Mes travaux de recherche les plus importants

Is the bank's involvement in LBO acquisitions a mean to encourage efforts or to save taxes?

Abstract: This paper studies the relationship between the financial capital structure in LBO (Leveraged Buy Out) acquisitions and the agents' incentives when there is a double sided moral hazard problem. The entrepreneur and the LBO fund provide complementary efforts that influence the distribution of the project's returns which may take either a high or a low value. The former agent needs to raise capital to take a company private. Both an LBO fund and a bank have sufficient funds to finance the investment. Hence, the involvement of the bank is not needed to get the project going. We show that there is no debt-equity contract that implements the first best efforts. Despite the fact that financing the project through a mixture of debt and equity or solely through equity lead the partners to provide the same level of efforts, the entrepreneur relies on both the LBO fund and the bank. To explain the high level of debt in LBO projects, the tax deductibility of the debt's interests seems to be a convincing theoretical rationale for the involvement of banks in buyout acquisitions. Key words: double moral hazard, debt, capital structure, LBO, tax advantage. JEL classification: G24, G32, G34.

Islamic Private Equity

The Islamic private equity (IPE) market has grown dramatically over the last few years. There are some similarities between venture capital (VC) and some traditional methods in Islamic financing. In medieval Islamic societies it is hard to pinpoint the starting of IPE but there were partnership arrangements similar to those practiced in conventional private equity (PE). But both academicians and professionals argue that the VC activity started in 1946 when General Doriot, a French born and a Harvard educated businessman, established the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC). It grew in Silicon Valley in the 1970s. Intel and Microsoft are amongst the most famous projects financed through VC. Without the intervention of venture capitalists none of these would have seen light of day or at least achieved such a spectacular rate of development in such a short period (Queyrel, 2006).

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Does corporate governance affect stock liquidity in the Tunisian Stock Market?

Abstract: The aim of the current paper is to study the link between the effects of corporate governance on information asymmetry problems and stock liquidity in the Tunisian Stock Market. We use a sample of 49 Tunisian firms listed between 1998 and 2007. Our results show that corporate governance has direct and indirect effects on stock liquidity. Threat of expropriation exerted by family and foreign shareholders discourages reluctant investors, which decreases stock liquidity. In contrast, they invest their capital in State controlled firms. In fact, State is regarded as an effective controller rather than a shareholder. The State involvement in Tunisian firms is considered as state guarantee for investors, which increases stock liquidity. Our results provide evidence that some attributes of corporate governance improve stock liquidity because they reduce information asymmetry. Key words: corporate governance, shareholder identity, stock liquidity, Tunisian Stock Exchange JEL Classification: G10, G34.

Firm's information environment and stock liquidity: evidence from Tunisian context

Abstract This paper analyzes the relationship between public disclosure, private information and stock liquidity in the Tunisian market. We use a sample of 41 listed firms in the Tunis Stock Exchange in 2007. First, we find no evidence that there is a relation between public and private information. Second, Tunisian investors do not trust the information disclosed in both annual reports and web sites, consequently it has no effects on stock liquidity, in contrast with private information. Key words: corporate information disclosure, private information, stock liquidity, emergent market. JEL classification: M41, G10, G14, O55

Modèle GARCH à mémoire longue : une application au marché de change tunisien

This paper deals with statistics’and econometrics’properties of fractionally integrated GARCH (FIGARCH). We compare these characteristics with those of traditional models. We insist on the GARCH exponential/IGARCH in…nite decrease of volatility impact. Then, we apply it on three Tunisian exchange rate series between 1994 and 2006. As Beine, Laurent and Lecourt (2002), the contributions of the FIGARCH model are extended by accounting for the observed kurtosis through a student-t based maximum likelihood estimation. This estimation improves the goodness of …t properties of this model and may lead to di¤erent interest parameters estimates.

Leveraged Buy Out: Does the Write-off threat increase the agents' incentives?

Abstract: This paper studies the financial capital structure in Leveraged Buy Out (LBO) acquisitions. It analyzes how the threat of prematurely exit of the LBO investor improves the agents' incentives when there is asymmetric information. We consider a dynamic agency model with two periods and three agents: the entrepreneur, the LBO investor and the bank. The two first agents provide unobservable efforts to enhance the productivity of their project. At the end of the starting stage, the LBO investor may abandon the entrepreneur's project. He must then pay compensation cost to the entrepreneur and to the bank. We show that there are no debt-equity contracts that induce the entrepreneur and the LBO investor to provide the first-best levels of efforts. The write-off threat increases the agents' incentives. Moreover, the entrepreneur's incentives increase when the amount of debt decreases and when the LBO investor promises her the whole compensation cost. Keywords: Leveraged Buy Out, incentives, exit, write-off option, double moral hazard. JEL classification: D82, D92, G33, G34.

Performance of Islamic Banks across the world: an empirical analysis over the period 2001-2008

Abstract Our study aims at analyzing Islamic bank efficiency over the period 2001-2008. We found that they were efficient at 92%. The level of efficiency could however vary according to the region where they operate. Asia displays the highest score with 96%. Indeed, country like Malaysia made reforms in order to allow these banks to better cope with the existing financial system, display the highest scores. On the contrary countries with Islamic banking system do not necessarily display efficiency scores superior to the average. The subprime crisis seems to have impacted those banks indirectly. And market power and profitability have a positive impact on Islamic banks efficiency, while it is the contrary for their size. The latter implies that they do not benefit from scale economy, may be because of the specificity of Islamic financial products. Keywords: Islamic Finance, Islamic Banks, performance, efficiency, stochastic frontier analysis. JEL classification: G21, G24, G15.