Actionnaire | EPFL Graph Search

L'actionnaire est un investisseur en capital et un type particulier d'associé. Il est propriétaire (ou titulaire) d'une valeur mobilière, l'action, qui lui ouvre des prérogatives dans le fonctionnement d'une société commerciale, par exemple société anonyme, société par actions simplifiée, société en commandite par actions. Ces prérogatives sont de trois ordres. Elles sont politiques (droit de vote en assemblée générale, droit à l'information), pécuniaires (droit aux dividendes et droit au reliquat (boni) en cas de liquidation) et patrimoniales (droit de céder ou de nantir ses actions). Le statut de l'actionnaire vis-à-vis de la société s'apparente parfois davantage à celui d'un investisseur (par l'apport de ses capitaux) qu'à celui d'un propriétaire. À ce titre, il détient des actions de cette société dont chacune représente une fraction de son capital. Il est donc copropriétaire — avec d'autres actionnaires — de la totalité de ce capital. Sa prise de risque financier est rémunérée p

Essays in Corporate Finance

Thomas Antonius Geelen

In this thesis I study how firms choose their optimal debt maturity. The recent financial crisis illustrated why debt maturity is an important determinant of firmsâ capital structure and it also renewed economistsâ interest in this topic, see for example Brunnermeier and Oehmke (2013), He and Milbradt (2016), Ju and Ou-Yang (2006), Crouzet (2016), and Huang et al. (2017). This thesis exists of two chapters. In the first chapter, titled âInformation Dynamics and Debt Maturityâ, I develop a dynamic model of financing decisions and optimal debt maturity choice in which creditors face adverse selection and learn about the firmâs quality from news. In equilibrium, shareholders may choose to postpone debt issuance to reduce adverse selection and improve the pricing of newly issued debt. Over time, the benefits of learning decrease and zero-leverage firms eventually decide to issue debt. Because shorter maturity debt is less sensitive to information, younger firms issue shorter maturity debt to alleviate adverse selection while mature firms issue longer maturity debt, leading to a life-cycle theory of debt maturity. In the second chapter, titled âDebt Maturity and Lumpy Debtâ, I develop a dynamic capital structure model in which shareholders determine a firmâs leverage ratio, debt maturity, and default strategy. In my model, the firmâs debt matures all at once. Therefore, after repaying the principal shareholders own all the firmâs cash flows and can pick a new capital structure. The possibility to alter the capital structure at maturity gives shareholders the incentive to issue finite maturity debt and allows me to study firmsâ joint choice of leverage and debt maturity. I also extend my model by allowing for time-varying capital supply to study time-variation in firmsâ joint choice of leverage and debt maturity.

EPFL2018

Essays in Bank Financing

Yalda Sigrist

This thesis examines the optimal mode of financing for banks and financial institutions. The first chapter, which is a joint work with Prof. Jean-Charles Rochet, investigates how Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs) should be financed. The main specificity of such firms is that their failure imposes negative externalities on the financial system and, more broadly, on the whole economy. Since their shareholders do not internalize these externalities, they tend to provide less capital than what would be socially optimal, generating too many failures. In jurisdictions where they receive tax exemptions, CoCo bonds are a simple means of increasing the resilience of SIFIs while providing large tax benefits to banks' shareholders. However, we show that when tax revenues are properly accounted for, these CoCo bonds are detrimental to social welfare. The second chapter provides a formal model of a bail-in plan, a pre-defined contract that results in self-recapitalization of a financial institution when it is in distress and has no access to equity financing. Bail-ins have the potential to eliminate inefficient bank liquidations and ease financing constraints in bad times. Using a theoretical model of a bail-in contract where banks face time varying financing frictions, taxation and liquidation costs, I show that banks' capital structure decisions and optimal financing and pay-out policies are largely affected by the design of the contingent capital (specifically the conversion ratio). However independent of its design, for an optimal level of debt, bail-in contracts always decrease shareholders incentives to build up liquid buffers and to recapitalize in good times but also eliminate any risk-taking incentives. The third chapter presents a model of bank optimal maturity structure when banks face systemic risk through correlated investments. Banks can privately affect the probability of success of their projects. Risky short-term debt can act as a disciplinary device if it is not rolled over when an adverse interim-date signal on the quality of banks' assets is received. The optimal maturity structure is the result of the trade-off between the disciplinary benefits of short-term debt and the costs of inefficient early liquidations. I show that bank asset commonality affects this trade-off since it reduces the costs of exerting effort through positive information synergies and increases the inefficiency of early liquidations through negative fire-sale externalities. In particular, there is a more important role for the disciplinary effects of short-term debt in high correlation, high fire-sale externalities and low information synergies environments.

EPFL2017

Empirical Evidence on the Effectiveness of Shareholder Democracy

Maxime Thibault B Couvert

This thesis is composed of two essays that study the effectiveness of shareholder democracy. In the first essay, I analyze the firm value implications of shareholder-initiated proposals. I show that managerial resistance precludes half of shareholder-initiated proposals from reaching the ballot stage. I construct a novel dataset of excluded and withdrawn proposals from the Securities and Exchange Commission's responses to managers' exclusion requests. An examination of announcement returns to the exclusion and withdrawal decisions reveals that non-voted proposals have a value-destroying nature. Special interest investors pursuing self-serving agendas and retail investors advocating for one-size-fits-all reforms explain the harmful character of non-voted proposals. I correct for the selection bias induced by managerial resistance and show that focusing only on voted proposals overstates the shareholder proposals-driven value creation. In the second essay, I study the impact of mutuals funds' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) preferences on portfolio firms. I construct measures of mutual funds' ESG preferences from their proxy voting guidelines in which mutual funds announce how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these voting policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting policies are a major predictor of funds' voting behavior. Exploiting staggered changes in funds' voting policies as an instrument, I show that investee companies adopt their mutual fund shareholders' preferred governance provisions. This adoption is the result of mutual fund shareholders' active voting. Announced voting policies also stimulate strategic proposal submissions by non-mutual fund shareholders.

EPFL2021

Essays in Bank Financing

Yalda Sigrist

EPFL2017