Discussion Papers

How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights, including those of possession and transfer, influence the shape of cities...

This paper investigates the role of sentiment in the US macro economy from 1920 to 1934. We use 2.4 million digitized articles from the Wall St...

Since 1978 China has developed strongly using a particular form of capitalism which has relied upon close relations between private enterprise and the...

This paper studies how managers react to shareholder empowerment that makes the votes on shareholder proposals regarding majority-voting director...

Universal owners - large institutional investors with highly diversified and long-term portfolios spanning the entire global capital market - have...

We use a 50-year panel of gendered laws for 190 countries to examine whether laws and legal change are associated with several measures of women’s...

What drives actual government policies after financial crises? In this paper, we first present a simple model of post-crisis policymaking driven by...

We explore the dynamics of media chatter about economic reforms using text analysis from about a billion newspaper articles in 28 languages. We show...

We theoretically analyze how index investing affects financial markets using a dynamic exchange economy with heterogeneous investors and two Lucas...

This paper explores the effect of oil shocks on electoral outcomes. Using a new polling and election dataset for 207 elections across 50 democracies...

What will be the political legacy of the Coronavirus pandemic? We find that epidemic exposure in an individual’s “impressionable years” (ages 18 to 25...

This paper offers for the first time a global picture of gender discrimination by the law as it affects women’s economic opportunity and charts the...

This paper develops a heterogeneous firm-dynamics model to jointly study firms’ currency debt composition and investment choices. In our model...

The EU’s 2019 Insolvency Directive increases debt holders’ control over bankruptcy reorganization proceedings, mirroring recent trends in U.S. Chapter...

We examine a new data set of laws and practices governing public procurement, as well as procurement outcomes, in 187 countries. We measure regulation...

We estimate the survival time of nearly 7,000 firms in a dozen of high-income and middle-income countries in a scenario of extreme economic distress...