It is widely believed that the stock-market oriented US financial system forces corporate managers to behave myopically relative to their Japanese counterparts, who operate in a bank-based system. We hypothesize that if US firms are more myopic that Japanese firms, then episodes of financial...

Empirical work relating trade liberalization and income distribution has identified an important anomaly. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem predicts that trade liberalization will shift income toward a country's abundant factor. For developing countries, this suggests liberalization will principally...

Does national market size matter for industrial strucure? This has been suggested by theoretical work on "home market" effects, as in Krugman (1980, 1995). In this paper, I show that what apreviously was regarded as an assumption of convenience - transport costs only for the differentiated goods...

This paper explains the size and value “anomalies†in stock returns using an economically motivated two-beta model. We break the beta of a stock with the market portfolio into two components, one reflecting news about the market’s future cash flows and one reflecting news about...

The Social capital literature documents a connection between social connection and economic outcomes of interest ranging from government quality to economic growth. Popular authors suggest that housing and architecture are important determinants of social connection. This paper examines the...

We present a model of succession in a firm controlled and managed by its founder. The founder decides between hiring a professional manager or leaving management to his heir, as well as on how much, if any, of the shares to float on the stock exchange. We assume that a professional is a better...

Many countries, especially developing ones, follow procyclical fiscal polices, namely spending goes up (taxes go down) in booms and spending goes down (taxes go up) in recessions. We provide an explanation for this suboptimal fiscal policy based upon political distortions and incentives for...