Intra-Firm Human Capital Externalities in Tunisia

In this case-study, we use matched worker-firm Tunisian data to elicit the roles of intra-firm human capital and modern firm features in worker remunerations. We show that the estimated return to education in wage equations is not modified when replacing in the list of regressors the firm dummies, representing observed and unobserved firm heterogeneity, by the first three factors of a Principal Component Analysis of the observed firm characteristics. These factors can be interpreted as: the activity sector, the intra-firm human capital density and the modernity of the firm. These results constitute an interesting argument in favour of the presence of intra-firm human capital externalities. Moreover, the estimated education coefficient does not change when the three factors are replaced by three surrogate variables, respectively: the textile industry dummy, the intra-firm mean education, and the firm’s age.economic development, rate of returns, human capital, wage differentials, intra-firm knowledge externalities, Tunisia.

Banking Environment, Agency Costs, and Loan Syndication : A Cross-Country Analysis

Bank loan syndicate structure can be considered as an organizational response to agency problems stemming from the syndication process. The banking environment also influences the syndication process. We investigate how syndicate structure is influenced by the characteristics of the banking environment, such as banking market structure, financial development, banking regulation and supervision, and legal risk. The results of a cross-country analysis performed on a sample of 15,586 syndicated loan facilities from 24 countries over a period of 15 years confirm that syndicate structure is influenced by banking environments consistent with agency costs minimization and efficient re-contracting objectives.Banking environment, Agency costs, Loan syndication, Syndicate structure.

Beating the teapot effect

We investigate the dripping of liquids around solid surfaces in the regime of inertial flows, a situation commonly encountered with the so-called "teapot effect". We demonstrate that surface wettability is an unexpected key factor in controlling flow separation and dripping, the latter being completely suppressed in the limit of superhydrophobic substrates. This unforeseen coupling is rationalized in terms of a novel hydro-capillary adhesion framework, which couples inertial flows to surface wettability effects. This description of flow separation successfully captures the observed dependence on the various experimental parameters - wettability, flow velocity, solid surface edge curvature-. As a further illustration of this coupling, a real-time control of dripping is demonstrated using electro-wetting for contact angle actuation.Comment: 4 pages; movies at http://lpmcn.univ-lyon1.fr/~lbocque

Super-Earths in the TW Hya disc

We test the hypothesis that the sub-millimetre thermal emission and scattered light gaps seen in recent observations of TW Hya are caused by planet-disc interactions. We perform global three-dimensional dusty smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations, comparing synthetic observations of our models with dust thermal emission, CO emission and scattered light observations. We find that the dust gaps observed at 24 au and 41 au can be explained by two super-Earths ($\sim 4 \mathrm{M}_{\oplus}$). A planet of approximately Saturn-mass can explain the CO emission and the depth and width of the gap seen in scattered light at 94 au. Our model produces a prominent spiral arm while there are only hints of this in the data. To avoid runaway growth and migration of the planets we require a disc mass of $\lesssim 10^{-2}\,\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$ in agreement with CO observations but 10$-$100 times lower than the estimate from HD line emission.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Collateral and Adverse Selection in Transition Countries

This paper tackles the question of knowing whether collateral helps solve adverse selection problems in transition countries. We use a unique dataset of about 400 bank loans from 16 transition countries. Our findings support the view of a positive link between the presence of collateral and the risk premium, which is in accordance with the observed-risk hypothesis. This suggests that collateral does not mitigate adverse selection problems in transition countries.Bank, collateral, transition economies.

Syndicated Loans in Emerging Markets

There has been a considerable expansion of the volume of syndicated loans in emerging markets in the recent years. We provide the first analysis of the determinants of the decision of banks to syndicate a loan on a sample of loan facilities from 50 emerging countries. We show the significant role of loan characteristics and of financial development, banking regulation, and legal institutions, on the decision to syndicate a loan. We support the efforts of authorities to increase banking competition and efficiency, and to implement binding banking regulation on capital requirement to promote the expansion of syndicated loans.Bank, Loan, Syndication, Emerging Markets, Logit Regressions.

How many banks does it take to lend? Empirical evidence from Europe

We provide empirical evidence on the determinants of the number of bank lenders using a sample of more than 3000 loans to firms from 24 European countries. Our testable hypotheses are built upon different theoretical frameworks drawn from the existing literature, referring to firm characteristics, strategic considerations, geographical distances, bank market concentration, efficiency of legal system, and development of alternative sources of funds. Our main results show that the number and the international diversity of lenders is increased by loan and firm characteristics which reduce agency costs, and by financial structure and legal environment characteristics which mitigate expropriation risk.Lending relationships, number of lenders, bank loans, financial governance, asymmetric information, Europe.

Ground state of a tightly bound composite dimer immersed in a Fermi Sea

In this paper we present a theoretical investigation for the ground state of an impurity immersed in a Fermi sea. The molecular regime is considered where a two-body bound state between the impurity and one of the fermions is formed. Both interaction and exchange of the bound fermion take place between the dimer and the Fermi sea. We develop a formalism based on a two channel model allowing us to expand systematically the ground state energy of this immersed dimer with the scattering length $a$. Working up to order $a^3$, associated to the creation of two particle-hole pairs, reveals the first signature of the composite nature of the bosonic dimer. Finally, a complementary variational study provides an accurate estimate of the dimer energy even at large scattering length.Comment: 11 pages; 3 figure