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Finance without foundations
(2022)
This thesis examines the role of financial inclusion by way of access to formal financial services such as savings, credit, transfers and payments, in supporting the lives of refugees in protracted displacement in Jordan. It asks if such access enables smoother financial and livelihood transitions as refugees arrive and integrate into their new environments in host countries. It critically evaluates the narrative presented by humanitarian actors supporting financial inclusion as a marketled intervention to support refugee self-reliance. It argues that the limited provision of financial services through mobile wallets and micro-credit is not sufficient to financially integrate refugees. Above all, it demonstrates through the in-depth qualitative research in Jordan that in a context where refugees’ livelihoods are constrained due to a lack of foundational economic rights, financial services can only marginally improve their lives by making it more convenient to receive remittances and humanitarian transfers.
The research is embedded in a larger project called “Finance in Displacement: Exploring and strengthening financial lives of forcibly displaced persons” (FIND), which was initiated in 2019 as a collaboration between the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, the Tufts University, and the International Rescue Committee. The project was supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
Employing a two-pronged approach to analyzing language, this study uses evidence obtained from a large-scale corpus study and psycholinguistic experiments to investigate the Comparative Correlative (CC) construction (e.g. The more we get together, the happier we’ll be) across twenty varieties of English. More than 10,000 tokens from three of the largest corpora of English (COCA, BNC, GloWbE) and experimental data from almost 600 participants from four locations (Texas, South Africa, Singapore, and Kenya) are analyzed using advanced statistical methods, providing striking evidence for a high degree of parataxis between the subclauses of the construction and massive redundancy regarding cross-clausal associations which, it is argued, are best explained with a Usage-based Construction Grammar (CxG) approach that posits the existence of an elaborate network of interconnected mesoconstructions.
Addressing more general questions about the nature of human language, it is argued that this ‘bottom-up’ approach to language can account for one of the most fundamental riddles that the discipline of linguistics is striving to solve: Accounting for the potential of infinite creativity of language based on a finite set of rules. Furthermore, it is claimed that as an inclusive approach to language, CxG is better at accounting for construction-specific features that Mainstream Generative Grammar (MGG)-based approaches have struggled with. As it turns out, the evidence suggests that the English CC construction is anything but ‘peripheral’.
Additionally, this study examines the CC construction from a World Englishes perspective, addressing a significant gap in research: Schneider, for example, has noted that “[o]nly rarely have New Englishes been employed as test cases for general questions of language theory” (2003: 237), and Hundt writes of the challenge of “bring[ing] intricate, quantitative modelling of usage data to bear on theoretical modelling” (2021: 298). Accordingly, this study provides evidence for the predictive power of Schneider’s Dynamic Model (DM) (2003, 2007), which posits that there is a correlation between evolutionary stages of World Englishes and linguistic features. In this context, it is also shown how principles of cognitive approaches to language can explain both generalizations across varieties as well as variety- and DM stage-specific effects. Furthermore, this study provides strong evidence to support Kortmann’s claim of a continuum ranging from Pidgins and Creoles as “deleters” to L1 varieties as “preservers” (2014: 9) of grammatical formatives, contra Mesthrie and Bhatt’s claim of a geographical dichotomy between African and Asian varieties.
In this cumulative dissertation, I investigate unintended economic consequences of government interventions in three essays, each looking at a very specific question. The first essay examines how the introduction and enhancement of public pension systems affect demography, the second essay focuses on tax evasion via citizenship-by-investment programs, and the third essay evaluates the diversion of foreign financial assistance by powerful elites from recipient countries.
Despite the different research questions, all three essays evolve around the issue that actions of governments almost always create incentives causing unforeseen or unexpected behavioral responses. The first essay shows that increasing pension wealth creates incentives to save less for old-age in the form of own children, the second essay documents that policy instruments that increase the detection probability of tax evasion create incentives for evaders to find new ways to circumvent the law, and the third essay shows that foreign assistance creates rent-seeking incentives.
The results collected in the dissertation have implications for economic policy: Government interventions must be informed by an understanding of how well policies and programs produce (or contribute to) their desired outcomes. The results of all three essays presented in this thesis demonstrate that unforeseen or unexpected behavioral responses to government interventions can lead to economic outcomes or side effects that are divergent or contrary to the intentions of policymakers. These unintended economic consequences can significantly lessen the effectiveness of the policy or render it unsustainable. The first essay illustrates that the fertility effects of public pensions can erode the contribution base and, thus, the sustainability and political acceptance of a PAYG pension system in the long-run. The second essay shows that loopholes that have been found by evaders can lessen the deterrence effect of tax information exchange mechanisms, undermining their effectiveness to curb tax evasion. The third essay demonstrates that aid capture can prevent resources from being spent on their intended use, rendering foreign assistance less effective.
The overall aim of this cumulative dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of both antecedents of the usage of automated mobility offerings and outcomes that individual consumers experience from such usage. The dissertation contains three distinct papers:
Paper 1: Janotta, F. (2022), “Making emergent technologies more tangible - Effects of presentation form on user perceptions in the context of automated mobility”
Paper 2: Janotta, F. & Hogreve, J. (2022), “Ready for take-off? The dual role of affective and cognitive evaluations in the adoption of Urban Air Mobility services”
Paper 3: Janotta, F.; Hogreve, J.; Gustafsson, A. & Lervik-Olsen, L. (2022), “Will automated mobility contribute to consumer well-being? The role of mindfulness interventions in the context of automated driving”
Each paper addresses a specific prevailing research gap in the literature related to automated mobility offerings, focusing on different use cases of automated mobility. Paper 1 investigates the effects of different presentation forms of automated driving on consumers’ perceptions, thereby addressing the challenge of effectively visualizing emergent automated technologies and making them more tangible to respondents in the context of empirical research, thus providing a methodological basis for the further investigation. Paper 2 investigates antecedents of consumers’ adoption intentions of autonomous passenger drones, specifically focusing on the dual role of affective and cognitive considerations in the formation of usage intentions. Paper 3 investigates outcomes of consumers’ usage of automated mobility offerings, focusing on the use case of automated driving and its effects on individual well-being of consumers.
Trading in the shadows
(2022)
1. Credit supply externalities of a secondary loan market
We analyze the primary and secondary market for leveraged loans over the period from January 2010 to January 2020. Our findings indicate a trading channel of credit supply contraction. Nonbank lenders that are active loan traders decrease their credit supply relative to banks when the secondary market becomes cheap and expected profitability of loan trading increases. Direct evidence from collateralized loan obligations, the largest nonbank lenders, is consistent with the interpretation that credit is crowded out by nonbanks responding to profitable opportunities in the secondary loan market, rather than with a demand-based interpretation. The results suggest that the existence of a secondary loan market might have negative spillovers to the real economy, a possibility overlooked thus far.
2. Do investors care about climate change risk – even if nobody looks? Evidence from the private market
This paper contributes to the discussion about the regulation of private markets by taking climate change into the equation. It aims at filtering out factors of public awareness and regulation to see how investors behave on private markets, where “nobody looks”. We analyze changes in leveraged loan index prices and trades that can be associated with changes in climate risk awareness during the Paris Agreement and the French Energy Transition Law in 2015. CLOs, the largest players on the leveraged loan market and barely regulated or publicly observed institutional investors, do care about climate risks – just not the way climate activists would hope for: They further invest in brown firms and even increase their inventory when the overall prices of these decline as a response to the Paris Agreement. The effect reverses in face of more concrete regulatory threats of the French Energy Transition Law.
3. Value and momentum in private debt: Trading strategies for leveraged loans
This paper applies empirical asset pricing literature on the leveraged loan market by analyzing short-term (one-month) value and momentum strategies. We apply portfolio sorts on aggregate industry and country excess returns for four different panels in the US and Europe with almost seventy years of combined data. This novel approach of aggregating leveraged loans ensures tradability as investors can choose from available facilities within an industry or country portfolio. Sorting countries into terciles of HIGH, MEDIUM, and LOW according to value and momentum results in annualized credit excess returns of long HIGH-value portfolios from 548 bps to 1,040 bps; and long HIGH-momentum returns from 429 bps to 1,358 bps. Annualized Sharpe ratios span 0.93 to 1.45 and 1.11 to 1.64, respectively. These profits are neither compensation for default risk nor liquidity provision.
A functional central limit theorem for recursive residuals and applications in asymptotic statistics
(2022)
We study partial sums of recursive residuals, define a recursive residual partial sum process and prove that this process converges weakly against Brownian motion. For not normally distributed errors, the limit process has been known only for time series samples under assumptions that are difficult to verify, or in the case of triangular schemes of design points only under strong assumptions on the regression functions. For the first time, we determine the limit process for triangular schemes without the restrictive assumption of normally distributed errors and under very mild assumptions on the regression functions (they have to be left continuous, of bounded variation and linearly independent with respect to the L2 norm) that are of great benefit for practical applications. Crucial for the proof are Donsker's invariance principle for triangular schemes, a technique to factorize simultaneously a family of functions and Rubin's famous continuous mapping theorem. Our approach, based on Rubin's theorem, further allows us to compute the distribution of the limit process under local alternatives. With the help of these asymptotic results we are then able to define and study asymptotic tests and we give an example of an asymptotically uniformly most powerful test.
We also give an introduction to the theory of weak convergence of finite measures, and present these classical results in a more general form than usual. We consider measures on perfectly normal spaces instead of metric spaces, and we consider filters of measures instead of sequences of measures.
Linear regression models are very popular among users as they allow an intuitive interpretation of the dependencies between an outcome variable and explanatory variables. However, to avoid false conclusions from such models, any statistical inference should be backed up by a goodness-of-fit test. These tests check whether the hypothesised class of possible regression functions has been adequately chosen.
In this work, goodness-of-fit tests for univariate linear regression models based on the asymptotic distribution of residual CUSUM processes are studied. In the literature, a distinction is made between random designs and fixed designs when studying such goodness-of-fit tests. We prove that for each of these two scenarios (random and fixed design) there is a corresponding uniform design, we examine similarities and differences between these two scenarios, and prove that, when it comes to goodness-of-fit tests in in linear regression models based on the asymptotic distribution of residual CUSUM processes, one can assume without loss of generality a generic linear regression model.
Furthermore, a geometric interpretation of residual CUSUM limit processes as projections on certain reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces is given, the effect of heteroscedastic regression errors on residual CUSUM limit processes is investigated, and an interpretation of the Khmaladze maratingale transformation as a continuous-time recursive least squares method is made explicit.
Demystifying pairs trading
(2022)
This thesis contributes to the literature on algorithm-based hedge fund strategies with new insights into pairs trading to further demystify the rule-based trading strategy. Thereby, I closely follow the popular trading approach of Gatev, Goetzmann, and Rouwenhorst (2006). After introducing the methodology, the return calculation, and previous academic work, three research questions are investigated to extend the current knowledge of researchers and practitioners about the trading strategy.