Corporate Governance and Dividend Policy in European Banking

This dissertation investigates corporate governance and dividend policy in banking. This topic has recently attracted the attention of numerous scholars all over the world and currently remains one of the most discussed topics in Banking. The core of the dissertation is constituted by three papers. The first paper generalizes the main achievements in the field of relevant study using the approach of meta-analysis. The second paper provides an empirical analysis of the effect of banking corporate governance on dividend payout. Finally, the third paper investigates empirically the effect of government bailout during 2007-2010 on corporate governance and dividend policy of banks. The dissertation uses a new hand-collected data set with information on corporate governance, ownership structure and compensation structure for a sample of listed banks from 15 European countries for the period 2005-2010. The empirical papers employ such econometric approaches as Within-Group model, difference-in-difference technique, and propensity score matching method based on the Nearest Neighbor Matching estimator. The main empirical results may be summarized as follows. First, we provide evidence that CEO power and connection to government are associated with lower dividend payout ratios. This result supports the view that banking regulators are prevalently concerned about the safety of the bank, and powerful bank CEOs can afford to distribute low payout ratios, at the expense of minority shareholders. Next, we find that government bailout during 2007-2010 changes the banks’ ownership structure and helps to keep lending by bailed bank at the pre-crisis level. Finally, we provide robust evidence for increased control over the banks that receive government money. These findings show the important role of government when overcoming the consequences of the banking crisis, and high quality of governance of public bailouts in European countries.

Maternal Smoking Impact on the Delivery Cost: a population-based study in the Emilia-Romagna region

This doctoral thesis is devoted to the study of the causal effects of the maternal smoking on the delivery cost. The interest of economic consequences of smoking in pregnancy have been studied fairly extensively in the USA, and very little is known in European context. To identify the causal relation between different maternal smoking status and the delivery cost in the Emilia-Romagna region two distinct methods were used. The first - geometric multidimensional - is mainly based on the multivariate approach and involves computing and testing the global imbalance, classifying cases in order to generate well-matched comparison groups, and then computing treatment effects. The second - structural modelling - refers to a general methodological account of model-building and model-testing. The main idea of this approach is to decompose the global mechanism into sub-mechanisms though a recursive decomposition of a multivariate distribution.

Gravitational Lensing as a Tool on Galactic and Cosmological Scales

This work considers the reconstruction of strong gravitational lenses from their observed effects on the light distribution of background sources. After reviewing the formalism of gravitational lensing and the most common and relevant lens models, new analytical results on the elliptical power law lens are presented, including new expressions for the deflection, potential, shear and magnification, which naturally lead to a fast numerical scheme for practical calculation. The main part of the thesis investigates lens reconstruction with extended sources by means of the forward reconstruction method, in which the lenses and sources are given by parametric models. The numerical realities of the problem make it necessary to find targeted optimisations for the forward method, in order to make it feasible for general applications to modern, high resolution images. The result of these optimisations is presented in the \textsc{Lensed} algorithm. Subsequently, a number of tests for general forward reconstruction methods are created to decouple the influence of sourced from lens reconstructions, in order to objectively demonstrate the constraining power of the reconstruction. The final chapters on lens reconstruction contain two sample applications of the forward method. One is the analysis of images from a strong lensing survey. Such surveys today contain $\sim 100$ strong lenses, and much larger sample sizes are expected in the future, making it necessary to quickly and reliably analyse catalogues of lenses with a fixed model. The second application deals with the opposite situation of a single observation that is to be confronted with different lens models, where the forward method allows for natural model-building. This is demonstrated using an example reconstruction of the ``Cosmic Horseshoe''. An appendix presents an independent work on the use of weak gravitational lensing to investigate theories of modified gravity which exhibit screening in the non-linear regime of structure formation.