Date of Award
8-2016
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Legacy Department
Economics
Committee Member
Dr. Paul Wilson, Committee Chair
Committee Member
Dr. Patrick Warren
Committee Member
Dr. Howard Bodenhorn
Committee Member
Dr. Dan Miller
Abstract
The first chapter of this dissertation is a study into the effects of geographic diversification on insolvency risk for commercial banks in the United States. Using a logit model, this paper finds that, ceteris paribus, more geographically diversified banks exhibited a lower probability of insol-vency during both banking crises, with the magnitude of these effects being smaller in the recent banking crisis. Furthermore, allowing for portfolio choices to vary, and holding commercial bank size constant, banks with greater geographic diversification during the crisis of the 1980s and 1990s were overall less likely to become insolvent, while there is no systematic difference in the overall probability of insolvency during the recent crisis. Using data from the non-equity crowdfunding website Kickstarter.com, the second chapter of this dissertation analyzes the behavior of potential crowdfunders in committing funds to projects in or-der to increase the probability that said projects will be successfully funded, and thus come into existence. This study finds evidence that while potential funders are aware of, and react to, possi-bilities for increasing the probability of project success, these effects are economically small. These results suggest that most funders contribute to non-equity crowdfunding projects for either altruistic reasons, or in order to purchase some non-equity reward being offered by the project creator. The third chapter develops a simple subscription game in order to analyze the ex ante inefficiencies of the voluntary provision of a discrete public good in the presence of incomplete information and a monopoly provider. Symmetric pure strategy Bayesian Nash equilibria are established as solu-tions to the subscription game. All considerations of the subscription game are ex ante inefficient. Inefficiencies are reduced with increased market size, and greater with increasing public good cost. Inefficiencies increase with the scale of the public good, suggesting that high cost public goods ben-efiting many individuals may be difficult to provide through a subscription game similar to the one presented in this paper. Inefficiency is also increased when the provider of the public good is a profit maximizing monopoly, with the relative inefficiencies between a monopoly and benevolent provider remaining consistent across economic conditions considered.
Recommended Citation
Swanson, Andrew, "Geographic Diversification and Commercial Bank Insolvency Risk and Essays on Crowdfunding and Subscription Games" (2016). All Dissertations. 1695.
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/1695