Contenu du sommaire

Public Unemployment Benefits Versus Self-Insurance and Social Insurance This article reassesses the optimal level of public insurance schemes when pri- vate insurance with precautionary savings or familial insurance with social networks are taken into account. These features are found to deeply challenge the traditional efficiency and equity results attached to the provision of unemployment benefits and provide new room for public insurance.

The Contribution of Quantitative Models to Bank Supervision in Europe. This article examines the potential contribution to bank supervision of a model designed to include an off-site proxy of the management quality based only on publicly available financial information. For quantifying banks' managerial quality, we use, following Barr, Seiford and Siems [1994] and Barr and Siems [1997], the concept of technical efficiency (Data Envelopment Analysis, DEA). The relevance of our early warning system depends to some extent on its accuracy in predicting which banks will have their solvency degraded. Because bank failures have been rare in Europe during the last decade, in order to assess our model we have to compute a theoretical probability of failure. In this paper we choose to identify which bank are most likely to have financial problems in future periods via an Asset Liability Management (ALM) method, which is an alternative to multivariate models such as multiple discriminant analysis or neural net- works. The method is based on corporate bond valuation models. We suppose that the dynamics for the total assets and the total liabilities can be described by geometric Brownian motions. The probability of insolvency - i.e. the probability that net worth is negative — is then estimated and analysed as the probability of default. Then, we test the ability of our off-site early warning system to predict degradation of solvency of the main European commercial banks from 1993 to 2000. We show that proxies for Capital adequacy, Asset quality, Management quality, Earnings ability, Liquidity and Sensitivity to market risk do a good job of identifying the banks that are likely to have their solvency degraded in the future : they contain useful information and are virtually cosdess to compute. Nevertheless, the model do less well in predicting degradation of solvency of banks in Europe than in United States. Thus, our model may certainly be used by the financial and banking supervision authority as an indicator of the need for prompt intervention, but should not be considered as a substitute for the current surveillance framework.

Institutional Profiles, a New Database of the Institutionnal Characteristics of Developing, in Transition and Developed Countries The disparity between the development paths followed by the economies of a limited number of countries, known as "emerging", and the bulk of the other developing countries has shown the limitations of previous development strategies. As a consequence, at the beginning of the 1 990s, the question of institutions has been propelled to the top of the economic agenda. The empirical literature has now solidly documented and validated the general relationship between institutions and development. With this a starting point, attention is now being concentrated on the actual nature of the institutional mechanisms at work, the inter-relationships between them and their combined impact on development. Whereas previous analysis of development had mainly drawn on the instruments derived from national accounts, there are not as yet internationally standardised observation ins- truments for tackling the questions now being raised. A few institutional indicators were created since the end of the 1990s but these cover only a limited part of the institutional domain. This document attempts to fill the gap, putting forward an original database covering a broad and detailed field of institutional characteristics for 5 1 countries (developing, in transition and developed countries). The basic data were collected using a questionnaire completed in 2001 by the economic missions of the French Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry in the selected countries, enabling us to cover 80 % of the world's GDP and population. In this document, we set out the method used for the construction of our indicators. We then compare them with other existing indicators, noting the existence of convergence for elements that are common to the respective inquiries. On the basis of our indicators we confirm the relationship between institutions and levels of development. We then go on to explore the database using a non-inferential (data analysis) approach. We identify an 'institutional core" consisting of four major institutional characteristics (governance, security of transactions, innovation and regulations), leading us to draw up an initial typology of institutional profiles : "authoritarian- paternalistic", "mild liberal", "pure liberal" and "informal". This typology is then supplemented by a combination of both institutional and economic variables, highlighting the main thrusts providing the framework for the database : welfare and reform. The classification obtained aggregates countries by relevant sub-groups.

Voluntary Agreements as an Environmental Policy Instrument For the past ten years, polluting firms have increasingly adopted a pro-active attitude towards the environmental protection. These environmental initiatives from polluters are called « voluntary approaches ». Their increasing implementation raises some questioning on their ability to protect the environment in an efficient way. May the regulator rely on firms to contribute to sustainable development in a credible and responsible way ? Under which conditions can voluntary approaches replace or complete the traditional environmental policy tools ? This article surveys the existing academic literature on voluntary approaches and offers some suggestions for further research in this field.