This thesis comprises of three essays. The first essay is titled ‘Do Acquiring Firms Manage Earnings?’ and is co-authored with Professor Anand M. Vijh. The second essay is titled ‘Do Firms Have a Target Leverage? Evidence from Credit Markets’ and is joint work with Professors Anand M. Vijh and Redouane Elkamhi. The third is essay is single authored and titled ‘Bondholder Wealth Effects of Fraud...

We study the effects of homebuyers’ beliefs about future house price changes on their mortgage leverage choice. We show that, from a theoretical perspective, the relationship between homebuyers’ beliefs and their leverage choice is ambiguous, and depends on the magnitude of a “collateral adjustment friction” that reduces homebuyers’ willingness to adjust their house size in response to beliefs ...

This paper explores the leverage determinants across firms’ sizesbased on the two main theories behind the capital structure, the trade-offand the pecking order theories. A panel data is sued to find therelationship between capital structure and the variables that proxy forbenefits and costs of debt during 1990 to 2006. Our findings show thatboth principles help to explain the capital structure...

Regulatory constraints on bank leverage have been at the center of many policy discussions recently. One important question to emerge from these discussions has been whether these regulations should be time-dependent and how they would interact with the business cycle. We analyze this question using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with banks and bank capital. In the model, bank c...

Simulation study is very important in model validation. It is invaluable and versatile tool especially in statistical problems and modeling where analytical technique is inadequate. In fitting to a model, problems will raise when there exists one or more high-leverage points in the data set. Due to the fact that the presence high-leverage points are commonly occurred in models fitting, we propo...

Adoption of evidence-based practice (EBP) is an increasingly advocated yet formidable challenge. Much work on EBP has implied simplistic solutions: if researchers would produce practice-relevant evidence-based approaches, practitioners would find, adopt, and use them. Blaming researchers for problems in supply, and practitioners for resistance in adoption, will only thwart progress at improving...

It is recognized that international water sector development work has issues with a lack of sustained positive outcomes. A large driver of this outcome is how NGOs work with communities to implement and then manage water services. Many NGOs tend to focus their efforts on improving their reach and organisational growth by continually engaging in new projects. This behaviour is largely driven by ...

The least squares linear regression estimator is well-known to be highly sensitive to unusual observations in the data, and as a result many more robust estimators have been proposed as alternatives. One of the earliest proposals was least-sum of absolute deviations (LAD) regression, where the regression coefficients are estimated through minimization of the sum of the absolute values of the re...

The introduction of good faith bargaining in Western Australia: Policy origins and implications for collective bargaining Michael Gillan and Donella Caspersz University of Western Australia The Australian Industrial Relations Commission ruled in 2003 that there was no legal duty on parties to bargain in ‘good faith’. In Western Australia, the Gallop Labor Government has introduced good faith ba...