Bien (économie) | EPFL Graph Search

vignette|Diada de Sant Jordi en 2007. Défilés pour la vente de Livres. Un bien est une chose utilisable pour combler un besoin fondamental ou un désir. Entendu le plus souvent comme étant une chose concrète et physiquement tangible, il se différencie du service qui par opposition est dit « intangible ». Cependant, en microéconomie, la notion de bien peut recouvrir les deux notions de bien et de service. Un bien peut faire l'objet d'un usage ou d'une appropriation par un individu ou une collectivité. Les modalités de cet usage ou de cette appropriation sont régies par le droit. La notion de Bien dans son acception économique Une première différenciation entre les biens que nous venons d'évoquer concerne la démarche économique qui cherche à les analyser. Les biens en comptabilité Généralités Historiquement, c'est la comptabilité qui développe un modèle (très rudimentaire à l'origine) pour l'enregistrement des biens matériels que les hommes possèdent. L

Essays in Banking and Financial Regulation

Susanne Johanna Petronella Léonie Vissers

This thesis examines how banks choose their optimal capital structure and cash reserves in the presence of regulatory measures. The first chapter, titled Bank Capital Structure and Tail Risk, presents a bank capital structure model in which bank assets are subject to both diffusion and tail risk. Of these two types of risk, tail risk causes uninsured deposits to be risky, as the bank's asset value can unexpectedly fall below the value of deposits in case of default. The model shows that tail risk, rather than diffusion risk, is the main driver of the risk on deposits when the bank is unregulated and of the endogenous deposit insurance premium when the bank is regulated. Keeping total volatility constant, the model shows that a high tail risk component leads to higher credit spreads, default risk, and magnitude of bank losses in default than a high diffusion risk component.The second chapter, titled Bank Regulation and Market Discipline in the Presence of Risk-Taking Incentives, presents a bank capital structure model in which equity holders can increase asset risk once debt is in place. I study the effects of capital requirements and subsidized deposit insurance on the bank's privately optimal funding and operational risk level. The model predicts that there are synergetic effects of regulation and market discipline. When the regulator sets the capital charge and deposit insurance premium payments sufficiently high for a risky portfolio, the bank commits to the low-risk asset portfolio by setting a lower leverage ratio and substituting market debt for deposits. This market discipline effect disappears when the regulatory costs become too high. In the third chapter that is titled Dividend Restrictions and Asymmetric Information, we develop a dynamic model of a bank whose management has superior information about the impact of a pending shock to the bank's cash holdings and can signal the bank's type through its dividend policy. Banks that will be adversely affected by the shock have incentives to pool with unaffected banks to increase their market value. To avoid being mimicked, the unaffected banks can credibly signal via a more aggressive payout strategy. Dividend payout restrictions have the potential to prevent a separating equilibrium from forming. This leads to the bad type adopting a more aggressive payout policy with a higher risk of default but mitigates the distortion of the good type's policy. We identify a number of scenarios where this trade-off presents an opportunity for regulatory intervention and some where it does not.

EPFL2021

Designing Coalition-Proof Reverse Auctions Over Continuous Goods

Orcun Karaca

This paper investigates reverse auctions that involve continuous values of different types of goods, general nonconvex constraints, and second stage costs. We seek to design the payment rules and conditions under which coalitions of participants cannot influence the auction outcome in order to obtain higher collective utility. Under the incentive compatible Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism, we show that coalition-proof outcomes are achieved if the submitted bids are convex and the constraint sets are of a polymatroid-type. These conditions, however, do not capture the complexity of the general class of reverse auctions under consideration. By relaxing the property of incentive compatibility, we investigate further payment rules that are coalition-proof without any extra conditions on the submitted bids and the constraint sets. Our results are verified with several case studies based on electricity market data.

2019

Operational Decisions and Supply Chain Dynamics

Olov Isaksson

While traditional research in operations management has focused on mathematical models for improving the flow of physical goods and information, this dissertation takes a quantitative empirical approach. With three distinct research projects it revisits central topics in the field and explores how operational decisions affect the performance of the firm and its trading partners. Chapter 2 examines the financial consequences that inventory leanness has on firm performance. We conduct an econometric analysis using 4,324 publicly traded U.S. manufacturing companies for the period 1980-2008. Using an instrumental variable fixed effects estimator we find a nonlinear relationship between inventory leanness and financial performance. However, we note that the maximum point of this inverted U-shaped relationship often lies at the extreme end of the investigated sample—suggesting a decreasing return from leanness rather than an optimal level. We show that the strength of this relationship is highly dependent on both industry and inventory type (raw materials, work in process and finished goods). The main novelty and direct implication of our findings is that most firms still have much potential to increase profitability by becoming leaner and they are unlikely to cross a threshold where profitability decreases with increased leanness. We display how much the average firm could gain by becoming leaner and show how this sensitivity changes by inventory component and industry. Finally, we highlight several new econometric aspects that we believe must be addressed when empirically investigating the inventory-performance link. The bullwhip effect is said to occur when demand variability is amplified from a downstream site (buyer) to an upstream site (supplier) in the supply chain. Chapter 3 contributes to the literature that empirically investigates the bullwhip effect by providing new evidence regarding its prevalence and magnitude. In contrast to previous work, we use a two-echelon approach, which allows us to observe varia- tions at both the upstream and the downstream sites. By drawing on a financial accounting standard regarding information disclosure about major customers, we are able to link 5,494 buyers-supplier dyads between 1976 and 2009. We merge this information with quarterly financial accounting data to form a sample of 14,933 buyer-supplier dyad observations. We correct for sample selection bias using propensity score matching and estimate the average bullwhip effect in our sample to 1.90 (i.e. 90% demand variability amplification between echelons). A significant bullwhip effect is found across industries (mining, manufacturing, wholesale and retail) and is supported by several robustness checks. We investigate and discuss how these results can be generalized beyond our sample. Chapter 4 explores knowledge spillovers in the supply chain. By building on the organizational learning literature we discuss how knowledge is diffused in the supply chain. Buyers-supplier relationship data is merged with financial accounting data, patent data and publication data to create a sample of 974 buyer-supplier dyad observations in the high tech industries. Using fixed effects estimation we show that a 1% increase in patent intensity at the buyers, on average leads to a 1% increase in patent intensity at the supplier. We find that the duration of the buyer-supplier relationship positively moderates this effect, but that the supplier’s sales dependency on the buyer has a negative moderating role. The technological proximity of the two firms, however, is not found to have a significant effect on spillovers. We discuss the implications of our findings for individual firms and theory.

EPFL2013