Cash holdings have often been presumed to help resolve the inherent uncertainty of assessing banks. Nonetheless, extant empirical evidence is inconclusive. The present paper adopts a novel approach to assessing the level of stockholder uncertainty associated with the cash holdings reported by...

Social banks are financial intermediaries paying attention to non-economic (i.e. social, ethical, and environmental) criteria. This paper investigates the behavior of social banks in the European credit market. We use a unique hand-collected dataset on 389 business loans granted by a French...

This paper is devoted to the analysis of liquidity risk in microfinance. Using a re-sampling method, we estimate withdrawal rate distributions for migrants’ and locals’ deposits, using an original database of 7,828 deposit contracts issued between 2002 and 2008 by 12 village banks belonging...

We complement standard portfolio theory à la Markowitz by adding a social dimension. We distinguish between two main setups, taking social returns as stochastic in the first, but as deterministic in the second. Two main features need to be introduced: Every asset must be assigned a...

En Afrique subsaharienne, les zones agricoles et rurales abritent plus de trois quarts de la population et contribuent pour la grande part à l’emploi, au PIB, aux recettes d’exportations et à l’offre alimentaire. Dès lors, le financement des activités qui se développent dans ces zones...

Poor women have complex financial lives. They borrow from a variety of sources. So far, however, research has focussed only on formal borrowing as a source of women’s empowerment. This study examines whether type of borrowing matters to women. We differentiate between ‘easy loans’ – that...

Slow money, or patient nurturing capital invested locally in food and basic industries, is a new term but an old notion. This paper examines the cases of the CIGALES clubs of microangels in France and the more recent case of the slow money alliance to ferret out the basic principles and...

Women entrepreneurs are known not only to reimburse loans swifter than men, but also to receive smaller loans. However, on average women have smaller-scope business projects and are poorer than men. A deeper investigation is thus required in order to assess the existence of gender discrimination...

To what extent do business angels really understand their own decision process? This paper is the first in business angel research literature to use conjoint analysis to capture decision makers’ actual decision policies and to compare these results with their stated decision policies. Although...

European nations substitute between employment protection regulations and labor market expenditures (e.g. unemployment insurance benefits) for providing worker insurance. Employment regulations more directly tax firms making frequent labor adjustments than other labor insurance mechanisms....