This paper compares two different types of private retirement plans from the perspective of a representative beneficiary: a defined benefit (DB) and a defined contribution (DC) plan. While salary risk is the main common risk factor in DB and DC pension plans, one of the key differences is that...

This paper examines relationships between theory of financial risk and size. Based on the work of Makridakis / Taleb [2009] and Taleb / Tapiero [2009], presents the problems of excessive risk and imbalances caused by the size of firms. Markets mixed on firm growth traps externalities can...

This paper considers financial, operational, solvency, and performance ratios in order to detect when there were balance sheets’ variations related to the 1994 Mexican currency crisis. Quarterly data for 88 non-financial Mexican companies that survived the crisis are used, and tests for...

The main objective of this paper is to present a reading of The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin in the context of the financial crisis, in particular, reflect from a few fragments of Benjamin's work appear to lie around a Black Swan. The recovery of the fragments of The Arcades seems...

The recent as well as precedent market crashes has increased a number of already existing biases when estimating a forward looking cost of capital for company’s stakeholders. With cost of capital being essential in corporate valuation and decision making the following paper analyzes the...

Mutual funds are significant blockholders in many corporations. Concerns that funds vote in a pro-management manner to garner lucrative pensions contracts led the SEC to mandate the disclosure of proxy votes. We present a model of mutual fund voting in the presence of potential business ties. We...

Financialization is a major trend in Western economies. This paper shows, on the one hand, how it changes the management criteria and, on the other hand, the limits to financialization in the property sector. Between 1992 and 2004, about 15% of Swiss pension funds’ wealth was invested in...

Dividend policy is an important issue of corporate finance and the present study examines the effect of market imperfections such as asymmetric information, agency costs and transaction cost of issuing external on corporate dividend policy for 138 firms selected from all major manufacturing...

In a diffusion model of risk, we focus on the initial capital needed to make the probability of ruin within finite time equal to a prescribed value. It is defined as a solution of a nonlinear equation. The endeavor to write down and to investigate analytically this solution as a function of the...

This paper presents a welfare analysis of several capital insurance programs in a rational expectation equilibrium setting. We first explicitly characterize the equilibrium of each capital insurance program. Then, we demonstrate that a capital insurance program based on aggregate loss is better...