INCAS

Firm-level Outcomes from a Comparative Perspective Abstract This conceptual paper is concerned with the outcomes of the financialization of non-financial firms, and particularly with the role of institutions in shaping these outcomes. It centers on the question of whether the institutional setting of economies can be expected to moderate the effects of financialization on companies’ employment practices, investment decisions, R&D activities, and value chain. To approach this question, I first sketch out the concept of financialization and its meaning when considering its firm-level implications. I then draw on the literature on comparative institutional theory to identify two opposite institutional settings,...

Abstract Most existing literature examining the links between firm heterogeneity and entry into exporting assumes that firms are risk neutral. In this study, we relax this strict assumption that firms are risk neutral and introduce different attitudes of firms toward risk as an additional source of firm heterogeneity. In particular, we examine how risk attitude changes the effect of uncertainty on the decision of a firm to export considering the different types of uncertainty faced by the firm, namely, firm-specific and macroeconomic. Our analysis yields two interesting findings. First, firm-specific uncertainty discourages risk-averse firms from participating in foreign markets more...

Abstract In this article we assert that the joint transformation of public perception about households’ over-indebtedness and financial deregulation had important implication on the government decision to reform the overall consumer credit between 2005 and 2010. On the one hand, the development of collective actions by groups of lawyers to defend borrowers from moneylenders’ abusive practices represents a source of change in the public opinion about over-indebted individuals in a context of long economic stagnation. A systematic press articles’ analysis from 1977 to 2006 shows that the rising number of these collective actions since the early 1990s may have gradually...

Abstract Contrary to what law and finance theory would predict, the Paris Bourse was highly liquid at the turn of the 20th century: the traded volumes amounted to four times the French GDP. This magnitude was mainly due to forward trading. The Bourse had developed as a forward market, despite a ban on forward transactions. The official stockbrokers played a key role in legitimizing and legalizing these operations, previously equated with gambling. The 1885 legalizing act initiated a new field of law and made possible further regulatory changes that paved the way for the heyday of the Paris Bourse. Authors...

Abstract Distinctive political compromises prevailed and explained various brands of capitalism observed from WWII to the early 1990s. Is this key finding by régulation research been still valid given the wide diffusion of common structural changes since the 2000s: slow productivity in the industrialized world, overwhelming impact of finance, rise of inequalities within many Nation-States in response to deregulation, social and political polarization, open conflict between capitalism and democracy, the trading place between mature and emerging economies? These stylized facts challenge most economic theories but they can be explained by an institutionalist and historical approach that also helps in redesigning...

 Abstract We study the causes and the consequences of two regulatory changes affecting the competition between the transparent Parquet and the OTC-like Coulisse markets in Paris at the turn of the 20th century. First, we provide evidence supporting the interest group theory to explain regulatory changes. By using these changes as natural experiments, we show then that competition widens bid-ask spreads while monopoly makes them narrower. These results are in line with recent literature questioning the effects of “dark” competition: a transparent monopoly could be more effective than competition if the latter involves opaque markets. Authors Pierre-Cyrille Hautcœur (EHESS &...

Abstract The purpose of this study is to account for the increase in non-regular workers, namely, part-time and dispatched workers, in the Japanese economy from the early 2000s. Our contribution is that we use a firm-level panel dataset extracted from an administrative survey and distinguish between the short-run and long-run determinants of non-regular labor demand. Using the estimated parameters of the labor demand function, we decompose the rate of increase in the macroeconomic non-regular worker ratio into determinant factor contributions. Our major results can be summarized as follows. First, the firm-level determinants of the demand for part-time and dispatched workers...