Papers & Opinions


Paper


Posted on 18 July 2021

We develop a model of political cycles driven by time-varying risk aversion. Agents choose to work in the public or private sector and to vote Democrat or Republican. In equilibrium,...

Paper


Posted on 16 July 2021

We show that political polarization between directors and the CEO negatively impacts the effectiveness of corporate boards. At the director level, polarization increases directors’ incentive to monitor the CEO but...

Paper


Posted on 15 July 2021

What political legacy is bequeathed by national health crises such as epidemics? We show that epidemic exposure in an individual’s “impressionable years” (ages 18 to 25) has a persistent negative...

Paper


Posted on 7 July 2021

We first present a simple model of post-crisis policymaking driven by both public and private interests. Using a novel dataset covering 94 countries between 1973 and 2015, we then establish...

Paper


Posted on 3 July 2021

Executive teams in U.S. firms are becoming increasingly politically polarized. We establish this new fact using political affiliations from voter registration records for top executives of S&P 1500 firms between...

Paper


Posted on 3 July 2021

We compare the findings of central bank researchers and academic economists regarding the macroeconomic effects of quantitative easing (QE). We find that central bank papers find QE to be more...

Paper


Posted on 2 July 2021

We examine the response from both local governments and their voters to a sudden increase in public debt burden. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the ex post cost of...

Paper


Posted on 2 July 2021

In the paper "The Real Effects of Bank Runs. Evidence from the French Great Depression (1930-1931)" we study how competition between regulated and unregulated institutions can trigger financial instability and...

Paper


Posted on 30 June 2021

In this paper, we study the consequences of banks’ political connectedness for economic activity. We focus on the subset of banks that donate to candidates in US congressional elections, and...

Paper


Posted on 22 June 2021

We investigate how politicians’ ideologies affect economic outcomes and financial development through firm-level channels. We explore a unique setting of ideological change in China from Mao’s ideology to Deng’s around...