With a large sample of public-to-private leveraged buyouts from 1980 to 2006, we find that LBO targets are equally likely to hold patents as other publicly-traded firms. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that LBOs reduce patent flows by one third. This reduction results from a...

This paper examines the impact of partisanship on growing inequality in the United States from 1977 to 2014. Drawing on Piketty and Zucman's data on the rising share of income flowing to the top one percent and falling share of income flowing to the bottom 50 percent, we tested the impact of...

Trust is an essential element of individuals' willingness to engage in economic activity such as investment. Because cultural institutions influence individuals' trust, I examine whether shocks to trust in a prominent cultural institution have crossover effects on households' investment...

We examine local market concentration and markups in the United States cement industry over 1974-2016. We estimate a model in which buyers use a second-score auction to procure cement from spatially differentiated plants. The model matches aggregated outcomes in the data, and the implied...

Professor Susan Crawford has just published an exciting new book on the future of high-speed Internet access in America. To hear Crawford tell it in 270 pages (excluding the copious footnotes), Americans should be worried because most of them will not have access to the fastest lane on the...

Most research on the CEO labor market has studied public company CEOs while largely ignoring the market for CEOs in private equity funded companies. We fill this gap by studying the market for CEOs among larger U.S. companies (enterprise value greater than $1 billion) purchased by private equity...

In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, governments in every developed country applied new forms of financial regulation, and now their attention has shifted to international regulation. One of those trans-national efforts involves applying a new layer of global capital...