Jean Tirole

Financial Intermediation, Loanable Funds and the Real Sector

We study an incentive model of financial intermediation in which firms as well as intermediaries are capital constrained. We analyze how the distribution of wealth across firms, intermediaries, and uninformed investors affects investment, interest rates, and the intensity of monitoring. We show that all forms of capital tightening (a credit crunch, a collateral squeeze, or a savings squeeze) hit poorly capitalized firms the hardest, but that interest rate effects and the intensity of monitoring will depend on relative changes in the various components of capital. The predictions of the model are broadly consistent with the lending patterns observed during the recent financial crises.

PLATFORM COMPETITION IN TWO-SIDED MARKETS

Many if not most markets with network externalities are two-sided. To succeed, platforms in industries such as software, portals and media, payment systems and the Internet, must “get both sides of the market on board”. Accordingly, platforms devote much attention to their business model, that is to how they court each side while making money overall. The paper builds a model of platform competition with two-sided markets. It unveils the determinants of price allocation and end-user surplus for different governance structures (profit-maximizing platforms and not-for-profit joint undertakings), and compares the outcomes with those under an integrated monopolist and a Ramsey planner.

Market Liquidity and Performance Monitoring

This paper studies the value of the stock market as a monitor of managerial performance. It shows that the stock price incorporates performance information that cannot be extracted from the firms current or future profit data. The additional information is useful for structuring managerial incentives. The amount of information contained in the stock price depends on the liquidity of the market. Concentrated ownership, by reducing market liquidity, reduces the benefits of market monitoring. Integration is associated with weakened managerial incentives and less market monitoring. This may explain why shares of divisions of a firm are rarely traded. The model offers a reason why market liquidity and monitoring have both a private and a social value, a feature missing in standard finance models. This is used to study the equilibrium size of the stock market as a function of investor preferences and the available amounts of long- and short-term capital.

Private and public supply of liquidity

This paper addresses a basic, yet unresolved, question: Do claims on private assets provide sufficient liquidity for an efficient functioning of the productive sector? Or does the state have a role in creating liquidity and regulating it either through adjustments in the stock of government securities or by other means? In our model, firms can meet future liquidity needs in three ways: by issuing new claims, by obtaining a credit line from a financial intermediary, and by holding claims on other firms. When there is no aggregateuncertainty, we show that these instruments are sufficient for implementing the socially optimal (second‐best) contract between investors and firms. However, the implementation may require an intermediary to coordinate the use of scarce liquidity, in which case contracts with the intermediary impose both a maximum leverage ratio and a liquidity constraint on firms. When there is only aggregate uncertainty, the private sector cannot satisfy its own liquidity needs. The government can improve welfare by issuing bonds that commit future consumer income. Government bonds command a liquidity premium over private claims. The government should manage debt so that liquidity is loosened (the value of bonds is high) when the aggregate liquidity shock is high and is tightened when the liquidity shock is low. The paper thus suggests a rationale both for government‐supplied liquidity and for its active management.

Using Cost Observation to Regulate Firms

The paper emphasizes the use of accounting data in regulatory or procurement contracts when the supplier (1) has superior information about the cost of the project and (2) invests in cost reduction. The main result states that, under risk neutrality, the supplier announces an expected cost and is given an incentive contract linear in cost overruns. This (optimal) contract moves toward a fixed-price contract as the announced cost decreases. An investment choice is then introduced and the use of a rate-of-return regulation is studied.

The theory of the firm

Publisher Summary The theory of the firm has long posed a problem for economists. This chapter discusses the analytical models of the firm that go beyond the black-box conception of a production function. The firm is seen as a contract among a multitude of parties. The main hypothesis is that contractual designs, both implicit and explicit, are created to minimize transaction costs between specialized factors of production. This follows Coases original hypothesis that institutions serve the purpose of facilitating exchange and can best be understood as optimal accommodations to contractual constraints rather than production constraints. There are three problems that need attention. A first step is to develop and apply techniques that deal with nonstandard problems, such as incomplete contracts, bounded rationality, and multi-lateral contracting. The second step ought to integrate observations from neighboring fields, such as sociology and psychology, in a consistent way into the theoretical apparatus. The third step will be to increase the evidence/theory ratio, which is currently very low in this field.

Incomplete contracts: Where do we stand?

The paper takes stock of the advances and directions for research on the incomplete contracting front. It first illustrates some of the main ideas of the incomplete contract literature through an example. It then offers methodological insights on the standard approach to modeling incomplete contracts; in particular it discusses a tension between two assumptions made in the literature, namely rationality and the existence of transaction costs. Last, it argues that, contrary to what is commonly argued, the complete contract methodology need not be unable to account for standard institutions such as authority and ownership; and it concludes with a discussion of the research agenda.

ASSET BUBBLES AND OVERLAPPING GENERATIONS

The first part of this paper considers the interaction between productive and nonproductive savings in a growing economy. It employs an overlapping generations model with capital accumulation and various types of rents, and gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an aggregate bubble. The second part is a series of thoughts on the definition, nature, and consequences of asset bubbles. First, it derives some implications of bubbles for tests of asset pricing. Second, it demonstrates the specificity of money as

A Theory of Collective Reputations with Applications to the Persistence of Corruption and to Firm Quality

The paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations. A members current incentives are affected by his past behaviour and, because his track record is observed only with noise, by the groups past behaviour as well. The paper thus studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature. It shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone, and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt. Last, the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality.

VERTICAL INTEGRATION AND MARKET FORECLOSURE

Supported by the MIT Energy Lab, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Olin Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Taussig Visiting Professorship at Harvard and the Marvin Bower Fellowship at the Harvard Business School.