What determines the boundaries of a firm? Is a firm defined solely by the ownership of physical assets as suggested by the property rights theory? This paper presents a theory of the firm based on the well-known idea that the firm improves over the market because it uses ex ante mechanisms to...

The housing crisis threatens to destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of value by causing homeowners with negative equity to walk away from their houses. A house in foreclosure is worth 30 to 50 percent less than a house that a homeowner either retains or sells on the market, and a foreclosed...

Indicators of the development of the financial sector do not improve monotonically over time. In particular, we find that by most measures, countries were more financially developed in 1913 than in 1980 and only recently have they surpassed their 1913 levels. This pattern cannot be explained by...

In this paper we examine data on firm size from Europe to shed light on factors correlated with firm size. In addition to studying broad patterns, we use the data to ask whether it is sufficient to think of the firm as a black box as some theories of the firm that we label...

Chapter 1. An Overview of Technologically Enabled Finance -- Chapter 2. Innovations in Alternative Finance in Historical Perspective -- Chapter 3. A Layman’s Guide to Bitcoin and Blockchain -- Chapter 4. An Introduction to Cryptocurrencies -- Chapter 5. The Role of Utopia in the Workings of...