External monitoring, managerial ownership and form performance in Malaysian capital market: a GMM based panel data approach

This study re-examines whether the structure of share ownership by both directors and institutional ownership provides explanation for firm performances. These relationships are modelled and estimated using GMM based dynamic panel data over a period from 1997 to 2001 with a sample of 100 CI components companies listed on Main Board of Malaysia. The findings provide strong evidence of simultaneity between firm performance and managerial ownership. Although an insignificant relationship between firm performance and institutional ownership is~ observed, the institutional holdings provide strong substitute for managerial ownership with a strong negative relationship between managerial ownership and institutional ownership. This is in line with the managerial incentive hypothesis, which suggests that manager's share in the firm's ownership leads to better performance and the monitoring substitute hypothesis, which suggests that managerial ownership could be effectively replaced by institutional ownership.

Do venture capitalists play a monitoring role in an emerging market? Evidence from the pay–performance relationship of Chinese entrepreneurial firms

This paper investigates venture capitalists' monitoring of managerial behavior by examining their impact on CEO pay–performance sensitivity across various controlling structures in Chinese firms. We find that the effectiveness of venture capitalists' monitoring depends on different types of agency conflict. In particular, we find that venture capital (VC) monitoring is hampered in firms that experience severe controlling-minority agency problems caused by disproportionate ownership structures. We provide further evidence that VC is more likely to exert close monitoring in firms that have greater managerial agency conflict, and thus require more direct monitoring. However, controlling-minority agency problems have a greater impact on VC monitoring than managerial agency problems. Overall, our study suggests that venture capitalists' monitoring role is hampered in an emerging market where firms have complex ownership structures that contribute to severe agency conflict between controlling and minority shareholders.

Informational spillovers in the pre-1914 London sovereign debt market

We document a novel type of international financial contagion whose driving force is shared financial intermediation. In the London peripheral sovereign debt market during pre-1914 period financial intermediation played a major informational role to investors, most likely because of the absence of international monitoring agencies and the substantial agency costs. Using two events of financial distress – the Brazilian Funding Loan of 1898 and the Greek Funding Loan of 1893 – as quasi-natural experiments, we document that, following the crises, the bond prices of countries with no meaningful economic links to the distressed countries, but shared the same financial intermediary, suffered a reduction relative to the rest of the market. This result is true for the mean, median and the whole distribution of bond prices, and robust to an extensive sensitivity analysis. We interpret it as evidence that the identity of the financial intermediary was informative, i.e, investors extracted information about the soundness of a debtor based on the existence of financial relationships. This spillover, informational in essence, arises as the flip-side of the relational lending coin: contagion arises for the same reason why relational finance, in this case, underwriting, helps alleviate informational and incentive problems.

Términos de referencia para la elaboración de un estudo sobre costos, mercado y sistema de transmisión para el Proyecto Regional de Interconexión Eléctrica del Istmo Centroamericano = Terms of reference for the preparation of a study on costs, market and transmission systems for the Regional Electric Interconnection Project of the Central American Isthmus

Incluye Bibliografía

Shareholder protection and stock market development

The dissertation contains five parts: An introduction, three major chapters, and a short conclusion. The First Chapter starts from a survey and discussion of the studies on corporate law and financial development literature. The commonly used methods in these cross-sectional analyses are biased as legal origins are no longer valid instruments. Hence, the model uncertainty becomes a salient problem. The Bayesian Model Averaging algorithm is applied to test the robustness of empirical results in Djankov et al. (2008). The analysis finds that their constructed legal index is not robustly correlated with most of the various stock market outcome variables. The second Chapter looks into the effects of minority shareholders protection in corporate governance regime on entrepreneurs' ex ante incentives to undertake IPO. Most of the current literature focuses on the beneficial part of minority shareholder protection on valuation, while overlooks its private costs on entrepreneur's control. As a result, the entrepreneur trade-offs the costs of monitoring with the benefits of cheap sources of finance when minority shareholder protection improves. The theoretical predictions are empirically tested using panel data and GMM-sys estimator. The third Chapter investigates the corporate law and corporate governance reform in China. The corporate law in China regards shareholder control as the means to the ends of pursuing the interests of stakeholders, which is inefficient. The Chapter combines the recent development of theories of the firm, i.e., the team production theory and the property rights theory, to solve such problem. The enlightened shareholder value, which emphasizes on the long term valuation of the firm, should be adopted as objectives of listed firms. In addition, a move from the mandatory division of power between shareholder meeting and board meeting to the default regime, is proposed.

Integrated plant monitoring to improve plant operation strategy and results

The more and more demanding conditions in the power generation sector requires to apply all the available technologies to optimize processes and reduce costs. An integrated asset management strategy, combining technical analysis and operation and maintenance management can help to improve plant performance, flexibility and reliability. In order to deploy such a model it is necessary to combine plant data and specific equipment condition information, with different systems devoted to analyze performance and equipment condition, and take advantage of the results to support operation and maintenance decisions. This model that has been dealt in certain detail for electricity transmission and distribution networks, is not yet broadly extended in the power generation sector, as proposed in this study for the case of a combined power plant. Its application would turn in direct benefit for the operation and maintenance and for the interaction to the energy market

The Opportunity Costs of STEM Degrees and the Unmet Needs of the Low-Skilled: Two labour market problems explained. CEPS Policy Brief No. 295, 26 June 2013

There is general consensus that to achieve employment growth, especially for vulnerable groups, it is not sufficient to simply kick-start economic growth: skills among both the high- and low-skilled population need to be improved. In particular, we argue that if the lack of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is a true problem, it needs to be tackled via incentives and not simply via public campaigns: students are not enrolling in ‘hard-science’ subjects because the opportunity cost is very high. As far as the low-skilled population is concerned, we encourage EU and national policy-makers to invest in a more comprehensive view of this phenomenon. The ‘low-skilled’ label can hide a number of different scenarios: labour market detachment, migration, and obsolete skills that are the result of macroeconomic structural changes. For this reason lifelong learning is necessary to keep up with new technology and to shield workers from the risk of skills obsolescence and detachment from the labour market.

Small-scale Fisheries and the Global Economy: Understanding Common-pool Resource Governance in the Context of Market Pressures, Neoliberal Policies, and Transnational Institutions

The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of how global seafood trade interacts with the governance of small-scale fisheries (SSFs). As global seafood trade expands, SSFs have the potential to experience significant economic, social, and political benefits from participation in export markets. At the same time, market connections that place increasing pressures on resources pose risks to both the ecological and social integrity of SSFs. This dissertation seeks to explore the factors that mediate between the potential benefits and risks of global seafood markets for SSFs, with the goal of developing hypotheses regarding these relationships.

The empirical investigation consists of a series of case studies from the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. This is a particularly rich context in which to study global market connections with SSFs because the SSFs in this region engage in a variety of market-oriented harvests, most notably for octopus, groupers and snappers, lobster, and sea cucumber. Variation in market forms and the institutional diversity of local-level governance arrangements allows the dissertation to explore a number of examples.

The analysis is guided primarily by common-pool resource (CPR) theory because of the insights it provides regarding the conditions that facilitate collective action and the factors that promote long-lasting resource governance arrangements. Theory from institutional economics and political ecology contribute to the elaboration of a multi-faceted conceptualization of markets for CPR theory, with the aim of facilitating the identification of mechanisms through which markets and CPR governance actually interact. This dissertation conceptualizes markets as sets of institutions that structure the exchange of property rights over fisheries resources, affect the material incentives to harvest resources, and transmit ideas and values about fisheries resources and governance.

The case studies explore four different mechanisms through which markets potentially influence resource governance: 1) Markets can contribute to costly resource governance activities by offsetting costs through profits, 2) markets can undermine resource governance by generating incentives for noncompliance and lead to overharvesting resources, 3) markets can increase the costs of resource governance, for example by augmenting monitoring and enforcement burdens, and 4) markets can alter values and norms underpinning resource governance by transmitting ideas between local resource users and a variety of market actors.

Data collected using participant observation, survey, informal and structured interviews contributed to the elaboration of the following hypotheses relevant to interactions between global seafood trade and SSFs governance. 1) Roll-back neoliberalization of fisheries policies has undermined cooperatives’ ability to achieve financial success through engagement with markets and thus their potential role as key actors in resource governance (chapter two). 2) Different relations of production influence whether local governance institutions will erode or strengthen when faced with market pressures. In particular, relations of production in which fishers own their own means of production and share the collective costs of governance are more likely to strengthen resource governance while relations of production in which a single entrepreneur controls capital and access to the fishery are more likely to contribute to the erosion of resource governance institutions in the face of market pressures (chapter three). 3) By serving as a new discursive framework within which to conceive of and talk about fisheries resources, markets can influence norms and values that shape and constitute governance arrangements.

In sum, the dissertation demonstrates that global seafood trade manifests in a diversity of local forms and effects. Whether SSFs moderate risks and take advantage of benefits depends on a variety of factors, and resource users themselves have the potential to influence the outcomes of seafood market connections through local forms of collective action.

Integrating a mobile accessible electronic system into dockside monitoring: How can small-scale fisheries data collection programs transition from paper-based to digital data collection?

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Essays on Market Frictions and Securitization

This dissertation provides a novel theory of securitization based on intermediaries minimizing the moral hazard that insiders can misuse assets held on-balance sheet. The model predicts how intermediaries finance different assets. Under deposit funding, the moral hazard is greatest for low-risk assets that yield sizable returns in bad states of nature; under securitization, it is greatest for high-risk assets that require high guarantees and large reserves. Intermediaries thus securitize low-risk assets. In an extension, I identify a novel channel through which government bailouts exacerbate the moral hazard and reduce total investment irrespective of the funding mode. This adverse effect is stronger under deposit funding, implying that intermediaries finance more risky assets off-balance sheet. The dissertation discusses the implications of different forms of guarantees. With explicit guarantees, banks securitize assets with either low information-intensity or low risk. By contrast, with implicit guarantees, banks only securitize assets with high information-intensity and low risk. Two extensions to the benchmark static and dynamic models are discussed. First, an extension to the static model studies the optimality of tranching versus securitization with guarantees. Tranching eliminates agency costs but worsens adverse selection, while securitization with guarantees does the opposite. When the quality of underlying assets in a certain security market is sufficiently heterogeneous, and when the highest quality assets are perceived to be sufficiently safe, securitization with guarantees dominates tranching. Second, in an extension to the dynamic setting, the moral hazard of misusing assets held on-balance sheet naturally gives rise to the moral hazard of weak ex-post monitoring in securitization. The use of guarantees reduces the dependence of banks' ex-post payoffs on monitoring efforts, thereby weakening monitoring incentives. The incentive to monitor under securitization with implicit guarantees is the weakest among all funding modes, as implicit guarantees allow banks to renege on their monitoring promises without being declared bankrupt and punished.