Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

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

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

Browse

Filters

2014 - 20182

Settings

Subject: search.filters.subject.Misallocation

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    ESSAYS ON FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND FIRMS IN CHINA
    (2014) Zhao, Jianzhi; Swagel, Phillip Lee; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My dissertation examines the impact of this misallocation of credit on firms' investment activities and productivity, drawing important implications regarding the potential for sustained economic growth in China. Understanding the relationship between China's financial system and the overall economy is critical to assessing the proper directions for reforms and thus for understanding China's future economic prospects. My dissertation investigate these links using data that cover the output, employment, and credit usage of hundreds of thousands of businesses in China, drawing on large firm-year data. The first chapter of my dissertation addresses two related topics: (1) the relationship between financial constraints based on firm ownership status and the investment behavior of each firm; (2) the impact on investment of the government's policy to "Grasp the Large, Let Go of the Small" in which the official sector of China looks to lessen the advantages of smaller SOEs but maintain them for larger enterprises. This is a crucial policy issue for China, since understanding the investment behavior of firms is central to assessing the impact of reforms that affect the state-owned firms and move China yet further toward a market-oriented economy. Chapter two then investigates the impact on firms' productivity growth of credit misallocation related to state ownership. The preferential access to credit enjoyed by SOEs affects investment as noted in the first chapter and this in turn affects productivity growth. This paper assesses whether the easy access to credit enjoyed by state-owned firms translates into slower productivity growth--that is, whether easy financing makes firms lazy. If so, then further moves to the market have immense potential to generate continued income gains. Chapter three explores the relationship between the liberalization of banking sector, government debt and macroeconomic stability in China. This paper sets out the policy implications of bad lending for the financial sector and the public balance sheet. Reforms that sustain growth matter immensely for China. But with the Chinese economy increasingly linked to the entire world economy, better policy is vital for prosperity in the United States and all other nations.