We investigate the empirical relation between competition and corporate governance and the effect of country characteristics on this relation. We find that competition is associated with strong corporate governance, but only in less developed countries. We next examine the impact of corporate...

We assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite (or because of) the substantial increase in global population. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical-level generalized utilitarianism...

In this paper, we propose a new multidimensional inequality index that satisfies a fundamental set of desired properties. We discuss the case where the social evaluation function of welfare depends simultaneously on unidimensional and multidimensional forms of inequality. We show how this mixed...

Using a large sample of US urban areas, we provide systematic evidence that mean household income rises with city ('agglomeration'), that this effect is stronger for the top of the income distribution ('polarization'), and that household income inequality increases at a decreasing rate in city...

This paper examines the link between globalization measured by foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign portfolio investment (FPI) and privatization of state-owned enterprises in a multi-country sample that focuses on developing countries. We hypothesize that privatization has an effect on...

We study the effect of an asymmetric environment on risk sharing. In our model, entrepreneurs consider undertaking risky projects in the real sector as well as selling part of their projects to investors. To capture the idea of an asymmetric environment, the returns on the alternative risk-free...

This paper looks at an institutional innovation in which Western investors lend peer-to-peer to poor country enterprises. Using a unique dataset from an online lending platform called MyC4, we find that MyC4’s Western lenders grant lower interest rates to pro-poor, socially responsible (SR),...

The objective of this paper is to assess the impact of working in the twelve months preceding the date of leaving high school, either as a graduate or as a dropout, on the probability of graduation. To do so, I use Statistics Canada's 1991 School Leavers Survey and its 1995 Follow-up. Given that...

The new NYSE rules for corporate governance require the audit committee to discuss and review the firm's risk assessment and hedging strategies. They also put additional requirements for the composition and the financial knowledge of the directors sitting on the board and on the audit committee....

It is established that the standard principal-agent model cannot explain the structure of commonly used CEO compensation contracts if CRRA preferences are postulated. However, we demonstrate that this model has potentially a high explanatory power with preferences with decreasing relative risk...