The efficient markets hypothesis implies that passive indexing should generate as high a return as active fund management. Indexing has been a very successful strategy. We document a large value premium in the average q ratios of firms in the Samp;P 500 index relative to the q ratios of other...

This paper compares the comovement of individual stock returns across emerging markets. Campbell et al. (2001) and Morck et al. (2000) show that the US in the post war period saw rising firm specific stock return variations and thus declining comovement. We detect a similar, albeit weaker,...

The remote inland province of Shanxi was late Qing dynasty China's paramount banking center. Its remoteness and China's almost complete isolation from foreign influence at the time lead historians to posit a Chinese invention of modern banking. However, Shanxi merchants ran a tea trade north...

The remote inland province of Shanxi was late Qing dynasty China's paramount banking center. Its remoteness and China's almost complete isolation from foreign influence at the time lead historians to posit a Chinese invention of modern banking. However, Shanxi merchants ran a tea trade north...

"Agency problems in economics virtually always entail self-interested agency exhibiting "insufficient" loyalty to principal. Social psychology also has a literature, mainly derived from work by Stanley Milgram, on issues of agency, but this emphasizes excessive loyalty -- people undergoing a...

Because positive spillovers give investment in innovation a social rate of return several times higher than its internal rate of return to innovators, innovation is chronically underfunded. Recurrent manias, panics and crashes in stock markets inundate "hot" new technologies with capital. To the...