Large shareholders may play an important role for firm performance and policies, but identifying this empirically presents a challenge due to the endogeneity of ownership structures. We develop and test an empirical framework which allows us to separate selection from treatment effects of large...

Public and private equity waves move together. Using quarterly cash-flow data for a large sample of venture capital and buyout funds from 1984-2010, we investigate the implications of this co-cyclicality for understanding private equity cash flows and performance. In the cross-section, varying...

This paper proposes a Bayesian method of performance evaluation for investment managers. We begin with a flexible set of prior beliefs that can be elicited without any reference to probability distributions or their parameters. We then combine these prior beliefs with a general multi-factor...

By reducing the threat of a hostile takeover, business combination (BC) laws weaken corporate governance and increase the opportunity for managerial slack. Consistent with the notion that competition mitigates managerial slack, we find that while firms in non-competitive industries experience a...

Aging populations in advanced economies are placing ever-increasing demands on government spending in the form of old-age benefits. Economies that have promised substantially more benefits than they have made provision to finance are heading into a prolonged era of fiscal stress. Unresolved...

We develop a consistent and comprehensive theoretical framework for assessing whether economic growth is compatible with sustaining well-being over time. The framework focuses on whether a comprehensive measure of wealth - one that accounts for natural capital and human capital as well as...

The global economy has a chronic shortage of safe assets which lies behind many recent macroeconomic imbalances. This paper provides a simple model of the Safe Asset Mechanism (SAM), its recessionary safety traps, and its policy antidotes. Safety traps share many common features with...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of power density [Watts/m2] into economics. By introducing an explicit spatial structure into a simple general equilibrium model we are able to show how the power density of available energy resources determines the extent of energy...

This paper discusses the likely evolution of the trade and environment issue in the World Trade Organization after the upcoming ministerial meeting in Singapore this December. It makes a number of points. Progress within the GATT/WTO on this issue looks likely to be slow and painfully...

We study a growth model with an environmental asset which is a source of utility and an input to consumption and production. The stock of this asset follows its own ecological dynamics, which are affected by economic activity. We study the implications of an approach to ranking sequences of...