We survey the theories of why banks promise to pay par on demand and examine evidence about the conditions under which banks have promised to pay the par value of deposits and banknotes on demand when holding only fractional reserves. The theoretical literature can be broadly divided into four...

We examine the returns to investors in publicly traded stock in new industries. We examine data from the United States on sellers of own-brand personal computers, airlines and airplane manufacturers, automobile manufacturers, railroads, and telegraphs. We find that a relatively small number of...

The misevaluation of risk in securitized financial products is central to understanding the financial crisis of 2007 - 8. This paper characterizes the evolution of factors affecting collateralized debt obligations based on subprime mortgages. A key feature of subprime-mortgage backed indices is...

We examine the relationship between real and financial integration. Real integration is measured by productivities of capital and labor from trade data for 1982 to 1997. Financial integration is measured by the black market exchange rate. We find more evidence of convergence to equality for...

Angel investors invest billions of dollars in thousands of entrepreneurial projects annually, far more than the number of firms that obtain venture capital. Previous research has calculated realized internal rates of return on angel investments, but empirical estimates of expected returns have...

Correlations of inflation with the growth rate of money increase when data are averaged over longer time periods. Correlations of inflation with the growth of money also are higher when high-inflation as well as low-inflation countries are included in the analysis. We show that serial...

We explore how a relatively small amount of heterogeneous securities created turmoil in financial markets in much of the world in 2007 and 2008. The drivers of the financial turmoil and the financial crisis of 2008 were heterogeneous securities that were hard to value. These securities created...

Research provides evidence that the method chosen to elicit value has an important effect on a person’s valuation. We hypothesize that role has a crucial effect on decision makers’ elicited values: Buyers prefer to pay less and sellers prefer to collect more. We conduct experimental sessions...

We examine the connection between the number of bank relationships and firms performance using a unique data set on Italian small firms for which banks are a major source of financing. Our evidence indicates that return on equity and return on assets decrease as the number of bank relationships...