"Who do you think of when you imagine a hedge fund manager? A greedy fraudster, a visionary entrepreneur, a wolf of Wall Street? These tropes capture the public imagination of a successful hedge fund manager. But behind the designer suits, helicopter commutes, and illicit pursuits are the...

While financialisation has been typically framed as a market imperative that permeates everyday life and transforms individuals and households into responsible self-governing subjects, we argue that the role of the state is vital in explaining the formation and impacts of specific forms of...

We derive a principal-agent model to analyze the effectiveness of bonus caps and deferrals in regulating banks' risk-taking. We calibrate the model to a sample of large US banks on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis and run counterfactual analyses of the potential effects of the...

We examine how directors with investment banking experience affect a firm's acquisition behavior. We find that the presence of investment banker directors is associated with a higher probability of subsequent acquisitions, and such positive relation is not driven by reverse causality. Focusing...

The capstone of regulatory reform in the wake of the financial crisis has turned out to be an effort to pair substantive changes to the financial industry with an effort to get bankers to behave more ethically. Regulators have emphasized the importance of “culture” set by a “tone at the...

We study whether banks are riskier if managers have less liability. We focus on New England between 1867 and 1880 and consider the introduction of marital property laws that limited liability for newly wedded bankers. We find that banks with managers who married after a legal change had more...