Taux d'intérêt | EPFL Graph Search

Le taux d'intérêt d'un prêt ou d'un emprunt fixe la rémunération du capital prêté (exprimée en pourcentage du montant prêté) versée par l'emprunteur au prêteur. Le taux et les modalités de versement de cette rémunération sont fixés lors de la conclusion du contrat de prêt. Ce pourcentage tient compte de la durée du prêt, de la nature des risques encourus et des garanties offertes par le prêteur. Les taux d'intérêt sont utilisés dans de multiples domaines, des instruments financiers jusqu'aux produits d'épargne (compte d'épargne), en passant par les obligations. Il est l'un des principaux canaux de transmission de la politique monétaire. Définition Le taux d'intérêt dit nominal correspond au taux tel qu'établi au moment de la conclusion du prêt. Le taux d'intérêt dit réel mesure la charge d'intérêt qui s'applique en réalité au prêt concerné compte tenu de l'évolution des prix. Le taux d'intérêt peut être convenu pour une valeur fixe — constante sur toute la durée du prêt

IT Investment and its impacts

Shameem Hasan

This thesis empirically explored the impacts of IT investment on three different scenarios under the common denominator / threads of IT investments. It comprises three different essays on the impacts of IT investments. IT investments and its impact on many aspects of the firms are well known - like performance / productivity, output, market value etc. But I looked into areas that were not explored before and examined events that didnât take place after the advent and integration of Information Technology â like the past financial crisis. The main contribution of my dissertation is to examine how IT investments helps in the debt market, how it helps firms fare comparatively better during crisis period and how CEO characteristics influence the well-established existing link between IT investment and Innovation intensity. The first essay examines the effect of IT investment on the cost of bank loan for firms. We argue that IT affects the decision of banks through three mechanisms: wealth effect, risk effect, and information effect. First, IT investment serves as a signal for higher future revenue and lower operational costs, thus greater future cash flows. Second, on one hand, IT may be able to reduce the risk of being locked out to competition or adverse situations; on the other hand, IT investment itself can bring risk to business. Last, the use of IT can lead to better information quality and thus reduce the information asymmetry between firms and banks. Using a sample of 270 firms between the year of 1991 and 2006, we find that IT investment is associated with lower interest rate from banks. More important, we find the strength of this relationship is contingent upon the role of IT in the industry and time period. In my second essay, the goal was to investigate whether IT investment contributed to better or worse performance during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. We took the available data for U.S. public companies (the final sample comprises 570 companies) and traced IT investments made in the years prior to the crisis period, we checked the impact of IT investments on the annual stock returns and relative changes in return (as well as for book values). After controlling for relevant risk and other independent variables during the 2007-2009 periods, we found evidence that indicates that although most of the firms suffered during the crisis period, expenditure in IT was significantly associated with relatively better performance for sample firms during the crisis period. The third essay brings in the role of CEO to examine whether CEOâs characteristics affects the already established link between IT investments and Innovation activities. We constructed data from multiple sources; we also developed empirical model to test our hypothesis and ran a series of regression tests. We find that CEOâs managerial ability and risk-taking incentive (determined by compensation scheme) are complements for IT investment. Thus for CEOs with lower ability and/or lower risk-taking incentive, firms can still achieve higher innovation efficiency by increasing expenditure in IT. On the other hand, CEOâs ownership of the firm substitutes the link. CEO with larger ownership enhances firmâs innovation efficiency by due diligence, but not necessarily through the channel of IT investment. In together, this paper shows that CEO is an important and significant factor in the conversion of IT investment to innovation efficiency.

EPFL2018

Essays in Financial Economics

Christoph Helmut Peter Herpfer

This thesis contains four chapters, each of which utilizes new or unusual data sources to analyze a different area of financial economics. In the first chapter, I construct a novel dataset linking individual bankers to large borrowers in the U.S. syndicated loan market to analyze the impact of bankers on bank lending. I find that time invariant banker fixed effects have at least as much explanatory power as bank fixed effects across key loan outcome variables. One channel through which bankers impact lending is through personal relationships with borrowers. I address the endogenous nature of relationship formation by exploiting shocks to relationships from the departure of bankers and find that stronger personal relationships are associated with significantly lower interest rates charged to clients. Reduced interest rates of relationship loans reflect superior information of bankers, rather than nepotism. Loans issued by bankers that have stronger personal relationships with borrowers are associated with fewer bankruptcies and no more beneficial terms upon renegotiation. The second chapter, which is joint work with Stefano Colonnello, exploits a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on diversity of citizenship in legal disputes to estimate the contribution of the court system to firm value. In an event study, we find that an increase in state court quality from bottom to top tercile is associated with an average increase in equity value of 0.45%, or about $8.7 million on the event day. This effect appears to be driven by courts¿ attitude towards businesses more than by their competency and is more pronounced for firms in industries with high litigation risk. We also test whether firms benefit from the ability to steer lawsuits into friendly courts, so called forum shopping. We provide evidence that a reduction in firms¿ ability to forum shop decreases firm value, whereas a reduction in plaintiffs¿ ability to forum shop increases firm value. We further document that the ruling had significant real effects. Firms which previously stayed out of regions with potentially problematic courts subsequently increased their operations in those regions. The third chapter is coauthored with Matthias Effing, Rüdiger Fahlenbrach, and Philipp Krüger and examines the impact of a sudden home currency appreciation on the valuation and behavior of corporations in a developed economy. The Swiss National Bank surprisingly repealed the minimum exchange rate of 1.2 Swiss francs per Euro on January 15, 2015. On that day the franc appreciated by 15% and the main stock market index dropped by 8.7%. The impact was largest for export oriented firms with high domestic costs. These firms experienced 5% lower announcement returns, subsequently faced economically sizeable reductions in sales and profitability, and responded by reducing investment by 8.1% while only slightly reducing employment. In the fourth chapter, which is joint work with Cornelius Schmidt and Aksel Mjøs, we exploit exogenous shocks to the distance between corporate borrowers and banks to analyze the role of distance in commercial bank lending. We find that a reduction in travel time due to improved infrastructure increases the likelihood of initiating a new borrowing relationship, evidence that closer distance creates a surplus from lower transaction costs. In existing lending relationships, however, banks capture a fraction of this surplus by increasing interest rates.

EPFL2017

A Revisitation of Low-Rate Bounds on the Reliability Function of Discrete Memoryless Channels for List Decoding

Marco Bondaschi

We revise the proof of low-rate upper bounds on the reliability function of discrete memoryless channels for ordinary and list-decoding schemes, in particular Berlekamp and Blinovsky's zero-rate bound, as well as Blahut's bound for low rates. The available proofs of the zero-rate bound devised by Berlekamp and Blinovsky are somehow complicated in that they contain in one form or another some "non-standard" procedures or computations. Here we follow Blinovsky's idea of using a Ramsey-theoretic result by Komlos, and we complement it with some missing steps to present a proof which is rigorous and easier to inspect. Furthermore, we show how these techniques can be used to fix an error that invalidated the proof of Blahut's low-rate bound, which is here presented in an extended form for list decoding and for general channels.

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022