Basile DUBOIS will defend his thesis on Monday 13th October at 02:00 PM (zoom)
Title: Essays in Corporate Finance : Empirical Models of Demand, Choice, and Policy Frictions
Supervisor: Professor Alexander GUEMBEL
To attend the conference, please contact the secretariat of the TSE Doctoral school.
Memberships are:
- Alexander GUEMBEL : Professor, TSM,TSE, Université Toulouse Capitole Supervisor
- Chuqing JIN : Assistant professor, GE TSE, Examinatrice
- Claudia CUSTODIO : Professor, Imperial College Business School Rapporteure
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Olivier DARMOUNI : Associate professor, Ecole Des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris Rapporteur
Abstract :
Over the past two decades, the methodological toolkit of industrial organization has steadily migrated into corporate finance. Rich micro-datasets and increasingly powerful estimation techniques now allow researchers to treat bank customers, investors, or boards of directors as decision-makers who face explicit menus of alternatives. This dissertation embraces that perspective. Across three essays, I build and estimate discrete-choice models that quantify how frictions in markets for credit, bonds, and the market for human capital interact with policy. The common thread is methodological: each chapter brings the structural‐IO demand toolkit to produce quantifications that are critical for policy evaluation. I place particular emphasis on the European Central Bank’s quantitative-easing programs, whose quasi-experimental design provides a unique opportunity to study policy-driven changes in demand.
The first essay studies commercial banks’ behaviour when central-bank reserves cease to be scarce. Using balance-sheet, credit registry, and regulatory data covering virtually the entire French banking sector, I embed Basel III constraints in a Monti–Klein style model of imperfect competition in loan and deposit markets. The estimates show that regulatory shadow costs can become so overwhelming as to contract credit provision.
The second essay moves from banks’ balance sheets to secondary debt markets. Combining eMaxx holdings of 16,000 fixed-income funds with Refinitiv prices and ratings for 2016-2020, I estimate a nested-logit demand system that reveals the existence of front-loading by arbitrageurs that take advantage of the structure of large-scale asset purchases.
The final essay turns to the market for corporate directors. Using 70 000 first-time U.S. board appointments between 1990 and 2020, I tackle the classic “unobserved choice-set” problem by aggregating individuals into profiles (age bracket, sector expertise, network size, educational background) and modelling a two-stage process: profiles enter the consideration set with probabilities that depend on firm networks, and boards then choose from those considered. My findings reconcile the apparent ubiquity of connections in board appointments with modest evidence of cronyism, suggesting that boards use networks primarily as a screening tool.
