R. Meager of University of New South Wales reviews “We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance” by Mara Kardas-Nelson. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores how microfinance, the practice of lending small amounts of money directly to people facing poverty, has impacted the lives of borrowers, highlighting the experiences of women in Sierra Leone who took out microfinance loans.”

Anat R. Admati of Stanford University reviews “Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal” by Melissa B. Jacoby. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores the impact of the bankruptcy system, promoting the argument that the present structure of reorganization cases has compromised policy objectives distant from bankruptcy's intended domain.”

I compare the impact of local tax revenue and royalties from the extraction of natural resources on governance in Colombian municipalities, leveraging plausibly exogenous variation from cadastral updates and fluctuations in the world price of oil. Higher tax revenue has a larger effect on local public goods in the areas of education, health, and water than a same-sized increase in oil royalties, despite earmarking of royalties for spending in these areas. Higher tax revenue also reduces the probability of a disciplinary prosecution against the municipal mayor, but the opposite is true for royalties, particularly for misbehavior related to public spending.

We construct a novel panel of insider ownership for roughly 600 U.S. bank holding companies from 2003 to 2014 to test whether ownership structure shaped recapitalizations around the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Insider ownership shows no discrete shift around the GFC. Using a difference-in-differences design with BHC and time fixed effects, we find that, after Q3 2008, banks with higher pre-crisis insider stakes issued significantly less common equity than otherwise similar peers. This effect is more pronounced where insiders enjoy greater private benefits of control, as proxied by insider lending and earnings opacity—consistent with dilution reluctance as the mechanism. The findings hold in propensity score matched regressions and when employing instrumental variables for insider ownership. These results reveal that ownership structure affects banks’ equity issuances in crises, underscoring the importance of accounting for ownership structure in bank stress tests and capital-regulation frameworks.

Much of Mike Jensen's research is foundational, including his early publications, which focus on empirical asset pricing. For example, Jensen's alpha, which he developss in Jensen (1968 and 1969) to evaluate mutual fund managers, is the foundation for most measures of investment performance. Similarly, in Fama et al (1969), Jensen and coauthors present the first event study, Thereafter, event studies play a major role in finance, accounting, and legal research. Finally, Black, Jensen, and Scholes (1972) develop a key insight about the importance of interdependence of sampling errors in the precision of asset pricing tests.

Variation in monthly metro area house prices unrelated to expected rents clouds the information about future rents in price-rent ratios and lagged changes in house prices. The variation in house prices unrelated to expected rents is, however, correlated across areas, and the problem is mitigated by measuring rent growth regression variables net of their monthly cross-section (across-area) means. This control for price variation unrelated to expected rents substantially enhances the information about future rents that we extract from price-rent ratios and lagged changes in house prices.

We use staggered enactments of state stakeholder constituency laws as a natural experiment to examine the effect of such laws on corporate pension risk shifting. Our analysis encompasses three components of pension risk shifting: funding risk, investment risk, and benefit risk. We observe a reduction in all three elements of pension risk shifting following the enactment of stakeholder orientation laws that promote greater consideration of stakeholder interests. We also find that the post-enactment reduction in pension risk-shifting is greater for firms with fewer investment opportunities. Overall, our results provide insight into how stakeholder constituency can mitigate an important form of risk-shifting.

We employ a structural model endowed with a banking system in which assets of different qualities, occasionally binding credit restrictions, and regulatory requirements coexist, to analyze the effectiveness of various macroprudential policies that cope with the level of due loans in the economy. We analyze how policy designs influencing impairment recognition by banks affect output and welfare, both in the steady state and across business cycles driven by financial risk. The cost of managing due loans, credit constraints, dividend strategies, and the cure rate, are key components of the driveshaft propelling policies to outcomes. Our findings suggest that “less is more,” i.e. policies emphasizing greater leniency in impairment recognition outperform stricter approaches, when management costs are sufficiently low, especially when combined with high cure rates that enhance the benefits of delaying recognition. However, reducing penalties for banks that violate regulatory requirements proves largely ineffective and exacerbates incentives for non-compliance. The presence of binding credit constraints enhances the effectiveness of lenient impairment policies when management costs are low and diminishes it otherwise.

The US Department of Justice's increasing use of deferred prosecution and non‐prosecution agreements (D/NPAs) over the past two decades has sparked debate about their merits compared with traditional plea deals, which often result in criminal convictions. This study examines the factors influencing prosecutors' decisions to use D/NPAs in disciplining firms for corporate misconduct. We analyze whether the likelihood of a firm's future misconduct varies by the type of discipline imposed, comparing the effectiveness of D/NPAs to traditional prosecution. Our findings reveal that prosecutors are more likely to employ D/NPAs with firms when a criminal conviction could cause significant economic harm to stakeholders. However, firms subject to D/NPAs are more likely to commit subsequent violations compared with those entering plea deals. As D/NPAs gain traction in the United States and internationally, our research highlights a trade‐off: while D/NPAs mitigate harm to innocent stakeholders, they are less effective at deterring future misconduct than traditional prosecutions.