Many pundits have alluded to cryptocurrencies as a bubble or Ponzi scheme. Yet, noted economists have long emphasized the need for competing currencies, and the usage of Bitcoin is high in countries where the fiat currency has experienced significant devaluation. With no central authority...

In 2002, a legal reform introduced in India allowed secured creditors to seize and liquidate the defaulter's assets. We study firms' choice between capital and labor in response to these strengthened creditor rights by exploiting variation in their pre-policy proportion of collateralizable...

We survey the empirical literature on corporate dividend policy, with emphasis on develop- ments over the last two decades. We divide our review into two parts. We first summarize what we “know” about dividend policy – the set of observations about the nature of (and trends in) dividend...

We address three questions relating to the interest rate options market: What is the shape of the smile? What are the economic determinants of the shape of the smile? Do these determinants have predictive power for the future shape of the smile and vice versa? We investigate these issues using...