The regulations that shape the design and the operations of corporations, credit and securities markets differ vastly from country to country. In addition, similar regulations are often unequally enforced in different countries. Economists still have an imperfect understanding of why these...

We argue that the choice of corporate governance by a firm affects and is affected by the choice of governance by other firms. Firms with weaker governance give higher payoffs to their management to incentivize them. This forces firms with good governance to also pay their management more than...

If the private benefits of control are high and management owns a small equity stake, managers and workers are natural allies. Two forces are at play. First, managers can transform employees into a 'poison pill' through generous long-term labour contracts and thereby reduce the firm’s...

The Paper analyses the political decision that determines the degree of investor protection. We show that entrepreneurs and workers can strike a political agreement by which low investor protection is exchanged for high employment protection. This ‘corporatist’ agreement is feasible if the...

This paper presents a political economy model where there is mutual feedback between investor protection and stock market development. Better investor protection induces companies to issue more equity and thereby leads to a broader stock market. In turn, equity issuance expands the shareholder...

We present a model in which issuers of asset backed securities choose to release coarse information to enhance the liquidity of their primary market, at the cost of reducing secondary market liquidity or even causing it to freeze. The degree of transparency is inefficiently low if the social...

Débat du pouvoir et des finalités des marchés financiers et plaide pour une réhabilitation de la politique qui peut constituer un contrepoids.

L'auteur tente de montrer que les menaces réelles liées à la mondialisation peuvent être évitées si la politique économique reconnaît dans le social une composante essentielle de l'efficacité économique.

Pour faire en sorte que le progrès social ne reste pas en panne, la politique doit imposer sa loi aux marchés financiers même si ceux-ci sont indispensables au fonctionnement de l'économie française en aidant à répartir la masse des risques. L'échec de la gauche en France s'explique...

We propose a model in which better governance incentivizes managers to perform better and thus saves on the cost of providing pay for performance. However, when managerial talent is scarce, firms' competition to attract better managers reduces an individual firm's incentives to invest in...