We examine whether personal wealth interests affect politicians’ decisions about stabilizing financial markets. We use the setting of the government’s support of financial institutions under the 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. We find that the personal wealth interests of...

Why do some economic systems depend on bank financing while others rely on capital markets and bond financing? We propose a political economy model in which elites favor a bank-based system, which increases their rents due to reduced competition. If suffrage is restricted to the elite, this will...

We study the optimal disclosure policy of a firm that wishes to maximize its expected stock price in the classic setting in which its stock is traded by risk-averse investors and noise traders. We find that the optimal disclosure policy is imprecise and leads to skewed posterior beliefs. This...

For capital markets to function, political institutions must support capitalism in general and the capitalism of financial markets in particular. Yet capital markets' shape, support, and extent are often contested in the polity. Powerful elements — from politicians to mass popular movements...

This paper is a preliminary exploration of the politics of financial market development. Using panel data for 197 countries over 34 years, we test a range of variables and hypotheses regarding the politics of financial market development. We find only weak support for the legal origins...

The first global financial sector crash eludes conventional assessments of sector risk. Singling out the usual culprits – the housing bubble, executive pay, regulators, rating agencies, risk models, and global imbalances – fails to explain either the unpredictability or the rapidity of the...

Why do countries with similar levels of development have such different financial systems? Some countries, such as the US and UK, rely extensively upon capital markets for mobilizing new capital, while others, such as Germany, France, and Japan, rely heavily on bank lending. I argue that the...

This article describes how Louis Kelso's binary economics can be used to open the prevailing system of corporate finance to enable all people to access non-recourse corporate credit so as to enable them to acquire capital with the earnings of capital. In economies operating at less than full...