We develop a model in which bank culture improves upon outcomes attainable with incentive contracting. The bank designs a second-best incentive contract to induce the desired managerial effort allocation across growth and safety, but this induces excessive growth relative to the first best, a distortion exacerbated by interbank competition. Bank culture has two effects: it matches managers to banks with similar beliefs, and a safety-oriented culture reduces the competition-induced excessive growth focus. Culture is also contagious – a safety-oriented culture in some banks causes others to follow suit – this effect strengthens with higher bank capital and weakens with stronger safety nets.

We examine the effects on IPO uncertainty of an alternative going-public mechanism – the two-stage IPO, where a firm first gets quoted on the OTC market, and then upgrades to a national exchange where it first issues public equity. We find that a two-stage IPO firm experiences lower underpricing and return volatility than does a similar traditional IPO firm. Our study is the first to analyze the impact of U.S. pre-IPO disclosure and liquidity on levels of uncertainty and pricing at the IPO stage. We find that greater disclosure and liquidity during the first stage leads to greater reduction in IPO uncertainty. We control for the potentially endogenous nature of the two-stage IPOs by using a difference-in-difference analysis that utilizes two exogenous OTC market events.

Assessing illegal insider trading is challenging due to the nature of the activity. Researchers observe and evaluate only the detected portion of illegal trading, not all illegal transactions. This presents a problem when using traditional empirical techniques to investigate such activity. In our analysis we employ a bivariate probit model that takes into account the partial observability nature of insider trading and provides estimates for the determinants of both the commission and the detection of illegal insider trading. Among our findings, most notable is the deterrence effect of recent actions taken by the SEC to enforce insider trading laws. We highlight that insiders consider these actions when deciding to trade. We also illustrate the influence of the SEC's political structure on insider trading detection. We show that political party affiliation within the SEC, past indictments by the SEC, and SEC budget all play a crucial role in determining current prosecution.

We document racial and ethnic disparities in the propensity of law enforcement to formally book juvenile arrests. A fair share of these disparities can be attributed to differences in arrest offense severity and arrest history as well as cross-agency differences in practice. The disparities are the largest for age ranges and offenses where the greatest discretion is exercised. We explore whether booked arrests increase the likelihood of future arrests and bookings exploiting the discontinuity in the booking probability at age 18. The results suggest sizable effects of a prior booking on the likelihood of a future arrest and subsequent booking.

Can securities be settled on a blockchain, and, if so, what are the gains relative to existing settlement systems? The main benefit of a blockchain is faster and more flexible settlement, whereas settlement fails need to be ruled out where participants fork the chain to cancel trading losses. With a proof-of-work protocol, the blockchain needs to restrict settlement speed through block size and time in order to generate transaction fees, which finance costly mining. Despite mining being a deadweight cost, our estimates for the U.S. corporate debt market yield net gains from a blockchain in the range of 1–4 bps. Received May 31, 2017; editorial decision May 29, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

We uncover stylized facts of commodity futures’ price and volatility dynamics in the post-financialization period and find a factor structure in daily commodity volatility that is much stronger than the factor structure in returns. The common factor in commodity volatility relates to stock market volatility as well as to the business cycle. Model-free realized commodity betas with the stock market were high during 2008–2010 but have since returned to the pre-crisis level, close to 0. While commodity markets appear segmented from the equity market when considering only returns, commodity volatility indicates a nontrivial degree of market integration.

We examine how trust is sustained in large societies with random matching, when records of past transgressions are retained for a finite length of time. To incentivize trustworthiness, defaulters should be punished by temporary exclusion. However, it is profitable to trust defaulters who are on the verge of rehabilitation. With perfect bounded information, defaulter exclusion unravels and trust cannot be sustained, in any purifiable equilibrium. A coarse information structure, that pools recent defaulters with those nearing rehabilitation, endogenously generates adverse selection, sustaining punishments. Equilibria where defaulters are trusted with positive probability improve efficiency, by raising the proportion of likely re-offenders in the pool of defaulters.

We construct Monetary Services (Divisia) Indexes at various levels of aggregation (the broadest of which is M4) from the late 1940s through 1967 employing methods designed to permit these historical series to be spliced to corresponding series currently published by the Center for Financial Stability (CFS), which begin in 1967. The annualized growth rate of our MSI M2 during 1947 to 1967 generally lies between the growth rates of conventional M1 and M2, while the growth rate of MSI M3 is below that of conventional M3 over the same period. Using spliced series, we find that the velocities of the MSI exhibit gradual upward trends from the late 1940s through 1978, with distinct upward shifts in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, while the velocity of conventional M3 trends downward between 1953 and 1982. Using a Fourier demand model, we find elastic substitution between M1 and the non-M1 components of MSI M3 up to 1967, but inelastic substitution between bank and thrift deposits.