The causes and consequences of the 2008 mortgage meltdown and 2020 COVID-19 crisis are quite different: the 2008 mortgage meltdown reflected infection of the financial system due to excess leverage and poor-quality mortgage loans, and the recent crisis reflects a substantial global economic shock to contain the viral outbreak of the coronavirus. Yet the financial and medical systems share many elements, such as opacity and interconnectedness as well as adequate buffers and reserves. We examine these themes as well as asset pricing, moral hazard (though it was at the root of the crisis only in the Great Recession), the consequences for government as a systemic actor, economic concentration, and capital market regulation in the two crises. In both crises, interventions in financial markets and disruptions in the housing market played important, but differing, roles. The recent crisis elucidates open questions about the foundation of financial economics and risk sharing.

Proxy advisory firms developed due to market failures underlying voting and corporate governance more broadly. However, these firms, which have not been subject to mandatory regulation, reflect their own market failures, emphasizing challenges underlying corporate governance. We highlight underlying frictions, such as economies of scale and public goods aspects to information production, the import of incentive conflicts faced by the advisory firms, their power, and the implications of their recommendations and votes by different types of investors. Asset managers emphasizing stewardship are more supportive of management than are proxy advisors. We highlight the evolving regulatory environment and limitations of one-size-fits-all recommendations. (JEL G34, G38, G24, H4) Received October 31, 2019; editorial decision October 17, 2020 by Editor Andrew Ellul.

The Market Microstructure Symposium in this issue of the Review of Financial Studies illustrates the diverse types of research being undertaken by scholars in this area of finance. The excitement and activity level reflect the overlap of a number of important ingredients, which in turn are helping to shape this subfield. The rational expectations paradigm provides a strong conceptual foundation for the theoretical analysis of problems. The development of the very powerful and tractable frameworks of Grossman and Stiglitz (1980), Glosten and Milgrom (1985), and Kyle (1985), and its extension by Admati and Pfleiderer (1988), has greatly spurred theoretical work in this area. In fact, the symposium includes the important extension of the Kyle framework to incorporate risk aversion in the Subrahmanyam (1991) article. The influence of these theoretical models of adverse selection has been enhanced by the broad recognition of the importance of adverse selection in actual security trading. The development of empirically tractable approaches for examining adverse selection [e.g., Glosten and Harris (1988)] has heightened the impact of the development of the theory. Admati (1991) provides a recent, more detailed overview of the theoretical literature on rational expectations and market microstructure.

Chester S. Spatt, Effects of Capital Gains Taxation on Life-Cycle Investment and Portfolio Management: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 42, No. 3, Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, December 28-30, 1986 (Jul., 1987), pp. 758-761

The extent to which the observed procedures for selling new issues are efficient is studied. We show that a posted-price mechanism, in conjunction with nonbinding preplay communication and participation restrictions, leads to an allocation of the security (and payment) that maximizes the seller’s expected revenue, given the informational constraints imposed by the optimizing incentives of the potential buyers.

[The extent to which the observed procedures for selling new issues are efficient is studied. We show that a posted-price mechanism, in conjunction with nonbinding preplay communication and participation restrictions, leads to an allocation of the security (and payment) that maximizes the seller's expected revenue, given the informational constraints imposed by the optimizing incentives of the potential buyers.]