We study the evolution of market-oriented policies over time and across countries. We consider a model in which own and neighbors' past experiences influence policy choices through their effect on policymakers' beliefs. We estimate the model using a large panel of countries and find that it fits a large fraction of the policy choices observed in the postwar data, including the slow adoption of liberal policies. Our model also predicts that there would be reversals to state intervention if nowadays the world was hit by a shock of the size of the Great Depression.

Liquidity dried up during the financial crisis of 2007–2009. Banks that relied more heavily on core deposit and equity capital financing, which are stable sources of financing, continued to lend relative to other banks. Banks that held more illiquid assets on their balance sheets, in contrast, increased asset liquidity and reduced lending. Off-balance sheet liquidity risk materialized on the balance sheet and constrained new credit origination as increased takedown demand displaced lending capacity. We conclude that efforts to manage the liquidity crisis by banks led to a decline in credit supply.

We compute and compare risk-adjusted CEO pay in the United States and United Kingdom, where the risk adjustment is based on estimated risk premiums stemming from the equity incentives borne by CEOs. Controlling for firm and industry characteristics, we find that U.S. CEOs have higher pay, but also bear much higher stock and option incentives than U.K. CEOs. Using reasonable estimates of risk premiums, we find that risk-adjusted U.S. CEO pay does not appear to be large compared to that of U.K. CEOs. We also examine differences in pay and equity incentives between a sample of non-U.K. European CEOs and a matched sample of U.S. CEOs, and find that risk-adjusting pay may explain about half of the apparent higher pay for U.S. CEOs. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

We model a firm’s value process controlled by a manager maximizing expected utility from restricted shares and employee stock options. The manager also controls allocation of his outside wealth, which allows partially hedging of his exposure to firm risk. Managerial control increases the expected time to exercise for his employee stock options. It also reduces the gap between his certainty equivalent and the firm’s Fair Value for his compensation, but that gap remains substantial. Managerial control also causes traded options to exhibit an implied volatility smile. With costly control the same basic patterns remain, but the manager’s risk-taking is dampened.

We analyze a unique data set containing annual salary and detailed job and publication histories for a sample of 1,009 faculty members drawn from 53 public Ph.D.-granting economics departments. Empirical results suggest that all else equal: (1) statistically significant negative returns to seniority exist within lower-ranked but not top 15 programs; (2) more frequent movers observe statistically higher annual salaries in lower-ranked but not top 15 programs; and (3) for each level of seniority, faculty in top 15 programs are more likely to move at any point in the career than faculty in lower-ranked programs.

American Economic Association Universal Academic Questionnaire Summary Statistics by Charles E. Scott and John J. Siegfried. Published in volume 101, issue 3, pages 664-67 of American Economic Review, May 2011

Counter to extant stylized facts, using newly available data on country allocations in US investors' foreign equity portfolios we find that (i) US investors do not exhibit returns-chasing behavior, but, consistent with partial portfolio rebalancing, tend to sell past winners; and (ii) US investors increase portfolio weights on a country's equity market just prior to its strong performance, behavior inconsistent with an informational disadvantage. Over the past two decades, US investors' foreign equity portfolios outperformed a value-weighted foreign benchmark by 160 basis points per year. JEL: C58, G11, G15

In a market-clearing economy, declines in demand from one sector do not cause large declines in aggregate output because other sectors expand. The key price mediating the response is the interest rate. A decline in the rate stimulates all categories of spending. But in a low-inflation economy, the room for a decline in the rate is small, because of the notorious lower limit of zero on the nominal interest rate. In the Great Depression, substantial deflation caused the real interest rate to reach high levels. In the Great Slump that began at the end of 2007, low inflation resulted in an only slightly negative real rate when full employment called for a much lower real rate because of declines in demand. Fortunately, the inflation rate hardly responded to conditions in product and labor markets, else deflation might have occurred, with an even higher real interest rate. I concentrate on three closely related sources of declines in demand: the buildup of excess stocks of housing and consumer durables, the corresponding expansion of consumer debt that financed the buildup, and financial frictions that resulted from the decline in real-estate prices. (JEL E23, E24, E31, E32, E65)

Research to date does not demonstrate a causal chain from financial education to welfare-enhancing financial behavior, in part due to biases, heuristics, and emotional influences on decisions. Yet the search for effective financial education continues. But it is time to ask whether giving every person effective financial education would make us better off. Two reasons it might not are discussed here. First, the time, expense, and invasion of privacy required would be enormous. Second, such a world would entail a decrease in individual autonomy. Alternative tools could potentially increase household financial welfare and security at lower social and individual expense.

We study a model where the aggregate trading of currency speculators reveals new information to the central bank and affects its policy decision. We show that the learning process gives rise to coordination motives among speculators leading to large currency attacks and introducing non-fundamental volatility into exchange rates and policy decisions. We show that the central bank can improve the ex ante effectiveness of its policy by committing to put a lower weight ex post on the information from the market, and that transparency may either increase or decrease the effectiveness of learning from the market, depending on how it is implemented.