Housing tenure decision combines financial, economic and socio-psychological factors. This paper considers the global premium associated to homeownership. On the other hand, homeownership is associated to private benefits of being an owner. On the other hand, overinvestment in housing is harmful...

In most developed countries, regulators have imposed loan-size ceilings to subsidized microfinance institutions (MFIs). Entrepreneurs holding above-ceiling projects then need to secure partial funding by a bank before applying for microcredit. In turn, the MFI is tempted to free ride on bank...

In microcredit institutions, credit officers play a prominent role in loan granting decisions. Indeed, they collect field data, meet with the applicants, and provide personal recommendations to the credit committee that takes the final decisions (loan approval/denial, and loan size). This paper...

This paper studies the relationship between a microfinance institution (MFI) and its credit officers when the latter are biased against a subgroup of the clientele. Using survey data from Uganda, we provide evidence that credit officers are more biased against disabled borrowers than other...

The performances of factor investing rely heavily on short sales, not only for building the initial long-short strategy, but also for regularly rebalancing the positions. Since short selling is subject to both legal restrictions and substantial costs, this paper examines how severely...

Does financial globalization lead to contagion? We scrutinize linkages between international stock markets in a long historical perspective (1880-2014). Our results highlight that without globalization, contagion cannot exist. However, if cross-market correlations are very high, globalization...

This paper offers a new representation of discrimination on the job market based on the most recent findings in the socio-psychological academic literature about human behavior. Put it simply, it is assumed that the agents prefer working with people like themselves. This affinity principle is...

Recent controversies testify that the tax shield valuation remains a hot topic in the financial literature. Basically, two methods have been proposed to incorporate the tax benefit of debt in the present value computation: The adjusted present value (APV), and the classical weighted average cost...

This paper is the first to draw a global picture of worldwide microfinance equity by taking full advantage of daily quoted prices. We revisit previous findings showing that investors should consider microfinance as a self-standing sector. Our results are threefold. First, microfinance has become...

The microfinance movement reached developed countries in the late 1980s and it is still a niche market. This chapter starts with a brief history of microfinance in the North. Next, it develops a supply-side perspective and pays special attention to the features of developed countries that shape...