I focus on two classes of market frictions: funding constraints and information asymmetry. Chapter 1 studies how the dealers' capital constraints affect the market liquidity in the presence of imperfect competition and how recent regulations have shifted the competitive landscape of interest rate swaps. On the subject of informational frictions, Chapters 2 and 3 study empirically and theoretically the pace at which prices incorporate private information under the limited learning capacity of the informed traders. Understanding the microstructure of the swap markets is of interest to both policymakers and academics, especially for it helps in the efficient implementation of post-crisis regulations, namely the Dodd-Frank Act. An understudied dimension of the swap market microstructure is the determinants of the cost of the market-making activity. Using a proprietary regulatory dataset collected by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on both the interest rate swap transactions and the collateral requirements at the London Clearinghouse (LCH), in Chapter 1, I study the key balance sheet constraints that affect the ability of the bank-affiliated dealers to provide intermediation service to the end-users. Most of the interest rate swaps are now mandated to be centrally cleared. This has increased the dealer's need for collateral in the form of highly liquid assets (cash and cash equivalents) to back their swap exposures. Facing capital adequacy measures such as Supplementary Leverage Ratio (SLR), dealers find it even costlier to increase the size of their balance sheet to fund these margins. I show that a 1-percentage point increase in SLR leads to an increase of 1.09 percentage points in the bank's cost of capital per unit of margin requirement. Furthermore, I find the funding spread of the dealers (the difference between the cost of external funding and the risk-free rate) is also a relevant factor for determining the dealer's marginal cost of swap transaction; a cost that is evidently transferred to the end-users in the form of less favorable prices. Measuring the cost of intermediation for the dealer-to-client interest rate swap market is challenging because of the high concentration in the market-- the first seven dealers intermediate more than 50% of the total notional traded. Therefore, one must consider the nontrivial effect of markups in transaction prices to estimate the marginal cost of intermediation reliably. For this reason, I model a differentiated product demand for swaps in the spirit of empirical Industrial Organization (IO) literature and structurally estimate this model to account for the markups in the transaction prices using estimated price elasticities. The demand estimations show economically interpretable heterogeneity among the end-users in their taste for duration risk hedging. The structurally estimated equilibrium model of intermediation can serve as a basis for answering counterfactual policy questions, especially in the debate on the social costs and benefits of excluding initial margins in calculating supplementary leverage ratio. In Chapter 2, I turn the focus to the impact of informational frictions on market-making activity. More specifically, we study the informed trading under random stopping time. Empirical evidence is provided based on an episode of time when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) unintentionally disclosed security filings to some investors before the public for several years. For technological reasons, the delay between the private and public disclosure was exogenously random. We exploit the variation in the time window of private information to show the intensity of trades and the speed at which market prices reach their efficiency, decrease with the expected arrival time of public announcement. In addition, we find the learning capacity of the insider determines the evolution of trading intensity over time. In Chapter 3, inspired by the stylized facts observed in the earlier chapter, I extend the Kyle (1985) model of strategic trading to a case with limited learning capacity of both the dealers and the informed traders (insiders). The insider does not perfectly observe the true value of the security, but he continues to hone his knowledge by using private information sources over time. Two classes of equilibria emerge from this model. In one class, the insider trades excessively patiently, and the market efficiency is reached only asymptotically. In the second type, the insider optimally chooses a deterministic time T, before which he trades patiently as in Kyle (1985) until the price reaches its full efficiency. After T, the insider keeps revealing every piece of new information immediately, and the market price stays efficient while the insider keeps making profits. Which equilibrium emerges depends on the insider's learning capacity, initial informational advantage, and the private source's informational content.

In the years following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, corporations have heightened their efforts to comprehensively manage all aspect of business risk that could jeopardize their operations or potentially lead to business failure. This increase in efforts have motivated firms to adopt additional preventative measures to internally manage their unique portfolios of impeding enterprise risk. Due to legislative efforts by the U.S. Congress, both the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) were broadly developed to improve corporate governance while increasing transparency within financial reporting. Specifically, Dodd-Frank mandates that large financial firms with $50 billion in assets establish special committees dedicated to assessing their financial risks. Meanwhile, SOX requires all public firms to establish rigorous internal control systems to ensure the adequacy of financial reporting. However, these laws mainly target financial firms and fall short of requiring nonfinancial firms to establish a separate committee to manage corporate risk even though it would be in these companies own interest to enhance their safeguarding efforts against ambiguous financial uncertainties, reputation downshifts, and other inherent risk. This dissertation seeks to understand whether a separate voluntary risk management committee at the board level is related to the financial stability and creditworthiness of nonfinancial firms. Firstly, we investigated whether the existence of a separate risk management committee is associated with the firm’s leverage, solvency, financial health, and organizational soundness. Secondly, we examined whether the existence of a separate risk management committee is associated with the firm’s short- and long-term credit ratings. Using secondary data from Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS), we analyzed data from a wide range of financial ratios and credit ratings from companies listed on the S&P 1500 index to evaluate if these committees have an association with the firm’s ability to manage its risk effectively. Regression analysis was utilized to explore this relationship. Although the direction of the relationship cannot be determined, the results suggest that the establishment of a separate voluntary risk management committee was minimally related to the financial soundness of the firm and was not related to the firm's leverage, solvency, or overall organizational soundness. Inferences or causality cannot be made. Additionally, we found that firms with better short-term credit ratings were more likely to establish a voluntary risk management committee, while long-term credit ratings did not show a correlation with the presence of a voluntary risk management committee. Interestingly, the study also found that the presence of more men on the board and a larger board size increased the likelihood of firms adopting a risk management committee, but over time, the interest in forming these committees has declined within the timeframe reviewed, particularly in the healthcare, communication, and utilities sectors. The results of this study suggest that relying on traditional financial/accounting ratios might not be the most effective method for assessing a firm's risk. Further, these results underscore the need for a more comprehensive approach that includes both quantitative and qualitative risk assessments and approaches. This dissertation contributes to the benefits of establishing a voluntary risk management committee in nonfinancial firms, which is a topic that has not been extensively researched. The aim is to offer a deeper insight into the benefits of such committees and encourage more firms to improve their risk management practices where positive correlations were identified. / Business Administration/Interdisciplinary

Visselblåsarbegreppet har blivit ett allt mer frekvent förekommande inslag inom den unionsrättsliga lagstiftningen, och vikten av att beskydda arbetstagare som bistår myndigheter med information som kan stoppa överträdelser har på senare år uppmärksammats och betonats världen över. I samband med en modernisering och uppdatering av den finansmarknadsrättsliga lagstiftningen, inte minst till följd av den tekniska utvecklingen inom området, valde EU:s lagstiftande organ att göra en markering mot fysiska och juridiska personer som ägnar sig åt överträdelser som kan vilseleda aktörerna på de finansiella marknaderna. Bland annat infördes, genom ett antal nya rättsakter, enhetliga sanktioner samt minimibestämmelser för kriminalisering av vissa ageranden. Vid framtagandet av lagstiftningen diskuterades även på EU-nivå huruvida ett potentiellt införande av ekonomiska incitament för visselblåsare som bidrar med värdefull information i fråga om marknadsmissbruk borde utgöra en del av det sociala skyddet för nämnda individer. Medlemsstaterna hade redan i samband med tidigare unionsöverskridande lagstiftning ålagts att vidta särskilda åtgärder för att säkerställa att visselblåsare erhåller skydd gentemot arbetsgivare avseende hämndaktioner, men här, tydligt inspirerade av den amerikanska lagstiftningen i motsvarande område, öppnade EU för första gången för att låta unionsmedlemmarna erbjuda monetära utbetalningar till visselblåsare. I förevarande uppsats presenteras den aktuella EU-lagstiftningen samt den inhemska lagstiftning som bestämmelserna genererat i Sverige. Nämnda inslag sätts i relation till den amerikanska visselblåsarlagstiftningen. En redogörelse för lagstiftningens mottagande och effekt – kombinerat med teoretiska såväl som statistiska studier avseende ekonomiska incitament kopplat till visselblåsning – används för att besvara frågan huruvida ett införande av nämnda incitament skulle kunna utgöra ett ändamålsenligt inslag inom den svenska lagstiftningen. Min argumentation, vilken presenteras i analysdelen, utmynnar i ståndpunkten att ekonomiska incitament mycket väl skulle kunna utgöra en funktionell beståndsdel av visselblåsarskyddet, men att lagstiftningens utformning och det praktiska utförandet skulle kunna optimeras jämfört med dess amerikanska motsvarighet. Vidare vill jag i analysavsnittet betona vikten av ett skifte i inställning och attityd inom europeisk rättskultur gentemot visselblåsare.

Submitted by Marcela de Carvalho Ponce Kawauti (marcelacponce@hotmail.com) on 2014-02-28T02:11:31Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DoddFrank_MK_270214.pdf: 3147203 bytes, checksum: 3ff834fb3d62bc255730fa98e23ba293 (MD5) / Rejected by Suzinei Teles Garcia Garcia (suzinei.garcia@fgv.br), reason: Prezada Marcela, Falta a contra capa: Fundação antes da escola, numeração das paginas não estão de acordo com a ABNT. Modelos de dissertações/teses na biblioteca digital. Att. Suzi 3799-7876 on 2014-02-28T14:43:25Z (GMT) / Submitted by Marcela de Carvalho Ponce Kawauti (marcelacponce@hotmail.com) on 2014-02-28T23:31:38Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DoddFrank_MK_FINAL.pdf: 3155751 bytes, checksum: 5cbd278a6017fe7bff89ba5d061ec66d (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Suzinei Teles Garcia Garcia (suzinei.garcia@fgv.br) on 2014-03-06T14:41:41Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DoddFrank_MK_FINAL.pdf: 3155751 bytes, checksum: 5cbd278a6017fe7bff89ba5d061ec66d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2014-03-06T14:44:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DoddFrank_MK_FINAL.pdf: 3155751 bytes, checksum: 5cbd278a6017fe7bff89ba5d061ec66d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-08 / The systemic financial crisis that started in 2008 in the United States had some severe effects in the economic activity and required the bailout of financial institutions with the use of taxpayer’s money. It also originated claims for stronger regulatory framework in order to avoid another threat in the financial market. The Dodd Frank Act was proposed and approved in the United States in the aftermath of the crisis and brought, among many other features, the creation of the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the tougher inspection of financial institutions with asset above 50 billion dollars. The objective of this work is to study the causal effect of the Dodd Frank Act on the behavior of the treatment group subject to monitoring by the Financial Stability Oversight Council (financial institutions with assets above 50 billion dollars) regarding capital and compensation structure in comparison to the group that was not treated. We use data from Compustat and our empirical strategy is the Regression Discontinuity Design, not usually applied to the banking literature, but very useful for the present work since it allows us to compare the treatment group and the non-treatment group in the year of the enactment of the law (2010). No change of behavior was observed for the Capital Structure. In the Compensation Schemes, however, a decrease was found in the item other compensation for CEOs and CFOs. We also performed a robustness check by running a placebo test on the variables in the year before the law was enacted. No significance was found, which supports the conclusion that our main results were caused by the enactment of the DFA. / A crise financeira com características sistêmicas que começou em 2008 nos Estados Unidos teve efeitos severos na atividade econômica e demandou o salvamento de algumas instituições financeiras com o uso do dinheiro dos impostos. Também gerou clamores por uma regulação mais estrita de forma a evitar uma nova ameaça no mercado financeiro. O Dodd Frank Act foi proposto e aprovado nos Estados Unidos após a crise e trouxe, além de outras características, a criação do Financial Stability Oversight Council e a maior fiscalização das instituições financeiras com ativos acima de 50 bilhões de dólares. O objetivo deste trabalho é estudar o efeito causal do Dodd Frank Act no comportamento do grupo de tratamento sujeito ao monitoramento do Financial Stability Oversight Council (instituições financeiras com ativos acima de 50 bilhões de dólares) com relação à estrutura de capital e de remuneração em comparação com o grupo que não recebeu o tratamento. Usamos dados do Compustat e nossa estratégia empírica é o Regression Discontinuity Design, que não é usual na literatura que analisa bancos, mas que nos permite comparar o grupo de tratamento e o grupo não tratado no ano em que a lei entrou em vigor (2010). Nenhuma mudança de comportamento foi observada na estrutura de capital. Com relação à remuneração. No entanto, encontramos uma queda no item Other Compensation para CEOs e CFOs. Também rodamos um cheque de robustez com um teste placebo nas variáveis no ano anterior à entrada em vigor da lei. Nenhuma significância foi encontrada, o que sustenta a nossa conclusão de que os resultados principais foram de fato causados pela nova legislação