This paper describes our construction of the Global Financial Development Database and uses the data to compare financial systems around the world. The database provides information on financial systems in 205 economies over the period from 1960 to 2010 and includes measures of (1) size of...

Globalization has made it possible for labor in developing countries to augment labor in the developed world, without having to relocate, in ways not thought possible only a few decades ago. We argue that this large increase in the developed world's effective labor supply, triggered by...

We combine self-collected historical data from 1867 to 1907 with CRSP data from 1926 to 2012, to examine the risk and return over the past 140 years of one of the most popular mechanical trading strategies — momentum. We find that momentum has earned abnormally high risk-adjusted returns — a...

We develop a structural credit risk model to examine how the interactions of liquidity and default risk affect corporate bond pricing. By explicitly modeling debt rollover and by endogenizing the holding costs via collateralized financing, our model generates rich links between liquidity risk...

We must infer what the future situation would be without our interference, and what changes will be wrought by our actions. Fortunately, or unfortunately, none of these processes is infallible, or indeed ever accurate and complete. Knight (1921)

The growing use of on-line educational content and related video services has changed the way people access education, share knowledge, and possibly make life decisions. In this paper, we characterize how video content affects individual decision-making and willingness to share in the context of...

Mutual fund managers can outperform the market by picking stocks or timing the market successfully. Previous work has estimated picking and timing skill, assuming that each manager is endowed with a fixed amount of each and found some evidence of picking skills and little evidence of timing...

Value stocks have higher exposure to innovations in the nominal bond risk premium, which measures the markets' perception of cyclical variation in future output growth, than growth stocks. The ICAPM then predicts a value risk premium provided that good news about future output lowers the...

We argue that the cointegrating relation between dividends and consumption, a measure of long run consumption risks, is a key determinant of risk premia at all investment horizons. As the investment horizon increases, transitory risks disappear, and the asset's beta is dominated by long run...