Europe is the continent where alcohol consumption is the highest in the world, with an average of 10.7 litres per person and per year. Now, as an important health determinant, and therefore responsible for harm, it has seemed necessary to launch an action in this field, for public health reasons.
So, in 2006, the European Commission published a Communication entitled “A European Union strategy to support Member States in reducing alcohol-related harm”. Subsequently, the French National Statutory Health Insurance Fund (Caisse Nationale d’Assurance Maladie des Travailleurs Salariés – CNAMTS) decided to participate in the discussion by publishing its contribution in May 2007.
The last three decades have been characterized byrepeated banking crises (the current financial crisis of 2008, the US savings and loans debacle of the eighties, the 1994-95 Mexican crisis, the 1997 Asian and 1998 Russian financial crises, etc.). Such episodes highlight the inherently unstable nature of banking and the tendency that banks have towards excessive risk-taking. In this paper, we aim to focus on one of the driving forces behind the risk-taking incentives of banks, namely shareholders’ behavior and their incentives to take higher risk. The issue of ownership structure is of particular interest for the banking industry as several factors interact and alter governance, such as the quality of bank regulation and supervision and the opacity of bank assets. Moreover, banking systems faced major changes during the last 20 years.
Until the Card and Krueger (1994, 1995) publications, there was near unanimity among economists that increases in the minimum wage have a small negative effect on the employment of low wage workers covered by minimum wage law. However, Card and Krueger’s contrary evidence with US data, as well as evidence from Britain (Machin and Manning, 1994; Dickens, Machin and Manning, 1999), have challenged this view, based on the traditional competitive model. Economists are now taking more seriously other models, such as the equilibrium wage dispersion models (e.g., Burdett and Mortenson, 1989; Burdett and Wright, 1994; Dickens, Machin and Manning, 1999; Manning, 1993), which can accommodate non-negative employment effects in the covered sector.
While this debate moves forward, we note that we have even less of an understanding of the employment and wage effects of the minimum wage on the sector not covered by minimum wage law (uncovered sector). Aside from this paper’s predecessors (El-Hamidi and Terrell, 2001; Gindling and Terrell, 1995), there are only a handful of empirical studies examining the impact on the uncovered sector, e.g., Tauchen (1981) studies the uncovered agricultural sector in the US and more recently Fajnzylber (2001) studies the impact on the informal sector in Brazil.
