How persistent are the effects of legal institutions adopted or inherited in the distant past? A substantial literature argues that legal origins have persistent effects that explain clear differences in investor protections and financial development around the world today (La Porta et al, 1998,...

We explore the link between liquidity and investment in a an overlapping generation model with a standard asynchronicity between firms' access to and need for cash. Imperfect pledgeability hinders the capacity of capital markets to resolve this asynchronicity, resulting in credit rationing and a...

This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common law countries generally have the best, and French civil law countries the worst, legal...

Nominal stock prices are arbitrary. Therefore, when evaluating how a piece of news should affect the price of a stock, rational investors should think in percentage rather than dollar terms. However, dollar price changes are ubiquitously reported and discussed. This may both cause and reflect a...

Introduction / William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo -- Business organization and internal governance. Revisiting American exceptionalism: democracy and the regulation of corporate governance: the case of nineteenth-century Pennsylvania in comparative context / Naomi R. Lamoreaux -- Corporate...

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction - William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo -- I. Business Organization and Internal Governance -- 1. Revisiting American Exceptionalism: Democracy and the Regulation of Corporate Governance: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania in...

In this paper we study European banks' demand for short-term funds (liquidity) during the summer 2007 subprime market crisis. We use bidding data from the European Central Bank's auctions for one-week loans, their main channel of monetary policy implementation. Through a model of bidding, we...

We investigate the impact of two types of financial liberalizations on short- and long-horizon capital flows to emerging markets in a framework that controls for push and pull factors. The first type of liberalization, a reduction in capital controls, is countrywide but uncertain, because its...