In generating fast economic growth, China is also generating growing concern about its environmental record. Using 2000-2009 data, we find that, while spending on environmental infrastructure has visible positive environmental impact, city spending is strongly tilted towards transportation...

This paper examines the impact of a policy change in Tobin's tax on housing market speculators. The policy intervention effectively raised the transaction cost in the market segment with a high presence of speculators. Relative to the unaffected control sample, we find that the rise in...

Many seemingly discordant results are reconciled if firm-specific return volatility is characterized as the intensity with which firm-specific events occur. A functionally efficient stock market allocates capital to its highest value uses, which often amounts to financing Schumpeterian creative...

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...

Traditional U.S. industries with higher firm-specific stock return and fundamentals performance heterogeneity use information technology (IT) more intensively and post faster productivity growth in the late 20th century. We argue that elevated firm performance heterogeneity mechanically reflects...

A panel of corporate ownership data, stretching back to 1902, shows that the Canadian corporate sector began the century with a predominance of large pyramidal corporate groups controlled by wealthy families or individuals. By mid-century, widely held firms predominated. But, from the 1970s on,...

What is good for big business need not generally advance a country%u2019s overall economy. Big business turnover correlates with rising income, productivity, and (in high income countries) faster capital accumulation; consistent with Schumpeter%u2019s (1912) creative destruction and recent...

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...

We observe less efficient capital allocation in countries whose banking systems are more thoroughly controlled by tycoons or families. The magnitude of this effect is similar to that of state control over banking. Unlike state control, tycoon or family control also correlates with slower...

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...