Jean Tirole: The political economy of corporate finance (On the book by J. Tirole “The theory of corporate finance”)

The present article undertakes a critical review of the new book of Jean Tirole, the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, “The theory of cor- porate finance”, which has recently been published in Russian. The book makes a real contribution to the profession by summarizing the whole field of corporate finance and bringing together a big body of research developed over the last thirty years. By simplifying modeling, using unified analytical apparatus, undertaking reinterpretation of many previously received results, and structuring the material in original way Tirole achieves a necessary unity and simplicity in exposition of extremely heterogeneous theoretical and empirical material. The book integrates the new institutional economic theory into classical corporate finance theory and by doing so contributes to making a new type of textbook, which is quite on time and is likely to become essential reading for all graduate students in corporate finance and microeconomics and for everyone interested in these disciplines.