The problem that we address in this paper stems from the trend to delegation in the water management field. It refers to the municipality's negotiating disadvantage in the face of cartelized water management firms that makes delegation, once undertaken, virtually irreversible. We show why the...

This paper uses standard methods in stochastic calculus to measure the cost of the agency conflict that pits elected officials of French municipalities against the communities they represent in the management of the water supply. Under the French legal code, the municipalities are responsible...

Many studies show relationships between sovereign debt discounts and various structural, financial and other economic and qualitative phenomena. Although many of them explicitly mention the importance of the willingness to pay, they typically exclude it from the testing because the variable...

This paper examines the effect of CEO risk appetite on the return volatility of a sample of large, listed financial firms over the period 2000-2008. After controlling for firm specific characteristics, the results give strong evidence that the CEO risk appetite has an important effect on firm...

The weak empirical evidence linking diversification and international equity flows calls into question the diversification paradigm at the international level and the analytical framework it implies. Using a novel measure of diversification that includes all the moments of the distribution of...

The severity and occurrence of rare events in financial markets has had a fundamental impact on the pricing and risk management of financial derivatives, such as volatility smile curves. However rare event modelling poses a problem in efficient and accurate simulation due to fundamental issues...

The inefficient pricing of the CDS (credit default swap) market has been considered as one of the main causes of the Global Financial Crisis. As price discovery is theoretically related to liquidity, this has been considered a source of mispricing in this over-the-counter market. However the CDS...