Crowding-out during the British Industrial Revolution has long been one of the leading explanations for slow growth during the Industrial Revolution, but little empirical evidence exists to support it. We argue that examinations of interest rates are fundamentally misguided, and that the...

We propose and investigate a new channel through which the resource curse - a stylized fact that countries rich in natural resources grow slower - operates. Predatory governments are more likely to expropriate corporate profits in natural-resource industries when the price of resources is...

We present a model in which issuers of asset backed securities choose to release coarse information to enhance the liquidity of their primary market, at the cost of reducing secondary market liquidity or even causing it to freeze. The degree of transparency is inefficiently low if the social...

I present a simple model in which it is possible that opening a new market makes everybody worse off. Unlike previous examples in the literature, the analysis does not rely on relative price changes of different consumption goods. This is shown in a standard framework in which uninformed traders...

We study the determinants of private benefits of control in negotiated block transactions. We estimate the block pricing model in Burkart, Gromb, and Panunzi (2000) explicitly accounting for both block premia and block discounts in the data. The evidence suggests that the occurrence of a block...

The Great Recession has shattered the consensus on the benefits of capital account liberalization. Capital account controls have been introduced in several countries and have even been supported by the International Monetary Fund. In this paper we investigate whether capital account policies in...

Empirical evidence indicates that trades by institutional investors have sizable effects on asset prices, generating phenomena such as index effects, asset-class effects and others. It is difficult to explain such phenomena within standard representative-agent asset pricing models. In this...

The Riksbank faces challenges with regard to each of its three core functions, conducting monetary policy with the objective of stabilising inflation around the inflation target and resource utilisation around a sustainable level, promoting a safe and efficient payment system and thereby...

We examine the pricing of financial crash insurance during the 2007-2009 financial crisis in U.S. option markets. A large amount of aggregate tail risk is missing from the price of financial sector crash insurance during the financial crisis. The difference in costs of out-of-the-money put...

We propose a model in which better governance incentivizes managers to perform better and thus saves on the cost of providing pay for performance. However, when managerial talent is scarce, firms' competition to attract better managers reduces an individual firm's incentives to invest in...