This article explains the roots of financial crises in one of the oldest and most fundamental problems of commercial law: hidden leverage. Common law courts wrestled with this problem for centuries and developed a time – tested solution: the doctrine of secret liens. If the debtor becomes...

The global financial crisis of the past decade has shaken the research and policy worlds out of their belief that housing markets are mostly benign and immaterial for understanding economic cycles. Instead, a growing consensus recognizes the central role that housing plays in shaping economic...

This lecture interprets the great tectonic shifts in the global economy that I have witnessed since I began studying economics in the 1950s. There are three stories of gaining ground ("catching up") on the world's lead economy and one of losing ground. This experience can help us to get right...

We propose a text-based method for measuring and analyzing the international propagation of uncertainty shocks at the firm level. We apply this method to estimate the impact of Brexit-related uncertainty and find widespread reverberations on listed firms in 81 countries. International firms most...

Using tools from computational linguistics, we construct new measures of the impact of Brexit on listed firms in the United States and around the world; these measures are based on the proportion of discussions in quarterly earnings conference calls on the costs, benefits, and risks associated...

During the past decade, equity crowdfunding (ECF) has emerged as an alternative funding channel for startup firms. In Germany, the Small Investor Protection Act became binding in July 2015, with the legislative goal to protect investors engaging in this new asset class. Since then, investors...

During the past decade, equity crowdfunding (ECF) has emerged as an alternative funding channel for startup firms. In Germany, the Small Investor Protection Act became binding in July 2015, with the legislative goal to protect investors engaging in this new asset class. Since then, investors...

This article aims to analyze the Feldstein-Horioka hypothesis, which suggests a strong correlation between investments and savings in advanced economies. Additionally, the analysis of the eldstein-Horioka hypothesis was expanded to include emerging markets and developing economies in order to...

We estimate that a unitary aggregate elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is economically and statistically consistent with cross-country data – capital deepening cannot explain the global decline in labor's share. Our methodology derives from inter-steady-state transitions in...

Why, since the mid-1980s, have so many European governments decided fiscally to support the development of private retirement savings accounts? Whereas analysts of pension reform in affluent democracies have traditionally considered the development of private pensions as a secondary outcome of...