This presentation captures a synopsis of the ideas in our new book "Money: A Zero-Sum Game". Following the Global Financial Crisis, central banks across the world employed so-called monetary “bazookas” to stimulate economic growth. But the so-called monetary “bazookas” proved to be damp...

Do employment protection laws hinder privatization? Using privatization deals in fourteen European countries from 1977-2003 and within-country variation in employment protection laws, we find that stringent employment protection laws significantly deter privatization. The fear of job cuts...

Can stringent labor laws be efficient? Possibly, if they provide firms with a commitment device to not punish short-run failures and thereby incentivize the pursuit of value-maximizing innovative activities. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that strong labor laws indeed appear to...

Do legal institutions governing financial contracts affect the nature of real investments in the economy? We develop a simple model and provide evidence that the answer to this question is yes. We consider a levered firm's choice of investment between innovative and conservative technologies, on...