Japan, an isolated, backward country in the 1860s, industrialized rapidly to become a major industrial power by the 1930s. South Korea, among the world's poorest countries in the 1960s, joined the ranks of First World economies in little over a single generation. China now seems poised to follow...

Economic models routinely assume firms maximize shareholder wealth; however common law legal systems only require that officers and directors pursue the interests of the corporation, leaving this ill-defined. Economic arguments for shareholder wealth maximization derived from shareholders'...

From January 2011 through March 2018, the Bank of Japan purchased equity index ETFs worth about 3.5% of GDP. Identification of the effect of central bank ETF purchases on stock valuations and corporate responses is via differently-weighted and changing stock indices. BOJ purchases lift...

It is often claimed that multinational firms avoid taxes by shifting income from high-tax to low-tax countries. Using a five year panel of data for two hundred large U.S. manufacturing firms, we find that U.S. tax liability, as a fraction either of U.S. sales or U.S. assets, is related to the...

The federal government stands poised to exercise its constitutional right to regulate financial markets, an area traditionally left to competing provincial securities commissions. The current state of securities regulation renders impotent US-style takeover defences, such as poison pills and...

Economics has firms maximizing value and people maximizing utility, but firms are run by people. Agency theory concerns the mitigation of this internal contradiction in capitalism. Firms need charters, regulations and laws to restrain those entrusted with their governance, just as economies need...

Family firms depend on a succession of capable heirs to stay afloat. If talent and IQ are inherited, this problem is mitigated. If, however, progeny talent and IQ display mean reversion (or worse), family firms are eventually doomed. This is the essence of the critique of family firms in...

Despite a vast accumulation of private capital, China is not embracing capitalism. Deceptively familiar capitalist features disguise the profoundly unfamiliar foundations of "market socialism with Chinese characteristics." The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), by controlling the career advancement...

Ghanaian custom views children as members of either their mother's or father's lineage (extended family), but not both. Patrilineal custom charges a man's lineage with caring for his widow and children, while matrilineal custom places this burden on the widows' lineage - her father, brothers,...

We examine information spillover as a source of stock return synchronicity, where information about highly-followed "prominent" stocks is used to price other "neglected" stocks sharing a common fundamental component. We find that stocks followed by few analysts co-move significantly with...