Recent literature emphasizes the importance of a director's external network of social connections. I use a sample of closed-end funds to show that internal, within-board connections are also significant determinants of shareholder value. I find that boards with shared education, employment, and family backgrounds exhibit lower market values, higher expense ratios, higher director compensation levels, and an increased likelihood of financial misrepresentation. Director turnover is lower within these boards, and new director appointments are more likely to share connections with incumbent directors. I conclude that internal board networks negatively impact a firm's governance environment and overall monitoring quality.

Whereas macroprudential policy has come to the fore since the Global Financial Crisis, with many regulators being given responsibility for such policy, the appropriate tools and the effectiveness of such tools remain open questions. We suggest that existing work on effectiveness of macroprudential policy may be vulnerable to bias due to omission of long run cointegration effects. This paper seeks to offer a fresh baseline for work in this area by adopting a cointegration framework which is robust to a variety of alternative techniques and compares favourably with non-cointegrated alternatives. We assess the impact of typical macroprudential policy interventions on house price and household credit growth in up to 19 OECD countries, using three datasets from the IMF and BIS, thus giving both a wider range of control variables and broader coverage of instruments than in most extant work. We find evidence that macroprudential polices remain effective in both short- and long-run at curbing house price and household credit growth even within a cointegration framework, albeit some tools are more effective than others. These include, in particular, taxes on financial institutions, general capital requirements, strict loan-to-value ratios and debt-to-income ratio limits.

ABSTRACT The increase in investor diversity over the last 35–40 years prompted us to revisit trading volume reactions to earnings announcements and how these reactions vary with firm size. We argue that this increase in investor diversity would likely increase differences in the precision of pre‐announcement information around earnings announcements, particularly for large firms. This suggests that the role of earnings announcements in resolving investor disagreement, as reflected in trading volume reactions, has increased. Over the 35‐year period 1977–2011, we find a dramatic increase in the magnitude and frequency of volume reactions to earnings announcements, particularly for large firms. The increase in large firms’ trading volume reactions is so pronounced that the relation between volume reactions and firm size has turned positive in recent years, reversing Bamber's ( , ) previously documented negative relation. We provide intuition and empirical evidence that our results are attributable to the resolution of differential prior precision among increasingly diverse investors following large firms.

Abstract We find the confluence of CEO-same industry experience makes independent directors particularly helpful in enhancing value-added growth and we identify a channel: guidance toward higher value-added R&D investments and higher quality innovations. Further corroborating these inferences, we find greater improvement in value-added growth when (1) independent directors with industry–CEO experience (IDICEs) have experience in more similar industries; (2) they create more shareholder value as CEO; and (3) they are current CEOs. In addition, IDICEs contribute to value-added growth most when firm environments and characteristics are conducive for active board-management interaction; namely, when product markets are more competitive and dynamic, when outsiders can more easily acquire firm-specific information, and when firms are younger and smaller. Consistent with our inferences on how IDICEs contribute to value-added growth, firms growing faster, less successfully innovating, and/or under strong governance tend to be matched with IDICEs.

I review The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King, published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2016. I discuss King’s proposed regulatory reform, the “pawnbroker for all seasons” (PFAS), and I compare it to an alternative solution developed in my own work. I argue that unregulated trade in the financial markets will not, in general, lead to Pareto-optimal allocations. As a consequence, solutions like the PFAS that correct problems with existing institutions are likely to be circumvented by the development of new ones. (JEL D81, D82, E44, G01, G18, G28, L51)

This paper tests how a major cap-and-trade program, known as the NOx budget trading program (NBP), affected labor markets in the manufacturing sector. The cap-and-trade program dramatically decreased levels of NOx emissions and added substantial costs to regulated firms. Using a triple-differences approach, I examine how labor markets adjusted in manufacturing industries that were exposed to the program. I find that overall employment in the manufacturing sector dropped by 1.3%, with energy-intensive industries losing up to 4.8%. Employment declines are shown to have occurred primarily through decreased hiring rates rather than increased separation rates, thus mitigating the impact on incumbent workers. Young workers experienced the largest employment declines, and earnings of newly hired workers fell after the regulation began.

Abstract We hypothesize that labor participation in governance helps improve risk sharing between employees and employers. It provides an ex post mechanism to enforce implicit insurance contracts protecting employees against adverse shocks. Results based on German establishment-level data show that skilled employees of firms with 50% labor representation on boards are protected against layoffs during adverse industry shocks. They pay an insurance premium of 3.3% in the form of lower wages. Unskilled blue-collar workers are unprotected against shocks. Our evidence suggests that workers capture all the gains from improved risk sharing, whereas shareholders are no better or worse off than without codetermination.

Most discussions of the Greek debt overhang have focussed on the implications for Greece. We show that when additional funds released to the debtor (Greece), via debt restructuring, are used efficiently in pursuit of a practicable business plan, then both debtor and creditor can benefit. We examine a dynamic two country model calibrated to Greek and German economies and support two-steady states, one with endogenous default and one without, depending on creditors’ expectations. In the default steady state, debt forgiveness lowers the volatility of both German and Greek consumption whereas demanding higher recovery rates has the opposite effect. In a second order approximation of the model, conditional welfare analysis shows that a policy of immediate leniency followed by harsher terms as the economy grows is beneficial to both creditors and debtors.