Economic integration on the EU banking markets is expected to favor competition, which should provide economic gains. However, even if there is a commonly accepted view in favor of enhanced bank competition during the last decade, no study has been performed in the 2000s showing this trend. In...

This paper explores the idea to regulate retailing industry through a tax on the store parking size. In Western economies, retailers use common resources (land use, road networks) contributing to the store accessibility that they do not pay for. This kind of free riding gives gross merchandisers...

We build a new measure of investor sentiment only based on changes in diversi?cation levels of individual investors? portfolios. The dynamics of the number of different stocks in portfolios is modelized as a Markov chain. We measure investor sentiment as the area above the cumulative...

We investigate bank loans’ specialness with a particular focus on the recent boom and bust cycle. We perform an empirical analysis using event study methodology on a sample of 253 large loan announcements for French borrowers between January 2000 and December 2009. We find a significant and...

In this article, we stress the impact of sophistication on stocks repurchase behavior by individual investors. By analyzing a large database of 8’072’016 trades by 84’500 individual French investors from 1999 to 2006, we evidence at aggregated and individual level that investors prefer to...

Après avoir brièvement rappelé les raisons par lesquelles la théorie économique justifie traditionnellement le recours au péage urbain, l’article examine les principaux éléments qui expliquent les résistances des agents économiques, afin d’en comprendre les fondements économiques....

This paper investigates the performance of 56’723 individual investors using a large French database between 1999 and 2006. In accordance with previous studies, investors in our sample exhibit poor performances and the securities bought are less profitable than the securities sold on the whole...

The Arab Spring is expected to enhance the weak quality of institutions in MENA countries. We show in this paper how these changes can contribute to favor the expansion of Islamic finance by analyzing the role of quality of institutions on cost efficiency of Islamic and conventional banks. We...

We investigate the network structure of syndicated lending markets and evaluate the impact of lenders’ network centrality, considered as measures of their experience and reputation, on borrowing costs. We show that the market for syndicated loans is a “small world” characterized by large...

This paper deals with corporate governance issues and competition policy. The impact of private benefits extraction on the values of oligopolistic firms is analyzed. Private benefits are assumed to generate costs which create price distortion on the product market. For a wide range of industry...