For many centuries, forms of Islamic charity such as zakat (i.e. "obligatory" alms) and waqf (i.e. endowment or philanthropic foundation) have proven to be essential tools for economic and human development. Both of these schemes aim to reduce income inequality and to encourage productive...

This paper examines qualitative properties of efficient insurance contracts in the presence of background risk. In order to get results for all strictly risk-averse expected utility maximizers, the concept of “stochastic increasingness” is used. Different assumptions on the stochastic...

We consider an exchange economy under incomplete financial markets with purely financial securities and finitely many agents. When portfolios are not constrained Cass [4], Duffie [7] and Florenzano–Gourdel [12] proved that arbitrage-free security prices fully characterize equilibrium security...

This paper studies the problem of optimal investment with CRRA (constant, relative risk aversion) preferences, subject to dynamic risk constraints on trading strategies. The market model considered is continuous in time and incomplete; furthermore, financial assets are modeled by Itô processes....

We explore which financial constraints matter the most in the choice of becoming an entrepreneur. We consider a randomly assigned welfare program in rural Mexico and show that cash transfers signi cantly increase entry into entrepreneurship. We then exploit the cross-household variation in the...

Is the impact of financial development on international trade heterogeneous – being positive, negative or null – across manufacturing sectors? And is it dependent on the level of sectoral requirement on external finance for capital need? To examine these questions this article uses a panel...

This article theoretically and empirically tests the link between financial constraints and the extensive (proportion of exporters) and intensive (volume of exports) margins of international trade. The article's main contribution is its macroeconomic analysis of this relationship, which is...

Les critiques de la finance contemporaine portent en grande partie sur le comportement de nouveaux acteurs financiers comme les hedge funds, les fonds de private equity et les fonds souverains. Jean-Hervé Lorenzi et Philippe Trainar nous aident ici à discerner les fantasmes de la réalité en...