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Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), School of Eng & Built Env, Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology, This thesis establishes new insights into the provision of affordable, operationally efficient rental housing in Australia, within the context of government-supported affordable rental housing schemes. A revision to the Australian ‘Affordable Housing Bond Aggregator’ (AHBA) model is proposed, which includes the integration of a green building mandate on affordable rental housing stock and the utilisation of sustainable financing pathways – notably green bonds. Linkages between the operational utility efficiency of rental housing, sustainable financing avenues, and outcomes for low- and middle-income households are investigated; furthermore, how ongoing operational utility efficiencies, achieved through green building principles, may be captured to improve the efficacy of government social support schemes as a system is examined. This research has implications for the Australian affordable housing sector. This thesis applies a mixed-methods approach to address and synthesise the following three concepts: 1) Green building principles as a demand-side subsidy to improve tenant outcomes within affordable housing policy. A case study is presented. 2) The application of green versus conventional housing bonds as a financing mechanism for affordable housing policy. A systematic literature review is undertaken to reveal plausible financing cost savings and ‘green premium’ determinants. 3) Lastly, an operational system dynamics model is developed to examine the outcomes of the AHBA in South East Queensland, and also to forecast the implications for integrating green building principles, including green bonds, against environmental, social, and economic outcomes. First, this research engages with a case study to investigate the financial value of green building principles within South East Queensland. Rising energy, water, and gas costs exert increasing financial pressure on low- and middle-income rental households, which are often subject to issues of split-incentives. The s

The affordability of urban housing has become an important issue for academics and policymakers. The rental housing sector in Australia continues to be ranked as one of the most unaffordable in the developed world (The 15th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey), and thus it requires further investigation to improve the situation. Housing affordability measures such as the ratio and residual income methods do not explicitly identify the household segment(s) where affordability stress is most severe. This thesis undertakes three studies to test a new approach for analysing housing affordability focusing on the housing rental sector, namely a whole-of-life approach (WOLA). WOLA is based on a family life cycle concept. This approach incorporates a comprehensive tool to analyse housing affordability along the different stages of the family life cycle, considering all non-housing consumption expenditures (both basic and discretionary) necessary for healthy living. WOLA identifies the household segments with the most severe affordability stress and is applied to the emerging build-to-rent (i.e. the development, professional management, and control of large-scale residential property by institutional investors and developers specifically for the renter market) asset class in housing supply. This thesis aims to examine the question: Can the whole-of-life approach and build-to-rent strategy provide solutions to rental housing affordability challenges in Australia?, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Dept Account,Finance & Econ, Griffith Business School, Full Text

Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Dept Account,Finance & Econ, Griffith Business School, This document is constructed from four interrelated empirical papers examining the mortgage interest-rate pass-through mechanism in the Australian banking market over the period 1997:1–2015:12 employing an anonymous sample of 20 banks anonymised. In particular, the transmission from both the bank international funding cost and the cash rate to the effective interest rate on the variable home loans for owner-occupiers, both asymmetries (downward and upward) and symmetries (homogeneity or heterogeneity), are investigated in parallel in the short run and in the long run. Furthermore, the effects of the recent Great Recession (GFC) on this transmission mechanism are carefully considered in different manners while controlling for nonlinearity, slope heterogeneity, complex cross-sectional dependencies arising from both observed and unobserved common factors in panel data. The economic imperative of this examination focuses on seven key reasons: (i) the paramount importance of the Australian mortgage market to monetary policy transmission, housing and financial soundness in Australia, and to the stability of global banking and financial markets, (ii) the salient characteristics of the mortgage products, (iii) the high oligopoly of the mortgage market and banking sector, (iv) the heavy reliance of Australian banks on wholesale funding to finance their mortgages, (v) the increased public concern about bank mortgage rate-setting behaviour and a proliferated attention of regulators (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority [APRA], Reserve Bank of Australia [RBA] and related bodies) towards the enhancement of banking competition and financial soundness, (vi) the small quantity of the literature on the policy rate–mortgage rate transmission using micro-data, considering the substantially dire effect of the GFC on this asymmetric transmission in Australia, and (vii) a lack of knowledge about the role of bank international funding cost on mortgage rate pass-through mechanisms in

Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Griffith Business School, Griffith Business School, This thesis examines the impact of corporate governance-related factors, particularly CEO incentive compensation, discretionary accruals and firm technical efficiency improvement, on stock returns in Australia. The motivation to investigate these impacts was the increasing importance of the equity-based compensation component in CEO remuneration packages, the numerous financial reporting scandals at high profile companies such as Enron, WorldCom and HIH Insurance, and an urgent call from the government on improvement in productivity. Among various corporate governance mechanisms, CEO compensation is viewed as an efficient incentive to align the interests of managers with those of shareholders. According to agency theory, effective compensation policies, particularly incentive-based pay, induce managers to make more effort, and to undertake risky and shareholder-wealth-increasing investments to increase their firms' value. However, in practice, some argue that too close a link between CEO compensation and firm performance may cause CEOs to become either too conservative or too aggressive, which may lead to suboptimal investments and lower firm value.

Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Dept Account,Finance & Econ, Griffith Business School, Over the past 15 years, the global food price has increased signi cantly in association with high market volatility (Naylor and Falcon, 2010; Wright, 2011; Ivanic et al., 2012). It is claimed that the world food prices have been strongly driven by the operation of the agricultural derivatives markets (Du et al., 2011; Gutierrez, 2013; Juvenal and Petrella, 2015). Moreover, the agricultural commodities markets have become integrated globally resulting in price transmissions across countries (Liu 2009; Liu and An 2011; Shi and He 2013, among others). The US and China, the leading economies in the world, are the two biggest producers and consumers of agricultural commodities globally and engage in massive trade in these products between each other. The US agricultural futures market is the world's most active while that of China is the fastest growing (Acworth, 2013). Despite the importance of the US and Chinese agricultural futures markets in relation to food security as well as to international investors, among others, there is still a dearth of studies which have investigated the interaction between these two markets. This thesis seeks to ll this vital knowledge gap by investigating the manner and structure of interdependence between the US and Chinese agricultural commodities futures markets and its implications on international investment, pro tability and risk. Specifically, it rst investigates the return spillovers and directional predictability between these two countries. Second, it examines the volatility transmission pattern between the US and Chinese agricultural futures markets. Third, given the ndings from study 1, it designs a rolling quantile trading strategy that can be applied in practice. This thesis focuses on four important commodities: soybeans, wheat, corn and sugar with more than a decade (2000 to 2016) of daily frequency data, i.e. opening, closing, daily high and daily low prices, which take into account the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The

Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Dept Account,Finance & Econ, Griffith Business School, The studies in this thesis examine financial integration: its extent across regions and market cycles, how culture affects it and how the levels of market linkages impact the effectiveness of policy decisions during periods of market crisis. This investigation is undertaken in four separate but interrelated studies. The first study (Chapter 3) uses a novel approach, partial correlations within a complex network framework, to examine the degree of globalization and regionalization of stock market linkages and how these linkages vary across different economic or market cycles. The results show that geography influences network linkages differently across market cycles. During normal times, regional factors shape market linkages; however, during periods of turbulence, global rather than regional factors drive these linkages. Also, the network traffic increases during times of turmoil, but contrary to previous results, the results do not indicate a consistent or overwhelming increase in positive linkages between markets. Also, contrary to expectations, financial centers such as the US, China, Japan, and the UK command a greater regional rather than global influence. These findings have implications for portfolio management and policy decision-making. The second study (Chapter 4) examines linkages between stock markets across market cycles by combining network and cointegration analysis. The results show that long-run linkages are likely to be global rather than regional and that market turbulence increases linkages. However, no widespread common stochastic trends between markets are detected. Also, the major financial markets fail to influence long-run network linkages. The third study (Chapter 5) conducts a comprehensive study on the effect of culture on stock market linkages. A quantile regression model uses data from 25 national stock markets to estimate the determinants of market linkages. It controls for distance, economic and legal variables while using culture va