Éric Pichet

Having authored two biographies about Adam Smith, a strong influence in his writings, Pichet's idea is that taxation must be based on four principles formulated by Smith in "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations", albeit only after adapting them to the 21st century:

Éric Pichet (born in 1960) is a French economist and a post-graduate professor at KEDGE Business School.

His main areas of expertise include market finance, monetary economics, fiscal economics, corporate governance and fiscal governance.

Eric Pichet is a graduate of HEC Paris, ESORSEM (French Staff College) and IMPI (postgraduate programme in Wealth Management and Real Estate of Kedge Business School).

He has a Ph.D in Management from the University of the Littoral Opal Coast with a thesis entitled "Convergence between Corporate Governance Practices in the large listed companies".

Pichet is a fellow at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, an Associate Researcher at the University of Bordeaux IV LAREFI research centre and CEFEP Research center at the University of PANTHEON-ASSAS and, since 1990 Professor at the SFAF Training Centre.

Currently employed as Professor of Economics at KEDGE Business School, since 2000 he has also been Director of KEDGE's postgraduate IMPI Wealth & Real Estate Institute (IMPI).

He has also worked as an independent financial expert and acted in an independent director's capacity since 2004.

He is a member of the IFA French Directors Institute's research centre and sits on the boards of several investment companies in France, including Gestion 21 and Signaux Girod (also Chairman of the audit Committee).

Pichet works with some publicly listed international hedge funds outside France and is Chairman of the Board of Directors at Diapason.

Lastly, he belongs to the APM, where he also works in an expert's capacity, and is chairman at CORAL, a French think tank of authors, book publishers and editors.

The rest of Pichet's body of work in this area, including his 2006 PhD thesis on the "Convergence between corporate governance practices in large publicly listed companies with diffuse shareholdings", allows him to define three main categories of governance principles that can be applied in large publicly listed companies.

These principles :

After analysing the role that failed governance mechanisms played in the Kerviel affair, Pichet detects a need for major improvements in the governance of large financial institutions, based on:

More generally, having analysed financial institutions that made huge losses in 2007–2010, he identifies 6 symptoms that are always present under these conditions, which create an explosive cocktail when combined.

The symptoms include:

When all six conditions are met, financial institutions can experience major losses causing them to collapse (Lehman Brothers).

Fundamentally, this is an example of systemic risk.

As Pichet teaches students, "The needle that pops the balloon (i.e. subprime loans) is just the trigger for the crisis, not the root cause".

The best way of avoiding future financial failures is to:

He also criticises three legislative trends that began after the crisis:

Although Pichet does not contest the theoretical utility of wealth taxes in modern fiscal systems, his analysis of the economic consequences of the ISF French Wealth Tax led him to the conclusion that this particular levy yields half as much as it costs in lost revenue.

He took clearly position against the "French utopia" of a Global tax on the Superrich.

His research fuels the debate set up in the US by Senator Elizabeth Warren about the possibility of an annual tax on household wealth of 2 percent on net wealth above $50 million and 3 percent on net wealth above $1 billion.

In 2008, he qualified an HDR Ph.D supervisor at the same university with dissertation entitled "An Hypermodern Analysis of Contemporary Social Governances".

He obtained a Phd in Law from l'Université Panthéon-Assas with a thesis entitled « Towards a General Theory of Social and Tax Expenditures »

Pichet began his career at French stockbroker CHOLET DUPONT before moving on to HSBC where he traded options and derivatives before becoming a financial analyst and joining France's SFAF (French Society of Financial Analysts).

In 2011, he published a methodological guide for research professors seeking a French HDR Ph.D supervision qualification.

The book, entitled "Art of the HDR", contains advice on writing HDR dissertations and supervising Ph.D candidates.

In an initial study published 5 April 2012 in La Revue de droit fiscal Pichet distinguishes between simple tax determination modalities and actual tax loopholes, his idea being that fiscal advantages (like family allowances) awarded to dependent or disabled persons do not constitute tax loopholes but are instead ways of determining the amount of tax owed in France's benchmark tax system.

His suggestion was that tax expenditures that are illegitimate (because they lack incentivising effects or are too costly or unfair) be eliminated.

He set up a methodology that can be used to assess tax loopholes in terms of their level of usefulness and to eliminate any tax expenditures that serve no purpose.

In 2016, Pichet published his General Theory of Social and Tax Expenditures in an article published in La Revue de droit fiscal dated 8 September 2016.

The theory is based on the idea that all compulsory levy systems are divided into six main categories called specific tax reference segments, each featuring a set of homogeneous fiscal standards enabling a methodical identification of relevant social and tax expenditures.

Pichet followed this up with a rigorous doctrine in which individual exception provisions are identified using a series of six successive filters analysing their legitimacy, utility, relevance, efficiency, effectiveness and social acceptability.

The analysis is prescriptive in nature and leads to a general doctrine in which each specific reference segment can be monitored.

In 2019 he published a methodological and practical guide for PhD students in social sciences.

The book entitled "L'Aventure de la Thèse" contains global advice on Pdh Dissertation.

Éric Pichet has developed theories in different areas.

Enlightened Shareholder Theory is an advanced and essentially shareholder-oriented corporate governance theory.