We study the effect of media coverage on corporate governance by focusing on Russia in the period 1999-2002. This setting offers us three ideal conditions for such a study: plenty of corporate governance violations, no alternative mechanisms to address them, and the presence of an investment...

In this paper we discuss the role of the media in pressuring corporate managers and directors to behave in ways that are 'socially acceptable'. Sometimes this coincides with shareholders' value maximization, others not. We provide both anecdotal and systematic evidence that media affect...

We argue that profit-maximizing media help overcome the problem of "rational ignorance" highlighted by Downs (1957) and in so doing make elected representatives more sensitive to the interests of general voters. By collecting news and combining it with entertainment, media are able to inform...

We construct a measure of the private benefits of control in 39 countries based on 412 control transactions between 1990 and 2000. We find that the value of control ranges between 4% and +65%, with an average of 14 percent. As predicted by theory, in countries where private benefits of control...

This paper analyzes the interaction between corporate taxes and corporate governance. We show that the characteristics of a taxation system affect the extraction of private benefits by company insiders. A higher tax rate increases the amount of income insiders divert and thus worsens governance...

We compile the list of articles published in major refereed economics journals during the last 35 years that have received more than 500 citations. We document major shifts in the mode of contribution and in the importance of different sub-fields: Theory loses out to empirical work, and micro...

We study the location-specific component in research productivity of economics and finance faculty who have ever been affiliated with the top 25 universities in the last three decades. We find that there was a positive effect of being affiliated with an elite university in the 1970s; this effect...

Have rising income and consumption at the top of income distribution since the early 1980s induced households in the lower tiers of the distribution to consume a larger share of their income? Using state-year variation in income level and consumption in the top first quintile or decile of the...

Can peer-to-peer lending (P2P) crowdfunding disintermediate and mitigate information frictions in lending such that choices and outcomes for at least some borrowers and investors are improved? I offer a framing of issues and survey the nascent literature on P2P. On the investor side, P2P...

We use a repeated survey of an Italian bank's clients to test whether investors' risk aversion increases following the 2008 financial crisis. We find that both a qualitative and a quantitative measure of risk aversion increases substantially after the crisis. After considering standard...