In the Rothschild and Stiglitz model, assuming differences in risk aversions may lead to unusual equilibrium configurations like multiple equilibria, equilibrium positive profits, or random contracts. We characterize the various types of equilibria and give results on the determinants of the...

For carbon-intensive, internationally-traded industrial goods, a unilateral increase in the domestic CO2 price may result in the reduction of the domestic production but an increase of imports. In such sectors as electricity, cement or steel, the trade flows result more from short-term regional...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

In this article we analyse the effects of different regulatory schemes (price cap and profit sharing) on a firm’s investment of endogenous size. Using a real option approach in continuous time, we show that profit sharing does not affect a firm’s start-up decision relative to a pure price...

Banks should evaluate whether a borrower is likely to default. I apply several techniques in the extensive mathematical literature of stochastic optimal control/dynamic programming to derive an optimal debt in an environment where there are risks on both the asset and liabilities sides. The...

The paper studies the interaction between cyclical uncertainty and investment in a stochastic real option framework where demand shifts stochastically between three different states, each with different rates of drift and volatility. In our setting the shifts are governed by a three-state Markov...

In U.S. data 1981–2012, unsecured firm credit moves procyclically and tends to lead GDP, while secured firm credit is acyclical; similarly, shocks to unsecured firm credit explain a far larger fraction of output fluctuations than shocks to secured credit. In this paper we develop a tractable...

We investigate how labor and investment demand at the firm level (gross as well as net and replacement investment separately) differs in French, German and U.S. manufacturing, and has changed since the 1974–75 crisis. We use three consistent panel data samples of large firms for 1970–79, and...