Economics for the Common Good
From Nobel Prize–winning economist Jean Tirole, a bold new agenda for the role of economics in society When Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by complete strangers and asked to comment on issues of the day, no matter how distant from his own areas of research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics, far from being a "dismal science," is a positive force for the common good. Economists are rewarded for wri...
The Theory of Industrial Organization
The Theory of Industrial Organization is the first primary text to treat the newindustrial organization at the advanced-undergraduate and graduate level. Rigorously analytical andfilled with exercises coded to indicate level of difficulty, it provides a unified and moderntreatment of the field with accessible models that are simplified to highlight robust economic ideaswhile working at an intuitive level.To aid students at different levels, each chapter is dividedinto a main text and supplementary section containing more advanced material. Each chapter openswith elementary models and builds on this base to incorporate current research in a coherentsynthesis.Tirole begins with a background di...
Competition in Telecommunications
The authors analyze regulatory reform and the emergence of competitionin network industries using the state-of-the-art theoretical tools ofindustrial organization, political economy, and the economics ofincentives.
Game Theory
This advanced text introduces the principles of noncooperative game theory -including strategic form games, Nash equilibria, subgame perfection, repeated games, and games ofincomplete information - in a direct and uncomplicated style that will acquaint students with thebroad spectrum of the field while highlighting and explaining what they need to know at any givenpoint. The analytic material is accompanied by many applications, examples, and exercises.The theoryof noncooperative games studies the behavior of agents in any situation where each agent's optimalchoice may depend on a forecast of the opponents' choices. "Noncooperative" refers to choices thatare based on the participant's percei...
The Theory of Corporate Finance
The past twenty years have seen great theoretical and empirical advances in the field of corporate finance. Whereas once the subject addressed mainly the financing of corporations--equity, debt, and valuation--today it also embraces crucial issues of governance, liquidity, risk management, relationships between banks and corporations, and the macroeconomic impact of corporations. However, this progress has left in its wake a jumbled array of concepts and models that students are often hard put to make sense of. Here, one of the world's leading economists offers a lucid, unified, and comprehensive introduction to modern corporate finance theory. Jean Tirole builds his landmark book around a s...
Financial Crises, Liquidity, and the International Monetary System
Tirole analyzes the current views on financial crises and on the reform of the international financial architecture. Based on the Paolo Baffi Lecture the author delivered at the Bank of Italy, this refreshingly accessible book is teeming with rich insights that researchers, policy makers, and students at all levels will find indispensable.
Inside and Outside Liquidity
Why do financial institutions, industrial companies, and households hold low-yielding money balances, Treasury bills, and other liquid assets? When and to what extent can the state and international financial markets make up for a shortage of liquid assets, allowing agents to save and share risk more effectively? These questions are at the center of all financial crises, including the current global one. In Inside and Outside Liquidity, leading economists Bengt Holmström and Jean Tirole offer an original, unified perspective on these questions. In a slight, but important, departure from the standard theory of finance, they show how imperfect pledgeability of corporate income leads to a demand for as well as a shortage of liquidity with interesting implications for the pricing of assets, investment decisions, and liquidity management. The government has an active role to play in improving risk-sharing between consumers with limited commitment power and firms dealing with the high costs of potential liquidity shortages. In this perspective, private risk-sharing is always imperfect and may lead to financial crises that can be alleviated through government interventions.
Dynamic Models of Oligopoly
Fudenberg and Tirole use the game-theoretic issues of information, commitment and timing to provide a realistic approach to oligopoly.
The Prudential Regulation of Banks
The Prudential Regulation of Banks applies modern economic theory to prudential regulation of financial intermediaries. Dewatripont and Tirole tackle the key problem of providing the right incentives to management in banks by looking at how external intervention by claimholders (holders of equity or debt) affects managerial incentives and how that intervention might ideally be implemented. Their primary focus is the regulation of commercial banks and S&Ls, but many of the implications of their theory are also valid for other intermediaries such as insurance companies, pension funds, and securities funds. Observing that the main concern of the regulation of intermediaries is solvency (the rel...
Balancing the Banks
The financial crisis that began in 2007 in the United States swept the world, producing substantial bank failures and forcing unprecedented state aid for the crippled global financial system. Bringing together three leading financial economists to provide an international perspective, Balancing the Banks draws critical lessons from the causes of the crisis and proposes important regulatory reforms, including sound guidelines for the ways in which distressed banks might be dealt with in the future. While some recent policy moves go in the right direction, others, the book argues, are not sufficient to prevent another crisis. The authors show the necessity of an adaptive prudential regulatory ...
A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation
Based on their pathbreaking work in the application of principal-agent theory toquestions of regulation, Laffont and Tirole develop a synthetic approach, with a particular, thoughnot exclusive, focus on the regulation of natural monopolies such as military contractors, utilitycompanies, and transportation authorities.
Competition in Telecommunications
The authors analyze regulatory reform and the emergence of competition in network industries using the state-of-the-art theoretical tools of industrial organization, political economy, and the economics of incentives.