This paper studies the effect of reductions in information asymmetry - information globalization - on international risk sharing and trade flows. Information frictions are often invoked to explain low levels of international trade beyond those that measured trade frictions (tariffs,...

A contentious debate in finance revolves around whether investment managers add any value for their clients. Presumably, households delegate the investment decision because these managers are able to process information and use it efficiently to generate additional return. The raises the...

Why do countries with a higher prevalence of disease grow much more slowly than their seemingly-similar neighbors? While Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001) document a relationship between disease and growth for colonies and argue that the colonization process is an important determinant of...

The literature assessing whether mutual fund managers have skill typically regards skill as an immutable attribute of the manager or the fund. We show that many measures of skill, such as returns, alphas, and measures of stock-picking and market-timing, appear to vary over the business cycle. We...

The network model also explains why societies with a high prevalence of contagious disease might evolve toward growth-inhibiting social institutions and how small initial differences can produce large divergence in incomes. Empirical work uses differences in the prevalence of diseases spread by...

set to compare our calibrated model to the time-series and geographic patterns of participation.

Many blame the recent financial market turmoil on malfeasance of ratings agencies, who had incentives to bias their ratings. But these incentives had existed for decades. Why did the ratings bias issue only recently emerge? We model asset issuers who can shop for ratings -- observe multiple...

In October 2009, the house financial services committee voted to study the effects of removing ratings requirements for credit products. Eliminating such requirements would allow the issuers of credit products to decide whether or not to pay a ratings agency to rate their asset. If such a rating...

For decades, macroeconomists have searched for shocks that are plausible drivers of business cycles. A recent advance in this quest has been to explore uncertainty shocks. Researchers use a variety of forecast and volatility data to justify heteroskedastic shocks in a model, which can then...

A recent literature explores many ways in which uncertainty shocks can have important economic effects. But how large are uncertainty shocks and where do they come from? Researchers typically estimate a model with stochastic volatility, using all available data, then condition on the estimated...