Public attention to a firm may provide valuable monitoring, but it may also have a dark side by constraining management's decisions and distracting it. We use inclusion in the S&P 500 index as a positive shock to public attention. Media coverage, Google searches, SEC downloads, SEC comment...

In recent years, impact investors - private investors who seek to generate simultaneously financial and social returns - have attracted intense interest and controversy. We analyze a novel, comprehensive data set of impact and traditional investors to assess how the non-financial characteristics...

In this paper we examine the political economy. of capitalization in a Tiebout model when there is a rent-seeking public bureaucracy. A new approach is suggested for testing for the influence of successful local public sector rent-seeking on local property values. We present empirical evidence...

This paper provides the first evidence of the effect of tax policy on the likelihood of violent attacks against black politicians. I find a strong positive effect of local tax revenue on subsequent violence against black politicians. A dollar increase in per capita county taxes increases the...

We analyze government interventions to alleviate debt overhang among banks. Interventions generate two types of rents. Informational rents arise from opportunistic participation based on private information while macroeconomic rents arise from free riding. Minimizing informational rents is a...

The conventional wisdom is that politicians' rent-seeking motives increase public debt and deficits. This is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible. An implication of this argument is that governments will under-save during a...

Initial inequality in endowments and opportunities, together with low average levels of endowments, can create constituencies in a society that combine to paralyze reforms, even though the status quo hurts them collectively. Each constituency prefers reforms that expand its opportunities, but in...

Structurally estimating the Grossman and Helpman (1994) model using coverage ratios that include non-tariff barriers leads to biased parameter estimates. We develop a "protection for sale" theoretical framework consistent with the data, by explicitly allowing for non-tariff barriers. Introducing...

Many developing countries have suffered under the personal rule of kleptocrats', who implement highly inefficient economic policies, expropriate the wealth of their citizens, and use the proceeds for their own glorification or consumption. We argue that the success of kleptocrats rests, in part,...