I examine whether stock ownership by politicians helps to enforce noncontractible quid pro quo relations with firms. The ownership by US Congress members in firms contributing to their election campaigns is higher than in noncontributors. This bias toward contributors depends on the financial...

Although financial development is good for long-term growth, not all countries pursue policies that render full financial development. This paper builds on an extensive political economy literature to construct a theoretical model showing that the intensity of opposition to financial development...

Financial development is good for long term growth. So why doesn't every country pursue policies that render full financial development? In this paper, building on a profuse political economy literature, we build a theoretical model that shows that the intensity of opposition by incumbents...

Although financial development is good for long-term growth, not all countries pursue policies that render full financial development. This paper builds on an extensive political economy literature to construct a theoretical model showing that the intensity of opposition to financial development...

Although financial development is good for long-term growth, not all countries pursue policies that render full financial development. This paper builds on an extensive political economy literature to construct a theoretical model showing that the intensity of opposition to financial development...

I examine the association between politician ownership and accounting conservatism for a sample of S&P 1500 firms between 2005 and 2011. The contracting explanation predicts that politician owned firms adopt less conservative accounting because lenders are less concerned with downside default...

Insurance Industry is going through a very important stage of its transformation - the transition from the classical system of management into a risk-based management. These changes were launched in Europe by international organizations which deal with the development of the necessary...

We propose a simple network–based methodology for ranking systemically important financial institutions. We view the risks of firms –including both the financial sector and the real economy– as a network with nodes representing the volatility shocks. The metric for the connections of the...

From the economists' perspective, the Capital Markets Union (CMU) represents a policy experiment that allows studying how legal conditions, economic incentives and financial activity interact. Recent papers provide economic support for the overall objective of CMU, but the robustness of this...