AMAR Jeanne

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In this article, we examine the determinants of CAC 40 companies' compliance with the recommendations of the FSB Task Force on Climate Financial Reporting (TCFD). We use in this analysis a new index measuring the level of compliance of firms with TCFD's recommendations, the Comprehensive Compliance Index (CCI). Using a panel Tobit model, we find that environmentally friendly companies are more compliant with TCFD's recommendations, especially when operating in an industry with high environmental stakes. In addition, media environmental exposure increases the level of compliance of firms with TCFD's recommendations. We also find a strong influence of ownership structure on the CCI as a high shareholder concentration and a high proportion of foreign shareholders decrease the level of compliance with TCFD's recommendations. Overall, our results shed new light on the company's voluntary environmental reporting for regulators seeking to improve financial transparency in relation with climate risks. JEL Classification : G38. Q51. M41. Q56.

In this paper we examine the investment strategy of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. GCC SWFs are considered as relatively opaque investors and strongly politicized, raising some concerns for perceived political and security risks. We investigate what are the drivers of majority cross- border equity acquisitions made by these institutional investors over the period 2006-2015. Using both Logit and ordered Logit models, we test if the usual determinants of SWFs investments still stand when we look at influential (> 10%) or majority (> 50%) acquisitions made by GCC SWFs. We find that GCC SWFs do not consider financial characteristics of the targeted firms when they acquire large cross-border stakes but rather the characteristics of the country (countries in the European union and/or countries with a high level of shareholders protection), suggesting that their motives may go beyond pure profit maximization. We also find that transparent funds are more likely to take influential or majority stakes and that they do so predominantly in non-strategic sectors. Overall, our results indicate that even if GCC SWFs do not seek only for financial returns, acquiring majority stakes is not a lever for GCC governments to get strategic interests in the target countries.

The aim of the paper is to shed light on the question of why a country decides to set up a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF). Despite the recent financial crisis, 43 SWFs have been created between 2005 and 2014. In particular, we test if the emergence of these new recent funds can be explained by the following economic, political and institutional factors : i) the excess foreign exchange reserves due to natural resources rents or persistent current account surpluses . ii) the volatility of commodity prices . iii) a way to mitigate the "Dutch Disease" effect and iv) the governance of the country. We test these hypotheses on a sample of 37 countries that created a SWF over the period 2000-2014 and compare them to a large panel of countries that did not set up a SWF. In order to allow the temporal dimension as well as the unobserved heterogeneity between SWFs, a Logit panel model with random effects is estimated. The results show that countries for which the creation of a SWF is more appropriate are those with foreign exchange excess reserves, which are dependent on a commodity and on its volatility and which suffer from an appreciation of the real exchange rate. We also find that non-democratic countries with a high level of corruption are more likely to create a SWF. Our results may be of interest for policymakers debating whether or not it can be optimal for the country to establish a SWF. "Modern Sovereign Wealth Funds are not new. The first, the Kuwait Investment Office, was set up in 1953 just as Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were setting out to climb Mount Everest. The number of funds has been increasing since then like the traffic on the slopes of Everest" (John Gieve, former deputy Governor of Bank of England in a speech in London, 2008).

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While SWFs are not new, their number and financial power have grown steadily since the early 2000s, raising many concerns, particularly in developed countries. Are SWFs driven by the same motivations as institutional investors? Does their financial power risk destabilizing markets? These questions have made SWFs a research topic in its own right, and this research paper is part of it. The first essay of this thesis contributes to identify the main factors that may lead a country to create a SWF. Furthermore, the investment strategies of SWFs raise many questions: do they pursue a financial return objective or do they have more strategic objectives? The second essay highlights the complexity of SWFs' decision-making process by testing whether they prefer to invest in countries they are familiar with and/or in countries they have invested in before. Following this analysis, the third essay focuses more specifically on the determinants of SWFs' majority shareholdings by focusing on a particularly active group of funds: the funds of the Gulf States. More precisely, this analysis aims to identify the factors that influence the decision to take control in a given company.