Associated with neo-liberalism, shareholder value is at the origin of the financialization of the economy and the current financial crisis. Indoctrinated by neoliberal economics, accountants set themselves the objective of ensuring the efficient functioning of financial markets instead of...

The reading of CAC 40 annuals reports on 1998 and 1999, based on a themes’ dictionary connected with corporate governance and shareholder value, shows evolution of financial communication. Five groups of firms which support a different shareholder influence are distinguished.

The possible existence of a link between the structure of firms' equity and profitability is a recurrent question among economists. The primary objective of this article is to provide a critical analysis of the two most recent hypotheses on the subject, one put forward by Demsetz, and the other...

We investigate the capital structure dynamics of a panel of 766 firms from five Western Europe countries: France, Italy, UK, Germany and Switzerland over the period 1996-2007. If firms adjust their capital structure towards an optimal level with adjustment costs affecting this optimization...

This article models a situation in which a monopolistic insurer evaluates risk better than its customers. The resulting equilibrium allocations are compared to the consequences of the standard adverse selection hypothesis. On the positive side, they exhibit the property that low-risk people are...

In this paper, we extend Aumann’s (Ann Stat 4:1236–1239, 1976) probabilistic agreement theorem to situations in which agents’ prior beliefs are represented by a common neo-additive capacity. In particular, we characterize the family of updating rules for neo-additive capacities, which are...

According to economic theory, health insurance raises medical care consumptions by inducing ex-post moral hazard behavior, it is to say the purchase of health care that individual value below their production cost. Nevertheless, among the economists community, some suggest that these additional...

In a differential information economy with quasi–linear utilities, monetary transfers facilitate the fulfillment of incentive compatibility constraints : the associated ex ante core is generically nonempty. However, we exhibit a well–behaved exchange economy in which this core is empty, even...

We study imperfect competition between insurers in a multiple-risk environment. In the absence of asymmetric information, equilibria are efficient, and we determine the degrees of specialization under which the specialized insurers are able or unable to capture the surplus. We show in contrast...

This paper presents a capital asset pricing model in the presence of asymmetric information and transaction costs. The model is a generalized version of Merton's (1987) model and Black's (1974) model. Empirical tests show a negative relation between the expected rate of return and the shadow...