The theme of this year's WDR is how to structure institutions to bring about an effectively functioning market economy. There is no question that political institutions play a key role here. In most countries political institutions determine the rules of access to considerable discretionary...

[...]In this paper, I survey the academic literature onblockholders and corporate control. As with any survey paper,I must be selective. Thus, I focus on empirical research, as Ibelieve that much of what we know about blockholders hascome through empirical investigations as opposed totheoretical...

[...]The New York City Social Indicators Survey (SIS)project represents one effort to track the consequences ofpolicy reform and devolution for inequality and well-beingin the largest and most diverse city in the United States.The project uses a telephone survey to collect data from arepeated...

A founding member of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, of the journal Past and Present, and of a distinctive and distinguished School of History at the University of Birmingham, Rodney Hilton was among the most notable medieval historians of the latter half of the twentieth...

[...]In this article, we describe and give an updated analysis ofour approach to estimating the cost of equity capital used bythe Federal Reserve System. The article is structured as follows.We begin with a review of the basic valuation models used toestimate the cost of equity capital. In...

[...]This paper surveys the research on boards of directors in theeconomics and finance literature. Boards of directors are aneconomic institution that, in theory, helps to solve the agencyproblems inherent in managing an organization. Althoughboards satisfy numerous regulatory requirements,...

[...]This article describes a method by which we may moreaccurately predict regional economic activity. Specifically, wedevelop an index of leading economic indicators (LEI) forNew York State and for New Jersey over the 1972-99 period.We extend our earlier work (Orr, Rich, and Rosen 1999),...

[...]Early in the morning of each business day, the major foreignexchange trading firms send their customers lists oftechnical trading signals for that day. Timely technical signalsare also supplied by major real-time information providers.These signals, which are based primarily on prior price...

[...]With fiscal affairs apparently in order—at least in the shortrun—and with some perspective on the past twenty-five years’economic performance, we are in a position to ask how well thebudget process has worked to produce a coherent andresponsive fiscal policy, particularly given the...

[...]This paper presents theoretical and empirical analysis ofautomatic fiscal stabilizers. Using the modern theory of consumption behavior, we identify several channels throughwhich optimal reaction of household consumption plans toaggregate income shocks is tempered by these stabilizers....