David Thesmar

Biography

Research

• Thesmar and David Sraer find that French family firms listed on the stock market largely outperform widely held corporations, even if family firms are run by the founder's descendants, which they attribute to a workforce that is lower-paid but also more sheltered from layoffs, with increases in the supply of skilled labour or globalization increasing product market instability and exacerbating wage inequality due to raising skilled wages and possibly also depressing unskilled wages.
• Thesmar, Landier and Robin Greenwood explain how negative shocks to the equity of banks with similar exposures can generate a fire sale of assets as banks sell assets in an attempt to return to target leverage yet depress asset prices in the process.
• Thesmar and Greenwood find that stock price fragility strongly predicts stock price volatility, the correlation of stocks' fragility strongly predicts their price co-movements, and hedge fund trading may exacerbate stocks' fragility.
• Thesmar, Sraer and Quentin Boucly find that, for French leveraged buyouts, targets become more profitable, grow much faster than their peer group, issue additional debt, and increase capital expenditures in the 3 years following an LBO, which they attribute to LBO targets becoming able to exploit growth opportunities through private equity funds' financing.

  Selected awards

• Prize of the Best Young Economist of France: 2007
• Manpower Prize
• Turgot Prize
• Spängler-IQAM Prize