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...

The global financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has brought the financial industry to centre stage. While most current analysis focuses on the way finance can be regulated in the topical context of the economic crisis, this book aims to show how financial activities actually shape...

We take advantage of the regulatory change planned to transform financial OTC markets into organized markets to study the processes and the means by which powerful actors resist categorization and contest a certain vision of the market. Specifically analyzing the documents produced by the MiFID...

Adopting an historical perspective, we propose to study the way recurrent debates regarding the “excessive speculation” category on financial derivatives markets, take various shapes at different points in time. We consider that history does not repeat itself, at least not in the exact way....