As has become widely known in the past few years, the mutual-fund industry is more concentrated than ever, especially because of the growing use of index funds.  Whether this is a problem and how to respond have been the topics …

Like advanced economies, emerging economies were buffeted by the global economic slowdown stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns of national economies. In 2020, emerging economies (and developing countries) contracted by 2.1 percent (their steepest decline in many …

Discussions on the role of higher-order beliefs (investor beliefs about the beliefs of other investors) in financial markets can be traced back to Keynes’ (1936) comparison of the stock market to a beauty contest. Investors “are concerned,” he famously said, …

Since its creation in 2008, the blockchain has seemed incompatible with legal constraint. Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, hailed the blockchain’s “unstructured simplicity.” Even now, apostles of distributed ledger technology (DLT) strongly resist the idea that …

When the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered major economies in March 2020, it also wreaked havoc on financial markets. In the first few weeks of March, investment-grade corporate bonds lost roughly a fifth of their value, on par with the declines in …

Cryptocurrencies are by now widely known as electronically generated and stored currencies that enable users to trade tokens. The tokens are exchanged anonymously through a decentralized payment system: the blockchain. To further anonymity, the parties to cryptocurrency transactions are identified …

Almost all countries have historically allowed businesses to write off interest expenses against taxable income. Critics argue that the tax-favored status of debt has created a corporate debt pile-up, thereby exacerbating economic downturns. This argument, which gained more attention after …

Venture capital and private equity funds are important equity investors in private companies (Hand 2005; Stromberg 2008; Kaplan and Stromberg 2009), and their investments are characterized by an extensive search process that imposes significant upfront costs for the funds (Chen …

Numbers generally convey a sense of certainty – especially in accounting and finance. However, this perceived precision also makes it easier to use them in misleading ways. An extensive literature in political science and mass communications discusses how numbers, taken …

We study the relative usefulness of earnings announcements for valuation from the perspective of information externalities: the use of industry peer information for valuation, particularly for IPO pricing. Externalities of accounting information are one of the primary justifications for disclosure …

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth has increased by over $100 billion since 2004, but he has paid relatively little income tax. Why? Because of the “realization rule:” Zuckerberg has not sold—and thus “realized” the gains on—the great majority of …

Though a bit provocative, this headline raises a liminal question on the various projects of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDBs): Which  governance will apply to them? Or as Juvenal, the poet in ancient Rome, famously asked, “Who will guard the …