This paper surveys research on corporate governance, with special attention to the importance of legal protection of investors and of ownership concentration in corporate governance systems around the world.

A Survey of Corporate Governance

This article surveys research on corporate governance, with special attention to the importance of legal protection of investors and of ownership concentration in corporate governance systems around the world. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE DEALS WITH the ways in which suppliers of finance to corporations assure themselves of getting a return on their investment. How do the suppliers of finance get managers to return some of the profits to them? How do they make sure that managers do not steal the capital they supply or invest it in bad projects? How do suppliers of finance control managers? At first glance, it is not entirely obvious why the suppliers of capital get anything back. After all, they part with their money, and have little to contribute to the enterprise afterward. The professional managers or entrepreneurs who run the firms might as well abscond with the money. Although they sometimes do, usually they do not. Most advanced market economies have solved the problem of corporate governance at least reasonably well, in that they have assured the flows of enormous amounts of capital to firms, and actual repatriation of profits to the providers of finance. But this does not imply that they have solved the corporate governance problem perfectly, or that the corporate governance mechanisms cannot be improved. In fact, the subject of corporate governance is of enormous practical impor

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Wireless Communications

A Course in Game Theory presents the main ideas of game theory at a level suitable for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, emphasizing the theory's foundations and interpretations of its basic concepts. The authors provide precise definitions and full proofs of results, sacrificing generalities and limiting the scope of the material in order to do so. The text is organized in four parts: strategic games, extensive games with perfect information, extensive games with imperfect information, and coalitional games. It includes over 100 exercises.

A Course in Game Theory

Does finance affect economic growth? A number of studies have identified a positive correlation between the level of development of a country's financial sector and the rate of growth of its per capita income. As has been noted elsewhere, the observed correlation does not necessarily imply a causal relationship. This paper examines whether financial development facilitates economic growth by scrutinizing one rationale for such a relationship; that financial development reduces the costs of external finance to firms. Specifically, we ask whether industrial sectors that are relatively more in need of external finance develop disproportionately faster in countries with more developed financial markets. We find this to be true in a large sample of countries over the 1980s. We show this result is unlikely to be driven by omitted variables, outliers, or reverse causality.

/pdf/financial-dependence-and-growth-2meheeba1z.pdf

Financial Dependence and Growth

Systemic risk refers to the propagation of a bank's economic distress to other economic agents linked to that bank through financial transactions. Banking authorities often prevent systemic risk through an implicit insurance of interbank claims, or by reducing interbank transactions and centralizing banks' liquidity management. This paper investigates whether the flexibility afforded by decentralized bank interactions can be preserved while protecting the central banks from the necessity of conducting undesired rescue operations. It develops a model in which decentralized interbank lending is motivated by peer monitoring. In this context, the paper derives the optimal prudential rules, and, in particular, looks at the impact of interbank monitoring on the solvency and liquidity ratios of borrowing and lending banks. Last, it provides conditions under which a Too Big to Fail policy is or is not justified and studies the possibility of propagation of a bank's liquidity shock throughout the financial system.

Interbank Lending and Systemic Risk

The recent crisis has brought to the fore the cyclical properties of banking regulation. Countercyclical buffers and enhanced capital requirements meant to stabilize banks' balance sheets across the cycle are not costless, and a delicate balance needs to be reached between providing incentives to generate value and discouraging excessive risk-taking.

The paper develops a model in which, in contrast with Modigliani-Miller, outside equity and capital requirements matter. It analyses banking regulation in the presence of macroeconomic shocks and studies the desirability of self-insurance mechanisms such as countercyclical capital buffers or dynamic provisioning, as well as "macro-hedges" such as CoCos and capital insurance.

Jean Tirole

Papers

Interbank Lending and Systemic Risk

Macroeconomic Shocks and Banking Regulation

Theorie de l'organisation industrielle

Modeling Aggregate Liquidity

La teoría de la organización industrial