UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Are the voices of customers louder when they are seen? Evidence from CFPB complaints
    (2022) Mazur, Laurel Celastine; Hann, Rebecca; Business and Management: Accounting & Information Assurance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This paper exploits a unique policy change in the banking sector – the first disclosure of the customer complaints submitted to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) – to examine whether regulatory scrutiny represents one mechanism through which the disclosure of customer complaints can affect bank behavior. I find that banks with a higher complaint volume on the disclosure date increase mortgage approval rates relative to banks with fewer complaints in the same county, and that this effect is strongest in financially underserved communities. I further find that the disclosure effect is larger for banks under more regulatory scrutiny, namely, those operating in states with stronger consumer financial protection enforcement and those with prior consumer affairs violations. Taken together, the results suggest that the public disclosure of customer complaints, especially when accompanied by regulatory pressure, can serve as a mechanism for customers to influence banks’ consumer lending behavior.
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    Essays on Firm Dynamics, Local Financial Markets, and the Business Cycle
    (2018) Blackwood, Glenn Jacob; Haltiwanger, John; Kalemli-Ozcan, Sebnem; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this dissertation, I explore the relative importance of financial markets for businesses on both firm-level and aggregate outcomes. In my second chapter, I find empirically that local banking conditions are important for firm-level outcomes, in particular for old and small firms. This finding has two implications, each of which I explore in my second and third chapter, respectively. First, the differential effect across firm age and size suggests sensitivity to financial conditions, or at least to certain financial mechanisms, is correlated with firm characteristics tightly linked with growth (age) and productivity (size). In the quantitative section of my second chapter, I develop a model that is consistent with this differential impact, while at the same time capturing the extreme sensitivity of young businesses to housing prices during the Great Recession. Second, the importance of local banking markets is confirmation of the importance of geographic segmentation. While recent literature has focused on misallocation induced by financial shocks on misallocation within a geographic location, this finding suggests the potential for misallocation across geographies in the context of the United States. In my third chapter, I develop a framework for investigating the relative importance of misallocation within and across geographies, and I explore different types of shocks considered in the literature. I focus on the impact on labor productivity dispersion, which can be directly attributed to misallocation induced by financial frictions in my framework.
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    ESSAYS ON FINANCIAL REFORMS AND FIRM PERFORMANCE IN EMERGING MARKETS
    (2017) Li, Wei; Kalemli-Ozcan, Sebnem; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation describes three studies on the linkages between changes in financial markets and firm-level performance in the real economy. The first chapter studies the impact of foreign bank deregulation on domestic firms' credit access and real outcomes in China, using an extensive firm-level data set from the manufacturing census. Following the deregulation policies implemented by the government in 2001, foreign banks were allowed to enter the Chinese banking market gradually, in different years in different cities. As a result, from 2001 to 2006 firms in different cities had differential access to foreign bank credit. Empirical results suggest that after foreign bank entry, private-owned firms which were previously more credit-constrained obtained more bank loans, increased investment and increased sales significantly more than state-owned firms, which were previously less constrained. The findings provide evidence that policy-driven positive foreign credit supply shocks could reduce domestic firms' financing constraints, especially for private-owned enterprises. In addition, I investigate the hypothesis that foreign bank entry intensified competition in the domestic banking sector, using a newly constructed regional bank competition index. Results confirm that increases in bank competition brought by foreign bank entry improved credit access for private-owned firms relative to state-owned firms. The second chapter studies determinants and impacts of foreign currency borrowing by firms in emerging Europe. Most of the existing studies on currency mismatch focus on large corporations, and this study complements literature by using firm-level survey data mainly covering small non-listed firms. The third chapter presents evidence on zombie firms and stimulating policies in China. We apply the framework from the seminal study of zombie firms in Japan to a broader manufacturing census sample in China between 1998 and 2013. We show that the number and the magnitude of undesirable zombie firms increased sharply after an enormous monetary expansion right after the 2008 financial crisis.
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    From Partisan Banking to Open Access - A Study on the Emergence of Free Banking in Early Nineteenth Century Massachusetts
    (2014) Lu, Qian; Wallis, John; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My dissertation examines how the financial sector, specifically banks, achieved open entry in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts. The first chapter introduces this question and provides the historical background and conceptual framework necessary for unpacking this question. The second chapter provides new evidence showing how the majority political party, the Federalists, held a monopoly on banks by dominating the state legislature in charge of issuing charters for new banks, effectively prohibiting members of the opposing political party, the Democratic- Republicans, from opening banks. Political turnover in the period between 1810 and 1812 destroyed the Federalist monopoly and allowed for the possibility of open entry in the banking sector. The third chapter provides a new measurement of an elite coalition by collecting original data about bank directors and state legislators in an effort to identify their relationship. The empirical results show how the political composition of the banking sector changed during the Federalist and the Democratic-Republican eras and how the banking sector became less connected to political elites (i.e. the legislators) in the 1830s-1850s. The fourth chapter shows that for people who were ever legislators at some point in their life, they were more likely to be legislators and bankers at the same time in the late 1790s and early 1800s than afterwards. The fifth chapter collects data on private accumulation of wealth from Boston tax rolls and data on bank balance sheets to show that bankers were always richer than other wealthy citizens in the 1830s and 1840s, but their relative wealth inequality remained stable. New banks chartered in the 1840s and 1850s were smaller banks. The sixth chapter provides an explanation of the transition from limited to open access banking based on the idea of intra-elite competition. Taken together, these chapters show that the banking sector moved toward free banking by solving the problem of exclusive party politics. Although intra-elite conflicts did not eliminate elites banking privileges, political elites and banks were still connected and bankers remained the wealthy class, they nevertheless led to de facto free banking.
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    Dream Deregulated: The Politics of U.S. Housing Finance, 1968-1985
    (2013) Henderson, Robert; Freund, David M.P.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Beginning in the late 1970s, policymakers enacted a series of legislative and regulatory changes that, by 1985, combined to dismantle the New Deal-era system of housing finance. These policy changes fundamentally restructured the way that Americans accessed credit for homeownership from primarily borrowing via long-term, fixed-rate mortgages from local, federally insured S&Ls that collected deposits at a regulated cost, to increasingly borrowing through adjustable-rate mortgages issued by unregulated brokers who then sold those mortgages to investors in a secondary market, typically through an intermediary such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. "Dream Deregulated" argues that this transformation of housing finance undermined the progressive intent of the open housing and community reinvestment initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s by making housing credit less stable for all borrowers, relative to the New Deal system, and by largely disconnecting housing finance from the institutional structure that the civil rights initiatives were designed to regulate. It further argues that policymakers pursued broad deregulation of housing finance only after their pursuit of a narrower agenda of deregulation, that of deposit interest rate ceilings, opened the door to a series of arguments for further deregulation, particularly of S&L assets, including authorization of adjustable rate mortgages. The populist politics of the deregulation of deposit rate ceilings, taken up by and on behalf of "small savers," provided a discursive wedge for advocates of broader deregulation, taken up by and on behalf of the interests of the largest financial institutions and a neoliberal political agenda. "Dream Deregulated" investigates the policymaking process as a case study in what Paul Pierson calls "politics in time." This study bridges scholarship on fair housing and community reinvestment with that on the deregulation of housing finance, and contributes to a deeper understanding of the politics of opportunity in the United States during the latter third of the twentieth century. It historicizes the politics of financial deregulation, and, with its focus on the populist politics of deregulation, helps to explain the "construction of consent" to a neoliberal regime. Finally, "Dream Deregulated" demonstrates how a contradictory complex of housing policies contributed to the recent financial crisis.