Milaković, Alfarano and Lux (2010) have identified a small core of directors who are both highly central to the entire network of German corporate boards as well as closely connected among themselves. While their analysis has been based on data for the management and supervisory boards of a...

A growing body of literature reports evidence of social interaction effects in survey expectations. In this note, we argue that evidence in favor of social interaction effects should be treated with caution, or could even be spurious. Utilizing a parsimonious stochastic model of expectation...

The question how the real and the financial side of a capitalist economy relate to each other has been a frequently recurring topic in the history of economic thought. Our paper addresses this question from the viewpoint that capital ultimately seeks returns from its perpetual reallocation and...

The basic philosophy behind Gibrat’s rule of proportionate effect has been to find some common mechanism in the growth process of business firms, based on the idea that growth rates are independent of size and drawn from the same distribution. After decades of research, however, it seems fair...

The question how the real and the financial side of a capitalist economy relate to each other has been a frequently recurring topic in the history of economic thought. Our paper addresses this question from the viewpoint that capital ultimately seeks returns from its perpetual reallocation and...

We perform a careful spectral analysis of the correlation structures observed in real and financial returns for a large pool of long-lived US corporations, and find that financial returns are characterized by strong collective fluctuations that are absent from real returns. Once the excessive...