The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a well-known welfare-to-work experiment that provided a generous but time-limited financial incentive to leave welfare and enter the workforce. Experimental evidence showed large short-term impacts but no lasting effects. We argue that these conclusions need to be reassessed. Policy changes implemented during the SSP implied that the control group’s behavior did not provide an appropriate counterfactual. We estimate the impacts the financial incentive would have had in an unchanging policy environment. This reassessment leads to significant changes in the lessons previously reached. Our study demonstrates that experimental findings need to be interpreted with care.

This article reports nonparametric estimates of the effect of labor-supply behavior on the payments to families enrolled in the Seattle/Denver Income Maintenance Experiment. The randomized assignment of families to the treatment groups in this experiment was designed to permit the calculation of these nonparametric estimates. However, the nonparametric estimates have never been reported, even though they are easy to construct using a simple weighting procedure. Unfortunately, responses to the data collection instrument (which depended on costly surveys) were not random, and this opens up some ambiguity in the results.

The high social costs of financial crises imply that economists, policymakers, businesses, and households have a tremendous incentive to understand, and try to prevent them. And yet, so far we have failed to learn how to avoid them. In this article, we take a novel approach to studying financial crises. We first build ten case studies of financial crises that stretch over two millennia, and then consider their salient points of differences and commonalities. We see this as the beginning of developing a useful taxonomy of crises – an understanding of the most important factors that reappear across the many examples, which also allows (as in any taxonomy) some examples to be more similar to each other than others. From the perspective of our review of the ten crises, we consider the question of why it has proven so difficult to learn from past crises to avoid future ones.

Excessively easy bank credit – visible in unusually small credit risk spreads and rapid loan growth – is often posited as a root cause of unsustainable asset price booms. This paper considers whether an increase in bank risk tolerance drove high loan growth that coincided with Florida's land boom of the mid-1920s, the first Florida housing boom in which buyers from around the nation participated. Estimates suggest that an astounding 20 million lots were offered for sale in Florida at that time. Our detailed narrative and empirical evidence suggest that the facts do not require the assumption of increased risk appetite during the boom. We find that most Florida banks that failed were associated with the Manley-Anthony chain and did not exhibit increases in observable indicators of risk during the boom. Instead, their increases in risk mainly reflected hidden choices either to lend to bank insiders on a preferential basis or to fund other banks that were engaged in such risky and often fraudulent activities. Bank regulators seem to have been complicit in the hidden risk-taking. Even informed investors would have been left in the dark about the amount of risk that was growing in Florida.

We analyze financial contracting in start-ups backed by corporate venture capitalists (CVCs). CVCs' strategic goals can economically hurt or benefit the start-ups, depending on product market relationships between start-ups and CVC parents. Empirically, start-ups receive funding from both complementary and competitive CVC parents. However, start-up insiders commonly limit the influence of competitive CVCs, awarding them lower board power, while retaining higher board representation for themselves. Second, lead CVCs receive lower board representation, indicating heightened concerns about their greater influence in start-ups' early stages. Finally, start-ups extract higher valuations from competitive CVCs, reflecting greater moral hazard problems. Overall, CVC strategic objectives affect their early inclusion in VC syndicates, their control rights and share pricing.

We analyze the potential competitive effects of the proposed Basel II capital regulations on US bank credit card lending. We find that bank issuers operating under Basel II will face higher regulatory capital minimums than Basel I banks, with differences due to the way the two regulations treat reserves and gain-on-sale of securitized assets. During periods of normal economic conditions, this is not likely to have a competitive effect; however, during periods of substantial stress in credit card portfolios, Basel II banks could face a significant competitive disadvantage relative to Basel I banks and nonbank issuers.

This paper examines how financial markets responded to the longest circuit breaker in American financial history: the four-month suspension of trading on the New York Stock Exchange following the outbreak of World War I. The suspension that began on July 31, 1914 fostered a substitute trading forum called the New Street market. Trading on New Street began almost immediately and offered economically meaningful liquidity services despite its impaired price transparency. A simple cross-sectional model of bid–ask spreads on New Street demonstrates that New Street liquidity responded to economic incentives. New Street's success implies that, from a public policy perspective, expensive back-up trading facilities are not required to preserve liquidity during a trading suspension in established markets. Back-up records of share ownership and transfer facilities, however, are crucial to maintaining liquidity.

We hypothesize that firms choose dividend increases to distribute relatively permanent cash-flow shocks and repurchases to distribute more transient shocks. As predicted, we find that post-shock cash flows of dividend increasing firms exhibit less reversion to pre-shock levels compared with repurchasing firms. We also examine whether the stock market uses the announcement of the payout method to update its beliefs about the permanence of cash-flow shocks. Controlling for payout size and the market's expectation about the permanence of the cash-flow shock, the stock price reaction to dividend increases is more positive than the reaction to repurchases.