Does auditor independence increase the quality of financial disclosures, and is regulation necessary to realize such improvements? Conventional wisdom answers "yes!," but lacks support from scholarly studies. We thus investigate whether auditor independence affects earnings quality in ways that...

Dino Falaschetti and Michael Orlando unify the treatment of the many deeply related topics in money and banking in this wide-ranging book. By continually building on the assumption that economic actors are maximizers, they explain how monetary and financial services, as well as related...

Empirical studies of the external effects of R&D suggest that both geographic and technological distance attenuate inter-firm spillovers from innovative activity. The results presented here indicate that the tendency for R&D spillovers to localize economic activity is conditional on the...

We consider an environment in which participants make payments over a network and can invest in a technology that reduces the marginal cost of using the network. A network effect results in multiple equilibria; either all agents invest and usage of the network is high or no agents invest and...

Evidence is presented which suggest that an important measure of the apparent geographic localization of R&D spillovers may be an artifact of industrial agglomeration. A production function framework is used to examine the role of geographic and technological proximity for inter-firm spillovers...

Electoral constituencies recognize favorable policy outcomes in high-turnout jurisdictions. In this article I evaluate whether underlying institutions might provide a finer explanation of this relationship. To do so I formally examine variation in telecommunications policy across U.S. states....

Economists tend to agree that the recent cutting of dividends taxes will encourage investment and reduce financial distress. In addition to creating these “benefits,” however, the tax cut can also increase governance costs. For example, by removing a bias for leveraged capital structures,...

Individuals attempting to supply themselves with public goods face well-known free-rider problems. Since at least Hobbes, social scientists have claimed that an `external agent' is necessary to check these problems and thus sustain efficient outcomes in political economies. Contributors to the...

Electoral constituencies recognize favorable policy outcomes in high- turnout jurisdictions (Key 1984 [1949]; Hamilton 1993; Fleck 1999). In the present paper, I evaluate whether underlying institutions might provide a finer explanation of this relationship. To do so, I formally examine variation in...

Received evidence suggests that changes in appointer- and overseer-preferences</EM> influence monetary policy (i.e., partisan heritage matters). Evidence presented here, on the other hand, is consistent with changes in the cost</EM> of pursuing a common</EM> preference influencing policy. I draw this evidence...