Discharge and entrepreneurship in the preventive restructuring directive

The European Council adopted the Preventive Restructuring Directive (2019/1023/EU) on June 20, 2019, which must be transposed by July 17, 2021, subject to a possible extension of a maximum of 1 year for countries encountering particular difficulties in the implementation. The Directive signals a paradigm shift in EU policy on insolvency from the traditional focus on cross‐border issues. The new Directive puts insolvency squarely at the heart of internal market regulation, following the EU's policy since the Great Recession of 2008 of promoting and strengthening the economy. Since 2016, the European Commission has issued several documents to facilitate insolvency procedures, leading to the recently adopted Preventive Restructuring Directive. Besides restructuring, the Directive promotes the discharge of pre‐insolvency debt for entrepreneurs. The Directive does not require that discharge be extended to other natural persons but recommends it. This article discusses the relationship between entrepreneurs and non‐entrepreneurs in an insolvency situation and concludes that a fair interpretation of the new Directive requires that the situation of the ordinary person with liability for business debt be closely scrutinised.     

Large population potential games

We offer a parsimonious definition of large population potential games, provide some alternate characterizations, and demonstrate the advantages of the new definition over the existing definition, but also show the equivalence of the two definitions.     

Entrepreneurship,Financiership, and Selection*

We develop an equilibrium model of the market for entrepreneurial finance, in which all agents have some personal wealth and a project whose quality is their private information. All agents choose whether to invest either as entrepreneurs or financiers, or to invest in storage technology. We find that a binding economy‐level wealth constraint, which renders credit scarce, can create advantageous selection, where productive agents become entrepreneurs and unproductive agents become their financiers. If funding is easier to obtain, entrepreneurship also attracts unproductive agents. In our model, individual wealth and entrepreneurship are positively (negatively) correlated if financial market participation is complete (incomplete).     

Estimating the long-run relationship between income inequality and economic development

There are several theories describing the effect of income inequality on economic growth. These theories usually predict that there exists some optimal, steady-state growth path between inequality and development. This study uses a new measure of income distribution and panel data cointegration methods to test for the existence of such a steady-state equilibrium relation. It is shown that there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between the variables, and that this relationship is negative in developed economies.     

Reforming corporate law in an emerging market

A sweeping and protracted reform of corporate law took place in Finland in the 1970s. We document how the reform brought significant improvements to investor protection and tightened disclosure rules at the cost of increasing the workload in corporate reporting. To study the economic consequences of the reform we develop a simple coordination game where the effects of investor protection on corporate valuation vary with equilibria. Then, using firm‐level daily stock return data, we find that the Finnish stock market generally reacts negatively to news of increased investor protection and workload, whereas news of delays in implementation of reform generate largely positive market responses. These results raise the question of whether stronger investor protection and greater transparency unambiguously promote development of stock markets.     

Innovation and imitation under imperfect patent protection

The paper develops a model in which the spillover of R&D is a consequence of a rational investment in imitation. The model incorporates the innovator's choice between patenting and secrecy as a protection device. The analysis demonstrates that an increase in patent breadth always discourages resorting to secrecy, whereas the influence of increased patent life is the opposite with large spillovers. An increase in patent life can also reduce innovative activity with large spillovers. Under endogenous imitation, short patents are socially optimal.     

Candidate quality

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties. Our results suggest that primaries, campaign costs and rewards have previously overlooked interactions that should be studied in a unified framework. Surprisingly, increasing the reward may lower the average candidate quality when the campaigning costs are sufficiently high. JEL Classification D70 · D72 · D79     

Evolution in Bayesian games II: Stability of purified equilibria

We study the evolutionary stability of purified equilibria of two-player normal form games, providing simple sufficient conditions for stability and for instability under the Bayesian best response dynamic.