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...

Cet article évalue l'impact sur la croissance potentielle à l'horizon 2020 de différentes trajectoires de dette publique française, sous l'hypothèse d'une accélération des dépenses de retraite entièrement financée par endettement. Un modèle analytique avec fonction de production et...

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...

This paper examines the role of credit rating agencies in the subprime crisis that triggered the 2007-08 financial turmoil. The focus of the paper is on two aspects of ratings that contributed to the boom and bust of the market for asset-backed securities: rating inflation and coarse information...

The American pension funds system reinforces the sensibility of the American economy to financial markets fluctuations. Market risk is supported by companies as concerns defined benefits funds (DB) and by households as regards defined contributions plans (DC). DC funds are often over-invested in...