Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

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Author: search.filters.author.Li, Wei

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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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    ESSAYS ON MARKET MICROSTRUCTURE AND HIGH FREQUENCY TRADING
    (2014) Li, Wei; Kyle, Albert S.; Business and Management: Finance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation includes two chapters on topics related to market microstruc- ture and high frequency trading. In the first chapter, I explore the effects of speed differences among front-running high frequency traders (HFTs) in a model of one round of trading. Traders differ in speed and their speed differences matter. I model strategic interactions induced when HFTs have different speeds in an extended Kyle (1985) framework. HFTs are assumed to anticipate incoming orders and trade rapidly to exploit normal-speed traders' latencies. Upon observing a common noisy signal about the incoming order flow, faster HFTs react more quickly than slower HFTs. I find that these front-running HFTs effectively levy a tax on normal-speed traders, making markets less liquid and prices ultimately less informative. Such negative effects on market quality are more severe when HFTs have more heterogeneous speeds. Even when infinitely many HFTs compete, their negative effects in general do not vanish. I analyze policy proposals concerning HFTs and find that (1) lowering the frequency of trading reduces the negative impact of HFTs on market quality and (2) randomizing the sequence of order execution can degrade market quality when the randomizing interval is short. Consistent with empirical findings, a small number of HFTs can generate a large fraction of the trading volume and HFTs' profits depend on their speeds relative to other HFTs. In the second chapter, I study the effects of higher trading frequency and front-running in a dynamic model. I find that a higher trading frequency improves the informativeness of prices and increases the trading losses of liquidity driven noise traders. When the trading frequency is finite, the existence of HFT front-runners hampers price efficiency and market liquidity. In the limit when trading frequency is infinitely high, however, information efficiency is unaffected by front-running HFTs and these HFTs make all profits from noise traders who do not smooth out their trades.