Banks cut dividends with great reluctance, as if addicted to them. Their apparent addiction is a major cause of concern for regulators because it could endanger the whole banking system. However, banks may be rational in maintaining elevated dividends if agency costs are high and dividends...

When assessing the financial performance of Microfinance institutions, the current literature commonly uses balance sheets and income statements. In order to assess sources of cash generated, if any, we analyse the cash flow statements of the 30 largest MFIs that display audited reports between...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Today, the shareholding structure of companies is sometimes so complex that it can be difficult to find back their actual owners and controllers. In particular, in continental Europe and in Asia, control tunnelling appears frequently through pyramidal structure. After describing the ownership...

Farber, Gillet and Szafarz (2006) propose a general formula for the WACC in which the expected return on the tax shield appears explicitly. The classical Modigliani-Miller and Harris-Pringle WACC formulas for specific debt policies are then derived from the general formula after having...

Pyramids, cross-ownership, rings and other complex features inducing control tunnelling are frequent in the European and Asian industrial world. Based on the matrix methodology, this paper offers a model for measuring integrated ownership and threshold-based control, applicable to any group of...