ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Venture capital is a major source of funding for the entrepreneurial community and usually focuses on the early stage, more risk orientated business endeavours. This study explores and identifies the investment criteria used by South African venture capitalists in their venture...

This thesis consists of three chapters on the impact of different government policies on entrepreneurial financing. In the first chapter, by quantitatively evaluating the impact of different personal bankruptcy regimes on entrepreneurship in a life-cycle model with occupational choices, I...

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay finds that small firms in poor quality legal environments (poor quality contract enforcement and property rights environments) are more financially constrained relative to small firms in better quality legal environments. Consequently,...

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the relationships between the structural and managerial characteristics of corporate venture capital (CVC) programs and the consequences of their CVC activities, and reveal the mechanisms that lead to enhanced CVC performance. It consists of three...

This thesis examines the pricing of volatility on organized U.S. options exchanges from October 31, 2005 through November 1, 2007. The research is motivated in part by the rapid growth of hedge funds that trade volatility and in part by the growing importance that the financial markets place on...

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This dissertation consists of four essays on pricing fixed income derivatives and risk management. The first essay presents pricing and duration formulas for floating rate bonds and interest rate swaps with embedded options. It combines Briys et al.'s approximation with the extended Vasicek term...

A growing body of evidence has accumulated on the behavior of volatility for pricing data on a variety of different financial assets. Twenty-four-hour currency markets are a particularly useful vehicle for examining the relationship between information and asset volatility--in part because the...

The number of multinational banks (MNBs) has increased in Central Europe, while the amount of real credit has decreased. This dissertation investigates whether there is a causal link between increased international financial competition (IFC) and the decline of real credit in Poland and Hungary,...