In the paper, we first investigate the impact of an increase in capital requirements on the equity risk (beta) of listed banks in France. We find that an increase in capital ratios reduces banks’ systematic risk. This leads to a decrease in shareholders’ required return on equity, providing...

This paper studies the effect of banks’ capitalization on banks’ Return on Equity (ROE). A debate has emerged on the costs for banks of the increase in capital requirements under Basel III. We bring empirical evidence on this issue by analyzing the effect of different capitalization measures...

In this paper, I use a two-country model to investigate the incentives which lead one country to take charge of another country's debt. I show that, when direct transfers to residents cannot be perfectly targeted, the first country can be better o_ honoring the second country's liabilities, even...

We uncover technological standardization as a microeconomic mechanism which is vital for the implementation of new technologies, in particular general purpose technologies. The interdependencies of these technologies require common rules (“standardization”) to ensure compatibility. Using...

The paper characterizes the optimal tax scheme in an open economy with structural inefficiencies on the labor market and on government size. On analytical grounds first, we show that the economy can use fiscal revaluation to exploit the terms of trade externality and to dampen the impact of an...

In this paper I shed light on the issues of the (low) volatilities of labor market variables implied by the search and matching model and the (high) values of the correlations between these variables and labor productivity. On the one hand, Shimer (2005) claims that “Not only there is little...

This paper explores convergence in higher-order beliefs - otherwise called eductive stability - when coordination is sequential, that is, when each agent of a given type fixes his own actions after observing the ones of earlier types in a given order. The presence of sequential types enhances...

Under the classical gold standard (1880-1914), the Bank of France maintained a stable discount rate while the Bank of England changed its rate very frequently. Why did the policies of these central banks, the two pillars of the gold standard, differ so much? How did the Bank of France manage to...

Theory and evidence suggest that in an environment of well-anchored expectations, temporary economic news or shocks should not affect agents' expectations of inflation in the long term. Our estimated structural VARs show that both long- and short-term inflation expectations are sensitive to...

Speculators can discover whether a signal is true or false by processing it but this takes time. Hence they face a trade-off between trading fast on a signal (i.e., before processing it), at the risk of trading on a false news, or trading after processing the signal, at the risk that prices...