We shed new light on the corporate governance role of institutional investors in markets where concentrated ownership and business groups are prevalent. When companies have controlling shareholders, institutional investors, as minority shareholders, can play only a limited role in corporate...

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...

Most stock exchange regulators around the world reacted to the 2007-2009 crisis by imposing bans or regulatory constraints on short-selling. Short-selling restrictions were imposed and lifted at different dates in different countries, often applied to different sets of stocks and featured...

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...

Exploring the period since the inception of the euro, we show that secondary-market yields on Italian public debt increase in anticipation of auctions of new issues and decrease after the auction, while no or a smaller such effect is present for German public debt. However, these yield movements...

L'auteur montre pourquoi le système des fonds de pension américain ne peut pas être introduit en France. Devant concilier à la fois la protection sociale et la spéculation financière, il repose sur un régime de propriété typiquement anglo-saxon, le trust. L'auteur analyse ce régime et...

La présente contribution vise à montrer l’intérêt de prendre en compte le droit dans une analyse économique institutionnelle du type de celle produite par la Théorie de la Régulation (TR). A partir du diagnostic initial sur le rôle des fonds de pension américains dans la...

Le pouvoir financier des salariés au moyen de leur épargne dans les fonds de pension est ici évalué au vu des règles juridiques qui régissent ces dispositifs.

Recent reforms of European pension schemes have largely taken the American system as a reference.The remarks which follow are aimed at understanding the origins of such a persistent belief in the virtues of the pension funds. The analysis brings out the role played by their legal structure, the...

This paper re-examines the incentives of mutual fund managers arising from investor flows. We provide evidence that the convexity of the flow-performance relationship varies with economic activity. We show that the effect is economically large and is not driven by abnormal years. We test two...