This paper ventures an institutional explanation for distinct patterns of political contestation over the rise of activist investors such as private equity and hedge funds in Europe and North America. Taking issue with the dichotomous nature of the literature on varieties of capitalism (VoC) and...

Vertical integration occurs when a firm does something for itself that it could otherwise procure on the market. For example, a manufacturer that opens its own stores is said to be vertically integrated into distribution. One irony of history is that both classical political economy and...

The development of marginalist, or neoclassical, economics led to a fifty-year long crisis in competition theory. Given an industrial structure with sufficient fixed costs, competition always became quot;ruinous,quot; forcing firms to cut prices to marginal cost without sufficient revenue...

Do emerging markets need to sacrifice economic sovereignty in order to borrow more cheaply on the international capital markets? To explore this, we exploit a natural experiment following the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 when four Balkan states - Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia - received full...

This Article attempts to define hedge funds and to distinguish them from a variety of similar investment funds. After reviewing the hedge fund definition in the U.S. and the EU, this Article argues that the current regulatory framework, which defines hedge funds by reference to what they are not...

Regulatory arbitrage is an indispensable element of regulatory competition as it provides regulatory substitutes for firms, and allows those firms to optimally benefit from such competition. This also increases the elasticity of demand for regulators and engenders accountability among them....

The finance industry has grown, financial markets have become more liquid, information technology has been revolutionized. But have financial market prices become more informative? We derive a welfare-based measure of price informativeness: the predicted variation of future cash flows from...

We study the impact of the Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act (DARA), a key legislation to protect debtors that was enacted in western colonial India. Using a panel dataset and a difference-in-difference estimation, we find a substantial decline in mortgage-backed credit after the passage of...

The Eurozone today is going into the same deflationary situation that the U.S. did under Jackson's destruction of the Second Bank, and the post-Civil War budget surpluses that deflated the economy. But whereas the Fed's creation was designed to inflate the U.S. economy, Europe's European Central...