The Theory of Money and Financial Institutions

The Theory of Money and Financial Institutions
Author: Martin Shubik
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 1999
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262693110

This first volume in a three-volume exposition of Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics" explores a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. This is the first volume in a three-volume exposition of Martin Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics"--a term he coined in 1959 to describe the theoretical underpinnings needed for the construction of an economic dynamics. The goal is to develop a process-oriented theory of money and financial institutions that reconciles micro- and macroeconomics, using as a prime tool the theory of games in strategic and extensive form. The approach involves a search for minimal financial institutions that appear as a logical, technological, and institutional necessity, as part of the "rules of the game." Money and financial institutions are assumed to be the basic elements of the network that transmits the sociopolitical imperatives to the economy. Volume 1 deals with a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. Volume 2 explores the new economic features that arise when we consider multi-period finite and infinite horizon economies. Volume 3 will consider the specific role of financial institutions and government, and formulate the economic financial control problem linking micro- and macroeconomics.

Essays in Behavioral Corporate Finance

Essays in Behavioral Corporate Finance
Author: Hui Zheng
Publisher:
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation explores the extent to which managerial overconfidence affects corporate decisions. This analysis includes three essays, which address a wide range of corporate decisions including financing, investment, acquisition, innovation, liquidity management and advertising decisions. The first essay introduces a fine-tuned test of the relationship between managerial overconfidence and corporate decisions by taking the chief financial officer (CFO) overconfidence effect into account. Ex-ante, I identify financial policies and non-financial policies such as investment, innovation and acquisition as the primary managerial duties of CFOs and chief executive officers (CEOs) respectively. I construct overconfidence measures for both CEOs and CFOs and test the impact of CEO and CFO overconfidence, both on financial decisions and on nonfinancial decisions. Based on a sample of 1,173 S & P 1500 firms, I find that financial policies are primarily affected by CFO overconfidence while only CEO overconfidence affects nonfinancial decisions. My findings demonstrate that managerial biases affect corporate decisions and managerial duties shape the ways in which top managers influence corporate policies. The second essay investigates how overconfident CEOs allocate resources toward innovation activities. It argues that overconfident CEOs tend to have greater innovation input. To finance innovation, they save more cash out of the cash flow and spend more on innovation when the cash flow is high. Results from an empirical analysis of 1,015 S & P 1500 firms support this argument. Moreover, based on a series of financial constraint measurements, the effect of CEO overconfidence on liquidity management is found to be more pronounced in financially constrained firms and in highly innovative firms, but not in firms without financial constraints. With regards to innovation performance, overconfident CEOs tend to have more patents, but the overall quality of their patents is not significantly better than that of rational CEOs. The third essay introduces a simple model of firm advertising behavior in monopolistic competition industries and applies it to the situation of managerial overconfidence. The model shows that the optimal advertising to sales ratio is determined by both firm advertising competency and consumer preference. Overconfident CEOs are more willing to use advertising as a means to convey the quality of their firms and products. Such overestimation of the effects of advertising by overconfident CEOs will result in overspending on advertising. When financially constrained, an overconfident CEO's tendency to overspend will be curbed to some extent, but his amount of advertising will increase with cash flows. An empirical analysis of 654 S & P 1500 firms supports these predictions. The distorted effect of managerial overconfidence is more prominent when firms are financially constrained and when the overconfidence measure is continuous.

Three Essays on the Rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds

Three Essays on the Rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds
Author: Jeanne Amar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

If Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) are not new, their number and their financial power have grown sharply since the beginning of the 2000's, which raise concerns, particularly among developed countries. Are SWFs' motives comparable to other institutional investors'? May SWFs investments destabilize financial markets? These concerns have encouraged researchers to investigate the issues raised by SWFs and it has now become a subject of research in its own rights. This thesis is in line with this literature. The first essay of this thesis identifies the main factors driving the decision to establish a fund. Moreover, investment decisions of SWFs are not well understood yet. Are SWFs investments driven by the search for financial profits or do they pursue more strategic objectives? The second essay highlights the complexity of the investment decision-making process of SWFs, testing if they rather invest in countries with which they share common characteristics and/or in countries where they have already invested. In line with this second essay, the third essay analyzes more specifically the determinants of majority acquisitions made by SWFs by focusing on some particularly active funds: Gulf Countries' SWFs. More precisely, this analysis aims at identifying both microeconomic and macroeconomic factors driving the decision to acquire a majority stake in a cross-border firm.

Three Essays in Financial Markets. The Bright Side of Financial Derivatives: Options Trading and Firm Innovation

Three Essays in Financial Markets. The Bright Side of Financial Derivatives: Options Trading and Firm Innovation
Author: Iván Blanco
Publisher: Ed. Universidad de Cantabria
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2019-02-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 8481028770

Do financial derivatives enhance or impede innovation? We aim to answer this question by examining the relationship between equity options markets and standard measures of firm innovation. Our baseline results show that firms with more options trading activity generate more patents and patent citations per dollar of R&D invested. We then investigate how more active options markets affect firms' innovation strategy. Our results suggest that firms with greater trading activity pursue a more creative, diverse and risky innovation strategy. We discuss potential underlying mechanisms and show that options appear to mitigate managerial career concerns that would induce managers to take actions that boost short-term performance measures. Finally, using several econometric specifications that try to account for the potential endogeneity of options trading, we argue that the positive effect of options trading on firm innovation is causal.

Three Essays in Corporate Finance

Three Essays in Corporate Finance
Author: Tareque Nasser
Publisher:
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2010
Genre: Electronic dissertations
ISBN:

This dissertation contains three distinct essays in the broad area of corporate finance. The first two essays examine the role of an independent director who is also a blockholder (IDB), a potent governance mechanism, on executive compensation, and corporate financial and investment policies, respectively. The last essay examines insider trading in takeover targets. The first essay examines three issues. First, we investigate the determinants of an IDB's presence in a firm. Second, we examine the relations between IDB presence and (1) the level and structure of CEO compensation, and (2) CEO turnover-performance sensitivity. Third, we analyze if IDB presence is related to firm valuation. Our findings suggest that the presence of an independent blockholder on the board promotes better incentives and monitoring of the CEO, and consequently leads to higher firm valuation. In the second essay, we examine how the presence of an IDB affects: (1) four key financial and investment policy choices of a firm: the levels of cash holdings, dividends, investments and financial leverage, and (2) firm risk. We also examine how the market values IDB presence and changes in various policy choices associated with IDB presence in a firm. We find that firms with IDBs have significantly lower levels of cash holdings, dividend yields, repurchases, and total payout, but higher levels of capital expenditures. We also find that firms with IDBs have lower risk. Overall, IDB presence appears to reduce agency problems between managers and shareholders. The third essay brings large-sample evidence on whether the level and pattern of profitable insider trading before takeover announcements is abnormal for a broad cross-section of targets of takeovers during modern times. We find an interesting and subtle pattern in the average pre-takeover trading behavior of target insiders. While insiders reduce both their purchases and sales below normal levels, their sales reduce more than purchases, leading to an increase in net purchases. This pattern of 'passive' insider trading is confined to the six-month period before takeover announcement, holds for each insider group, for all measures of net purchases examined, and in certain sub-samples with less uncertainty about takeover completion.