[eng] This paper reviews some early evidence on the performance and possible developments of European capital markets, after few months of EMU. On almost all counts monetary unification has changed the European financial landscape already drastically or has the potential to do so in the future....

[fre] Quelques mois après la création de l’UME, cet article examine les premiers indices permettant de jauger les performances et de pressentir l’évolution future des marchés de capitaux en Europe. Dans presque tous les domaines, l’UME a d’ores et déjà bouleversé le paysage...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <p>Securitization is a process that transforms some traditional non-traded banking assets into marketable securities. To evaluate this process, this paper surveys theories of the intertemporal allocation of funds through demand deposits and anonymous markets, first...</p>

The paper introduces the problem of unawareness into principal--agent theory and discusses optimal incentive contracts when the agent may be unaware of her action space. Depending on the agent's default behaviour, it can be optimal for the principal to propose an incomplete contract (that keeps...

In a democracy, a political majority can influence both the corporate governance structure and the return to human and financial capital. We argue that when financial wealth is sufficiently concentrated, there is political support for high labor rents and a strong governance role for banks or...

We present a theory in which the corporate governance structure in a country is determined by a political majority and show how this decision is related to the distribution of financial wealth. The main argument is that labor claims are exposed to undiversifiable risk, so voters with small...

This article integrates the problem of designing corporate bankruptcy rules into a theory of optimal debt structure. We show that, in an optimal contracting framework with imperfect renegotiation, having multiple creditors increases a firm's debt capacity while increasing its incentives to...

The paper introduces the problem of unawareness into principal--agent theory and discusses optimal incentive contracts when the agent may be unaware of her action space. Depending on the agent's default behaviour, it can be optimal for the principal to propose an incomplete contract (that keeps...