Dodging Bullets -- Contents -- About the Authors -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The End of the 1980s -- Why the 1980s Stopped: Leveraging as a Mania -- Why the 1980s Stopped: Did Judges, Lawmakers, and Regulators Kill the Leveraging Business? -- RJR-Nabisco: A Case Study -- The...

"During the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was common practice for milliners to decorate women's hats with birds' feathers and plumes-and sometimes with the birds themselves. As many as 300 million birds per year were killed for this fashionable enterprise, causing the extinction of some entire...

"Investors are looking for answers as to why and what they can do to protect their current and future investments. This book will provide the answers to those questions and is written by well-respected individuals whose publications and newsletters reach hundreds of thousands of investors."

While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work...

This paper discusses the potential macroeconomic implications for Hong Kong SAR of accommodative monetary policy in the United States. It shows, through model simulations, that a resumption of the credit channel in Hong Kong SAR has the potential to create inflation in both goods and asset...

External demand was the main driver of growth in Thailand in 2006 and 2007. However, WEO projections indicate moderating foreign demand in 2008, with U.S. growth being revised downwards to reflect the turmoil in housing and credit markets, and high oil prices. While the share of Thai exports to...

This paper gauges the key determinants of China's private consumption in relation to GDP using data on the Chinese economy and evidence from other countries' experiences. The results suggest there is nothing ""special"" about consumption in China. Rather, the challenge is to explain why the...

The recent housing bust has reignited interest in psychological theories of speculative excess (Shiller, 2007). I investigate this issue by identifying a segment of the U.S. population-evangelical protestants-that may be less prone to speculative motives, and uncover a significant negative...

Social insurance programs shield individuals from specific risks, but these programs are not necessarily independent of each other. The existence and scope of one program can potentially influence the use of others, especially when the risks covered by the programs are related. This study...