Building on prior literature that constrained individuals consume the most out of a tax rebate, we study the tradeoffs high interest borrowers face when they received their 2008 tax stimulus checks. We find a persistent decline in payday borrowing in the pay cycles that follow the receipt of the...

The housing crisis threatens to destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of value by causing homeowners with negative equity to walk away from their houses. A house in foreclosure is worth 30 to 50 percent less than a house that a homeowner either retains or sells on the market, and a foreclosed...

We find that institutional ownership in publicly traded companies is associated with more innovation (measured by cite-weighted patents). To explore the mechanism through which this link arises, we build a model that nests the lazy-manager hypothesis with career-concerns, where institutional...

The U.S. system of security law was designed more than 70 years ago to regain investors' trust after a major financial crisis. Today we face a similar problem. But while in the 1930s the prevailing perception was that investors had been defrauded by offerings of dubious quality securities, in...