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

The paper builds a tractable model of a patent pool, an agreement among patent owners to license a set of their patents to one another or to third parties. It first provides a necessary and suncient condition for a patent pool to enhance welfare. It shows that requiring pool members to be able to independently license patents matters if and only if the pool is otherwise welfare reducing, a property that allows the antitrust authorities to use this requirement to screen out unattractive pools. The paper then undertakes a number of extensions. It evaluates the external test' according to which patents with substitutes should not be included in a pool; analyzes the welfare implications of the reduction in the members' incentives to invent around or challenge the validity of each other's patents; looks at the rationale for the (common) provision of automatic assignment of future related patents to the pool; and, last, studies the intellectual property owners' incentives to form a pool or to cross-license when they themselves are users of the patents in the pool. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Efficient Patent Pools

La France se distingue par la mixite de son systeme
d’assurance-maladie. Deux types d’operateurs
concourent a la couverture des memes soins  :
la Securite sociale et les organismes complementaires.
Une telle organisation entraine des couts de gestion eleves
et favorise la hausse des prix des soins. La regulation
actuelle des complementaires encourage aussi la selection
des risques, ce qui produit des inegalites dans l’acces
a l’assurance et aux soins.

/pdf/refonder-l-assurance-maladie-4thpb52thq.pdf

Refonder l'assurance-maladie

It is generally agreed that an intelligent interconnection policy is the key to an harmonious development of competition in the telecommunications industry. The paper first warns against some hazards associated with the dominant regulatory paradigms. By treating retail and wholesale prices asymmetrically, these paradigms may distort the structure of relative prices. They may further provide incumbents with incentives to exclude and to cross-subsidize. These perverse incentives generate a legitimate suspicion and lead regulators or courts to substitute their judgment fot the operators' business judgment. Second, the paper explains the intellectual underpinnings of an alternative mode of regulation, which consists in putting the operator's retail and wholesale activities into a single basket and thus in subjecting the firm to a global price cap. It provides an extensive discussion of the costs and benefits of global price caps, and shows that they do not distort the structure of retail and wholesale prices. Last, global price caps eliminate or substantially reduce the incentives for exclusionary behaviors and cross-subsidies, and thus allow a light-handed regulation.

/pdf/global-price-caps-and-the-regulation-of-access-1hhkjv4nvg.pdf

Global Price Caps and the Regulation of Access

Cet article passe en revue quelques apports des reflexions recentes de la theorie des incitations au choix entre differentes formes d’appels d’offre et de contrats de concession. Il examine les determinants d’un choix judicieux du partage du risque entre autorites concedante et concessionnaire, et etudie les dangers auxquels font face les relations de long terme ainsi que l’opportunite de politiques d’equilibre budgetaire et de privatisation. Il conclut par une application de la theorie a un debat recent sur les concessions autoroutieres.

Jean Tirole

Papers

Efficient Patent Pools

Refonder l'assurance-maladie

Global Price Caps and the Regulation of Access

Concessions, concurrence et incitations

On the efficiency of fixed price equilibrium