We analyze the economic consequences of disclosure and regulation within a context of significant information asymmetry and lenient regulation. In Canada, firms can enter the stock market at a pre-revenue stage by fulfilling each of the requirements of an initial public offerings or using...

Canadian listed firms issue private offerings more often than public offerings. Yet the issuing cost of private investments in public equity (PIPEs) has neither been analyzed nor compared with the cost of conventional seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). We examine a sample of 2,108 PIPEs and 1,990...

Numerous innovative Canadian new technology-based firms migrate abroad when local venture capitalists exit. This article aims to determine how common this type of exit is, and to understand the motivations behind and the consequences of these migrations. We use a mixed-methodology approach,...

We experimentally test whether risk aversion or ambiguity aversion can explain decisions in a learning-by-doing game. We first measure subjects' preferences toward risk and ambiguity, and then use these measures to predict behavior in the game. We find that ambiguity averse subjects pay more...

The explanation of social inequalities in education is still a debated issue in economics. Recent empirical studies tend to downplay the potential role of credit constraint. This article tests a different potential explanation of social inequalities in education, specifically that social...

This paper proposes a general way to craft public policy when there is no consensual account of the situation of interest. The design builds on a dual extension of the traditional theory of economic policy. It does not require a representative policymaker's utility function (as in the literature...

Twenty years ago, the French created a so far unique insurance scheme to cover damages due to natural catastrophes. This so-called ''Cat-Nat system'' combines private insurance industry, a state-guaranteed public reinsurance and the Treasury. We provide a simple game-theoretic model which seems...

What is a rational decision-maker supposed to do when facing an unfamiliar problem, where there is uncertainty but no basis for making probabilistic assessments? One answer is to use a form of expected utility theory, and assume that agents assign their own subjective probabilities to each...

We consider the effect of an increase in the risk from pollution. We show that in the case of a flow pollution, when the number of players is sufficiently large, the result of Bramoulle and Treich, showing that a marginal increase of risk in the neighborhood of a risk-free world is...