Affacturage | EPFL Graph Search

L'affacturage (factoring en anglais) est une technique de financement et de recouvrement de créances mise en œuvre par les entreprises et consistant à obtenir un financement anticipé et à sous-traiter cette gestion à un établissement de crédit spécialisé : l'affactureur ou, en anglais, le factor. Longtemps considéré comme le dernier recours de sociétés en difficultés financières, l'affacturage est aujourd'hui un outil souple au service des entreprises. C'est un procédé à la fois d'externalisation de tâches administratives, d'assurance contre les impayés et de financement à court terme. L'affacturage ne peut pas gérer les créances sur les particuliers : il ne concerne que le commerce entre entreprises (business to business ou B2B en anglais). Fonctionnement vignette|upright=1.5|Mécanisme de l'affacturage.|alt= L'affacturage est une opération ou technique de gestion financière : un établissement de crédit spécialisé (l'affactureur ou, en anglais, factor) ou une société de

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

Is the US outperforming Europe in university technology licensing? A new perspective on the European Paradox

Annamaria Conti, Patrick Gaulé

Europe is perceived to be lagging behind the US in converting its academic results into economic outcomes. Using new survey data on European and US technology transfer offices (TTOs), we find that differences in academic research, TTO staff and experience explain to a great extent the gap between the US and Europe in terms of the number of license agreements concluded. However, these factors account for only part of the difference in license income. We relate the difference in licensing income to differences in the organization and staffing of TTOs. Our analysis reveals that US TTOs do not attach more importance to generating revenue as an objective than their European counterparts. However, they employ more staff with experience in industry which explains some of the remaining differential in license income performance. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

2011

On the Geometry of the Term Structure of Interest Rates

Damir Filipovic

We present recently developed geometric methods for the analysis of finite dimensional term structure models of the interest rates. This includes an extension of the Frobenius theorem for Fr´echet spaces in particular. This approach puts new light on many of the classical models, such as the Hull-White extended Vasicek and Cox-Ingersoll-Ross short rate models. The notion of a finite dimensional realization (FDR) is central for this analysis:we motivate it, classify all generic FDRs and provide some new results for the corresponding factor processes, such as hypoellipticity of its generators and the existence of smooth densities. Furthermore we include finite dimensional external factors, thus admitting a stochastic volatility structure

2004

Essays in Bank Financing

Yalda Sigrist

EPFL2017