Abstract: Wall Street: no other place on earth is so singularly identified with money and the power of money. And no other American institution has inspired such deep moral, cultural, and political ambivalence. Is the Street a bulwark defending commercial order? Or is it a center of mad...

A formal model of the appointment process -- Estimating monetary policy preferences -- Empirically testing the model's predictions -- Appointments to the European Central Bank -- The origins of the Federal Reserve appointment process -- Conclusions

In the aftermath of the 20078 crisis, senior policymakers and the media have blamed excessive risk-taking undertaken by bank executives, in response to their compensation incentives, for the crisis. The inevitable follow-up to this was to introduce stronger financial regulation, in the hope that...