Financial policymaking after crises: Public versus private interest
Financial crises invariably lead governments to intervene in one way or another, whether to ease the damage to middle-class voters, to respond to the...
Making furlough portable would encourage people to move into new jobs
Furlough is here to stay – in the UK, at least until March. The author argues that making part of furlough income portable would encourage people to...
Reform bankruptcy laws to save businesses from going under
Faced with the prospect of hundreds of thousands of businesses going under, the UK changed its bankruptcy laws in June. Other G7 countries that put...
COVID-19 hurt women’s employment the hardest
Changes to maternity leave and pension regulation, among other policy tools, can lessen the burden on women.
Financial Policymaking after Crises: Public vs. Private Interests
What drives actual government policies after financial crises? In this paper, we first present a simple model of post-crisis policymaking driven by...
Reviving tourism in the COVID era: bungs, tax cuts and no more tour buses
Tourism has taken an enormous hit during the pandemic. Simeon Djankov (LSE) looks at some of the ways governments are trying to revive the sector –...
Moving property sales online could give developing economies a boost
In some countries, COVID-19 has prompted property transactions to move online, and in these places the market has picked up as a result. It represents...
Price and Probability: Decomposing the Takeover Effects of Anti-Takeover Provisions
Journal of Finance, 75 (5), 2591-2629
Measuring property rights institutions
In a world of limited public capacity, which rules and institutions that protect property rights have the largest impact on economic activity? This...
Five things the French and German recovery plans have in common (and what’s missing)
France and Germany have announced big recovery plans. Simeon Djankov looks at what they have in common – and what’s missing from both.
Information Dispersion across Employees and Stock Returns
The Review of Financial Studies, 34(10), 4785–4831.
Firms in emerging markets fall to COVID-19
Young, small, and domestic market-oriented firms are more likely to fall into financial distress.
Reform chatter and democracy
It is often argued that democracy is the least imperfect form of government mainly because of the existence of a ‘self-correcting’ mechanism stemming...
Support for small businesses amid COVID-19
A sizeable proportion of enterprises, especially SMEs, in receipt of financial assistance from the government will fail to repay. This column asks...
Time inconsistency in recent monetary policy
A decade of near-zero, and even negative, interest rates in advanced economies has both encouraged the continued accumulation of debt and a search for...
Firms in Financial Distress
We use simple accounting measures to estimate the share of private manufacturing firms in financial distress under a hypothetical scenario of losing...
