<DIV>Despite recent corporate scandals, the United States is among the world’s least corrupt nations. But in the nineteenth century, the degree of fraud and corruption in America approached that of today’s most corrupt developing nations, as municipal governments and robber barons alike found new...</div>

<DIV>Not-for-profit organizations play a critical role in the American economy. In health care, education, culture, and religion, we trust not-for-profit firms to serve the interests of their donors, customers, employees, and society at large. We know that such firms don't try to maximize profits,...</div>

<DIV>Conventional wisdom held that housing prices couldn’t fall. But the spectacular boom and bust of the housing market during the first decade of the twenty-first century and millions of foreclosed homeowners have made it clear that housing is no different from any other asset in its ability to...</div>

<DIV><DIV>When firms and people are located near each other in cities and in industrial clusters, they benefit in various ways, including by reducing the costs of exchanging goods and ideas. One might assume that these benefits would become less important as transportation and communication costs fall....</div></div>

The remarkable boom and bust of America’s housing markets during the first decade of the twenty-first century now join the stock market gyrations of the 1920s and the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, doing as much damage to the received wisdom about housing markets and housing policy as...

These seven papers answer the question: How do not-for-profit firms behave in response to a governance system that is not constrained by profit?

Most international measures of corruption rank the United States today as one of the least corrupt nations. However, in the early 1850's this was not the case. How did this change? What happned? This important edited volume tackles this important question.

Introduction / Edward L. Glaeser, Tano Santos, and E. Glen Weyl -- Stochastic compounding and uncertain valuation / Lars Peter Hansen and José A. Scheinkman -- The good banker / Patrick Bolton -- How to implement contingent capital / Albert S. Kyle -- Bankruptcy laws and collateral regulation:...