In this paper we study the role of private debt financing in disciplining a state owned firm operating for a government that incurs a cost of public financing. We show that debt contracts allow the government to avoid socially costly subsidies by letting unprofitable state- owned firms default....

Traditionally share price returns and their variance have been explained by factors linked to the operations of the company such as systematic risk, corporate size and P/E ratios or by factors related to the influence of the macroeconomic environment. In these models, the institutional...

This paper has described two broad systems of corporate governance existing in Continental Europe and in the UK.

In this paper, we discuss the choice for build-operate-and-transfer (BOT) concessions when governments and firm managers do not share the same information regarding the operation characteristics of a facility. We show that larger shadow costs of public funds and larger information asymmetries...

The focus of this paper is on the trade-off between cost efficiency and access in the choice of the optimal mix of public and private provision in universal health systems. We model a simple health care market in which the regulator acts as a third payer. Patients need one unit of medical...

This paper studies the effect of soft-budget constraints in a pure adverse selection model of monopoly regulation. We consider a government maximizing total surplus but incurring some cost of public funds A la Laffont Tirole (1993). We propose a regulatory set-up in which firms are free to enter...

We consider a market in which a public firm competes against private ones, and ask what happens when the public firm is privatized. In the short run, privatization is harmful because prices rise: the disciplinary role of the public firm is lost. In the long run, privatization leads to further...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of privatization in a mixed duopoly, where a private firm competes in quantities with a welfare-maximizing public firm. We consider two inefficiencies of the public sector: a possible cost inefficiency, and an allocative inefficiency due to...

We consider a market in which a public firm completes against private ones, and ask what happens when the public firms is privatized. In the short run, privatization is harmful because prices rise: the disciplinary role of the public firm is lost. In the long run, privatization, leads to further...

In the French urban public transport industry, services are often delegated to a private firm by the mean of a fixed-term regulatory contract. This contract specifies the duties of the firm and a financial compensation. When it expires, a new contract is awarded, possibly to a different...