Levy and Roll (Review of Financial Studies, 2010) have recently revived the debate related to the market portfolio's efficiency suggesting that it may be mean-variance efficient after all. This paper develops an alternative test of portfolio mean-variance efficiency based on the realistic...

This paper proposes a principal-agent model of labour market discrimination. In this model, the firm manager is a taste-based discriminator and has to make unobservable hiring decisions that determine the shareholder's profits, because workers differ in skill. The model shows that...

The literature has not reached a consensus yet regarding the existence of sovereign creditor moral hazard. Exploiting an exceptional historical example, this paper proposes an original method to address this issue. As the corona which is observable only during a total eclipse of the sun,...

This paper estimates the impact of loan officers' subjectivity on microcredit granting by exploiting an exceptionally detailed database from a Brazilian microfinance institution. Loan officers collect field data, meet with applicants, and make recommendations to the credit committee that in turn...

This paper sheds light on a poorly understood phenomenon in microfinance which is often referred to as "mission drift": A tendency reviewd by numerous microfinance institutions to extend larger average loan sizes in the process of scaling-up. . We argue that this phenomenon is not driven by...

Women entrepreneurs are known not only to reimburse loans swifter than men, but also to receive smaller loans. However, on average women have smaller-scope business projects and are poorer than men. A deeper investigation is thus required in order to assess the existence of gender discrimination...