We use anonymized data from Facebook to construct a new measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 180 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more with each other when they are more socially connected and when they share social connections with a similar...

The past two decades have seen a rapid increase in Private Equity (PE) investment in healthcare, a sector in which intensive government subsidy and market frictions could lead high-powered for-profit incentives to be misaligned with the social goal of affordable, quality care. This paper studies...

Do returns in private equity (PE) rise or fall with fund scale? This question is increasingly urgent amid larger funds and new focus on the retail market. Since better managers can raise larger funds, the causal effect is difficult to identify. We develop an instrument based on gifts to...