Essais sur la gouvernance et sur la privatisation.

摘要

This thesis includes two essays on two different topics: (1) corporate governance and (2) privatization.;In the first essay titled " Does Competition Matter for Corporate Governance? The Role of Country Characteristics ", we investigate the relationship between product market competition and corporate governance. Specifically, do country characteristics influence this relationship, and how does this relationship affect firm value? Using U.S. data, Giroud and Mueller (2011) show that, firms from weakly competitive industries benefit more from good governance than do firms from strongly competitive industries. Using corporate governance ratings for a large sample of firms from thirty-eight countries, we corroborate Giroud and Mueller's (2011) findings for a set of developed countries. Further, we highlight the role that country characteristics, especially the level of economic and financial development and the level of investor protection, play in the relation between competition and corporate governance. We find that competition is associated with lower corporate governance ratings in developed countries. In developing countries, firms from competitive industries have, on average, higher corporate governance ratings than firms from less competitive industries. We next examine the impact of corporate governance on firm value. We show that corporate governance is positively associated with greater firm value, but only in less competitive industries from developed countries. For developing countries, the evidence suggests that corporate governance is valuable mostly in competitive industries.;The second essay, titled " Credible Reforms and Stock Return Volatility: Evidence from Privatization ", examines how investors' confidence, about the government commitment towards market-oriented policies impacts stock return volatility. We focus on privatization, a market-oriented policy. The literature often relates privatization to an improvement in firm performance, better corporate governance; stock market development, etc. (see Megginson and Netter (2001) for a comprehensive survey). In this essay, we propose to learn more about privatization through the study of its impact on stock return volatility. Using a sample of 47 countries, we show that privatization is related to volatility via political risk. Indeed, a privatization program maintained over some time signals the government credibility and this process gradually resolves political risk and reduces volatility. Volatility decomposition shows that the sustainability of the privatization program is mostly associated with lower idiosyncratic volatility among developed markets, while it is strongly related to developing markets' systematic volatility. Additional tests suggest that the reduction in volatility components is greater when a sustained privatization program is carried out through the stock market. Finally, our results indicate that although all public firms benefit from the resolution of political risk, firms that are partly owned by the government experience greater reduction in volatility.