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...

Business groups often contain banks or near banks that can protect group firms from economic shocks. A group bank subordinate to other group firms can become an "organ bank" that selflessly bails out distressed group firms and anticipates a government bailout. A group bank subordinating other...

Disequilibrating macro shocks affect different firms' prospects differently, increasing idiosyncratic variation in forward-looking stock returns before affecting economic growth. Consistent with most such shocks from 1947 to 2020 enhancing productivity, increased idiosyncratic stock return...

Savings increasingly flow to low-cost index funds, which simply buy and hold the stocks in a major index, such as the S&P 500. Increased indexing impedes incorporation of idiosyncratic information into stock prices. We limit endogeneity bias by showing that exogenous idiosyncratic currency...

Because corporate limited liability protects founder's personal assets, creditors often require founders of new, small and risky firms to contract around limited liability by pledging their personal assets as collateral for loans to their firms. This makes personal bankruptcy law (PBL) relevant...

This paper presents a synopsis of recent NBER studies of the history of corporate governance in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Together, the studies underscore the importance of path dependence, often as...

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...

Countries in which billionaire heirs' wealth is large relative to G.D.P. grow more slowly, show signs of more political rent-seeking, and spend less on innovation than do other countries at similar levels of development. In contrast, countries in which self-made entrepreneur billionaire wealth...

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...