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...

Firm-specific variation in stock returns and fundamental performance measures is significantly higher in industries that have a history of more investment in information technology (IT). We hypothesise that IT is associated with creative destruction or product differentiation, either of which...

Technological innovation is not a blessing for all firms, or for investors holding the market. In the late 20th century US, individual firms' stock returns correlate positively with their own productivity growth, yet the market return correlates negatively with aggregate productivity growth,...

Using complete order books from the Korea Stock Exchange for a four-year period including the 1997 Asian financial crisis, we observe (not estimate) limit order demand and supply curves for individual stocks. Both curves have demonstrably finite elasticities. These fall markedly, by about 40%,...

Using 550 million limit orders submitted in the Korea Stock Exchange, we estimate demand and supply elasticities of heterogeneous investor types and their changes around the Asian financial crisis. We find that domestic individuals have substantially more inelastic demand and supply curves than...

In this paper, we examine the sources of the productivity growth in the U.S. computer industry from 1978 to 1999. We estimate a joint production model of output quantity and quality that distinguishes two types of technological changes: process and product innovations. Based on the estimation...

Because positive spillovers give investment in innovation a social rate of return several times higher than its internal rate of return to innovators, innovation is chronically underfunded. Recurrent manias, panics and crashes in stock markets inundate "hot" new technologies with capital. 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...

Agency problems in economics virtually always entail self-interested agency exhibiting "insufficient" loyalty to principal. Social psychology also has a literature, mainly derived from work by Stanley Milgram, on issues of agency, but this emphasizes excessive loyalty -- people undergoing a...

Large pyramidal family controlled business groups are the predominant form of business organization outside America, Britain, Germany, and Japan. Large pyramidal groups comprising dozens, even hundreds, or listed and unlisted firms place the governance of large swathes of many countries' big...