The FinTech sector has begun to grow rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa. I document far greater adoption of social media, digital currency, ride sharing, and other FinTech applications in countries with a common law legal heritage compared to those with a civil law system, suggesting that legal...

Blockchains represent a novel application of cryptography and information technology to ag-eold problems of financial record-keeping, and they may lead to far-reaching changes in corporate governance. Many major players in the financial industry have began to invest in this new technology, and...

I study "donor governance," which occurs when contributors to non-profit firms place restrictions on their gifts to limit the discretion of managers. In a study of U.S. art museums, I find that this practice has grown significantly in recent years, and it represents the largest source of...

A bona fide currency functions as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account, but bitcoin largely fails to satisfy these criteria. Bitcoin has achieved only scant consumer transaction volume, with an average well below one daily transaction for the few merchants who accept it....

This paper shows close connections between CEOs' absences from headquarters and corporate news disclosures. I identify CEO absences by merging corporate jet flight histories with records of CEOs' property ownership near leisure destinations. I find that CEOs go to their vacation homes just after...

This paper provides a systematic evaluation of the different types of digital currencies. We express skepticism regarding centralized digital currencies and therefore focus our economic analysis on private digital currencies. Specifically, we highlight the potential for private digital...

We present the first estimates of investment returns and distribution rates for U.S. non-profit endowment funds, based on a comprehensive sample of 29,762 organizations drawn from Internal Revenue Service filings for 2009-2017. Non-profit endowments badly underperform market benchmarks, with...

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are sales of blockchain-based digital tokens associated with specific platforms or assets. Since 2014 ICOs have emerged as a new financing instrument, with some parallels to IPOs, venture capital, and pre-sale crowdfunding. We examine the relationship between issuer...

We show in a theoretical model that credit default swaps induce managerial agency problems through two channels: reducing the opportunity for managers to transfer value to equityholders from creditors via strategic default, and reducing the intensity of monitoring by creditors, which leads to...

We examine the importance of ambiguity, or Knightian uncertainty, in the capital structure decision. We develop a static tradeoff theory model in which agents are both risk averse and ambiguity averse. The model confirms the usual idea that increased risk--the uncertainty over known possible...