Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

1208

Date

2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Business Admin

Major

Business Administration

Concentration

Finance

Committee Chair

Ronald Spahr

Committee Member

Pankaj Jain

Committee Member

David Kemme

Committee Member

Steven Jordan

Abstract

There are three essays in this dissertation. The first essay provides information regarding tax havens and its role in portfolio equity flows. For a sample of 70 countries average portfolio flows received from tax haven countries is higher than average flows received from non tax haven countries. When countries increase personal tax rates, portfolio equity flows from tax haven countries increases as compared to non tax haven countries. These effects are consistent for countries belonging to emerging, frontier and developed markets and whether a given country has high or low corporate governance. The second essay looks at the impact of tax treaties on valuations, equity flows and cost of equity capital. We construct a dyadic time series for 64 countries finding that the existence of over 2500 bilateral double taxation treaties (DTTs) facilitates effeciencies of foreign portfolio investment (FPI) by reducing investors' tax budens. Our analysis incoporates fixed effects, corporate and personal taxes and other control variables. Subsequent to countries' signing DTTS, annual flows increase significnatly, investors' benefits from tax savings, corporate equity valuation increases, and equity capital costs decline. Third essay looks at the impact of macro-economic uncertainty and stock index returns. Our resuls sugges that global GDP uncertainty is corrlated with country returns. More global macro uncertainty (GUN) is associated with higher country index returns. During non-crisis years, local macro uncertainty (CSUN) is uncorrelated with country returns. However CSUN is important for explaining market returns during extreme down markets. Thus macro uncertainty is a priced factor and differentation between country specific and global macro uncertainty is important. Lastly, we dcompose uncertainty into private and common components and study their effects.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

Download

Share

COinS