Using a sample that provides unprecedented detail on foreign listings, new listings, and delistings for 29 exchanges in 24 countries starting from the early 1980s, we document a growing tendency of listings to concentrate in the U.S. and the U.K. and large changes in all exchanges’ ability to...

Using the regression discontinuity design of close gubernatorial elections in the U.S., we identify a significant and positive impact of the social networks of corporate directors and politicians on firm value. Firms connected to elected governors increase their value by 3.89%. Political...

In the absence of financing frictions, profit taxes reduce investment by their effect on the user cost of capital. With finance constraints due to moral hazard, investment becomes sensitive to cash-flow and own equity of firms. We propose a corporate finance model of investment and derive three...

We show that financial sector bailouts and sovereign credit risk are intimately linked. A bailout benefits the economy by ameliorating the under-investment problem of the financial sector. However, increasing taxation of the non-financial sector to fund the bailout may be inefficient since it...

Credit constraints are more frequent among growth companies with large investment opportunities. For the same reason, profit taxes may harm innovative firms more than standard ones. This paper develops a model of heterogeneous firms where an endogenous share opts for innovation and faces credit...

There is an increasing recognition that economically disadvantaged areas do not have an inherent capacity to regenerate economic activity or to deliver automatically socially propitious outcomes. In such circumstances, there might be a strong case for public sector intervention of various types....

Systemic risk is modeled as the endogenously chosen correlation of returns on assets held by banks. The limited liability of banks and the presence of a negative externality of one bank’s failure on the health of other banks give rise to a systemic risk-shifting incentive where all banks...

Fire sales that occur during crises beg the question of why sufficient outside capital does not move in quickly to take advantage of fire sales, or in other words, why outside capital is so slow-moving. We propose an answer to this puzzle in the context of an equilibrium model of capital...

The purpose of this Paper is to study the determinants of the concentration of ownership in a privatized, regulated firm. The discussion illustrates some aspects of the costs and benefits of different corporate systems. Privatized utilities are large firms with professional management: there is...

Many countries, including economies in transition, have suffered banking crises in recent years. This paper develops a general framework for analysing trade-offs between policies for cleaning banks' balance sheets of bad debt. The framework - a two-tier hierarchy consisting of regulators, banks,...