Papers & Opinions


Paper


Posted on 27 November 2023

We examine the roles of commercial bank ownership and CEO faction membership in facilitating or in hindering the implementation of central bank policy in China. Both ownership and membership matter:...

Opinion


Posted on 6 November 2023

This year’s edition of the CEPR Conference Series on the Political Economy of Finance took place in the beautiful Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam. This edition gathered a great lineup of scholars...

Paper


Posted on 5 October 2023

We formalize Zingales' (2017) argument about the link between corporate economic characteristics and political influence in a setup that exhibits an inverse relationship between citizens' participation in production and the...

Paper


Posted on 18 July 2023

A first-order concern regarding sustainable finance is that it may crowd out individual support for more effective, policy-driven approaches to address societal challenges. We test the validity of this concern...

Paper


Posted on 11 May 2023

Using data on roll-call voting patterns of U.S. state legislators from 1993 to 2016, we find a negative relationship between firm investment and state legislative polarization, measured as the ideological...

Paper


Posted on 20 April 2023

In the last three decades, legal delegation of monetary policy to independent central banks (CBI) has achieved the status of a global norm of good governance. The recent backlash against this...

Paper


Posted on 29 March 2023

National surveillance is often insufficient to identify transnational issues. One solution to this problem is to delegate to international organizations (IOs) the power to surveil activity in numerous states simultaneously,...

Paper


Posted on 9 February 2023

Because of secrecy, little is known about the political economy of central bank lending. Utilizing a novel, hand-collected historical daily dataset on loans to commercial banks, we analyze how personal...

Paper


Posted on 25 January 2023

Since the 1980s many countries have reformed the institutional framework governing their central banks to increase operational independence. Collecting systematic biographical information, international press coverage, and independent expert opinions, we...

Paper


Posted on 7 November 2022

We use the acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. by News Corporation in 2007 to study whether investors respond to a news source’s political affiliation. Following the acquisition, the price...

Paper


Posted on 24 October 2022

Having “friends in high places” can bring many benefits. But what happens if these “friends” are involved in shady business dealings, use taxpayer funds to finance lavish offices or vacations,...

Paper


Posted on 3 October 2022

Ideology, the belief system about "how the society should be governed" that some group of people collectively sustains, is a critical factor that motivates economic decisions in democratic countries. However,...

Paper


Posted on 5 September 2022

Does democracy shape international merger activity? If so, how? The short answer is yes because democratic institutions are conducive to higher-quality corporate governance. In a new paper, we examine 104,425...

Paper


Posted on 25 August 2022

We examine the causal effect of politicians' partisan ideologies on firms' industrial pollution decisions. Using a regression discontinuity design involving close U.S. congressional elections, we show that plants increase pollution...

Paper


Posted on 4 August 2022

We characterize conditions under which the majority of voters supports a bailout despite incurring bailout expenditures. This yields inefficiently high investments when economic prospects are good. When economic prospects are...