The impact of private benefits extraction on the values of oligopolistic firms is analyzed. Private benefits are assumed to generate costs which are passed through the organizational structure and create price distortion in the downstream product market. We prove that this may affect the profit (i.e. the market value) of the firms in a positive sense since the intensity of rivalry is curbed by the cost increase.

In oligopoly, private benefits extraction may enhance the profits while still generating a welfare loss: this suggests that corporate governance cannot be divorced from competition policy in industries where managerial opportunism generates expropriation costs.

This paper addresses the role of markup variations in the transmission process of cross-sectoral productivity differential shocks and government spending shocks to the relative price of nontradables. The Balassa-Samuelson model based on frictionless goods markets predicts that a rise in the sectoral productivity ratio by 1% raises the relative price by 1% while government spending changes leave the relative price unaffected. Using panel cointegration and unit root tests applied to a panel of fifteen OECD economies, our empirical evidence does not support these implications. We find that a rise in relative productivity by 1% raises the relative price of nontradables by only 0.70% and that an increase in government spending by 1% of GDP drives up the relative price by around 1%. This paper shows that these items of evidence can be successfully explained by a two-sector open economy model in which variations in the composition of demand for nontradables give rise to endogenous changes in the markups.

This paper examines the question as to whether, before 1914, French savers bought foreign assets to gain higher foreign returns or because of low correlation. Using tools of the Modern Portfolio Theory, the benefit from international diversification is decomposed into these two components, using a counterfactual hypothesis of perfect correlation between two assets. This approach allows an original measure of the respective share of the higher foreign returns and the low correlation in the benefit of diversification. The argument is put forward that French investors were mainly attracted by weak foreign correlation with domestic assets, rather than higher foreign returns.

Nous considérons une prise de contrôle dans laquelle les motivations des repreneurs potentiels sont multiples et étudions I’impact du degré d’affiliation de leurs évaluations sur la stratégie optimale. Nous montrons que cet impact dépend du rapport des dotations initiales. Nous trouvons que lorsque les dotations initiales sont symétriques, la stratégie optimale des enchérisseurs est indépendante du degré d’affiliation de leurs évaluations. En revanche, lorsque les dotations initiales sont asymétriques, cet impact dépend du niveau du signal privé de l’enchérisseur. Si les acqueréurs potentiels surenchérissent en présence de dotations initiales, l’étendue de la surenchére décroît avec l’augmentation du degré d’affiliation lorsque le signal privé est inférieur un certain seuil. L’agressivité des enchérisseurs profite à la firme cible dont le revenu espéré augmente avec le degré d’affiliation des évaluations.