This paper provides empirical evidence that campaign contributions arestrongly associated with market expectations of future firm-specific political favors,including preferential access to external financing. Using a novel dataset, we find thatfirms in Brazil providing contributions in the 1998...

The recent banking turmoil was a stark reminder of the fragility associated with banks' funding structures, especially when they rely on an insufficiently diverse uninsured deposit base. Concerns about unrealised losses, triggered by the rapid shift in monetary policy, played a clear role in the...

This paper reviews the state of thinking on the governance role of public ownership and control. We argue that the transfer of operational control over productive assets to the private sector represents the most desirable governance, due to the inherent difficulty for citizens to constrain...

We study the evolution of voter support for climate policies aimed at containing the effect of climate risk, as weather conditions worsens at a time of rising economic inequality. Households differ in age, beliefs and income, and the scale of intervention to preserve habitable land reflects the...

We study the evolution of voter support for climate policies aimed at containing the effect of climate risk, as weather conditions worsens at a time of rising economic inequality. Households differ in age, beliefs and income, and the scale of intervention to preserve habitable land reflects the...

Novel early stage ideas face uncertainty on the expertise needed to elaborate them, which creates a need to circulate them widely to find a match. Yet as information is not excludable, shared ideas may be stolen, reducing incentives to innovate. Still, in idea-rich environments inventors may...

Established firms often fail to maintain leadership following disruptive market shifts. We argue that such firms are more prone to internal resistance. A radical adjustment of assets affects the distribution of employee rents, creating winners and losers. Losers resist large changes when strong...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

Entry requires external finance, especially for less wealthy entrepreneurs, so poor investor protection limits competition. We model how incumbents lobby harder to block access to finance to entrants when politicians are less accountable to voters. In a broad cross-section of countries and...

We develop a model of endogenous lobby formation in which wealth inequalityand political accountability undermine entry and financial development. In-cumbents seek a low level of effective investor protection to prevent potentialentrants from raising capital. They succeed because they can...