The Halting Gender Reforms in Burundi
In the sixty years since its independence Burundi has taken some steps to improve the legal standing of women in the economy and society. These steps...
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Why Do Boards Exist? Governance Design in the Absence of Corporate Law
Review of Financial Studies, 36 (5),1788–1836
Gender Legal Reform in Zimbabwe: Wanting
Zimbabwe has introduced some legal reforms towards women’s rights in the first three dozen years since its independence in 1980, though these changes...
Personality Differences and Investment Decision-Making
We survey thousands of affluent American investors to examine the relationship between personalities and investment decisions. The Big Five...
Options-based systemic risk, financial distress, and macroeconomic downturns
Journal of Financial Markets, 65, 100834
Bank Presence and Health
This paper demonstrates that increasing bank presence in underserved areas can substantially improve households’ health. I apply a regression...
Towards a new tax system in Ukraine
Ukraine’s tax system functions primarily on the basis of unofficial rules of tax collection. This divergence between law and practice predates Russia...
Gender Legal Reforms in Zambia: Motivated by International Conventions
In 2023, Zambia ranked 17th among African countries on the World Bank’s Women Business and the Law index, a notable decline over a half century. The...
Latent Fragility: Conditioning Banks' Joint Probability of Default on the Financial Cycle
We propose the CoJPoD, a novel framework explicitly linking the cross-sectional and cyclical dimensions of systemic risk. In this framework, banking...
A Preferred-Habitat Model of Term Premia, Exchange Rates, and Monetary Policy Spillovers
We develop a two-country model in which currency and bond markets are populated by different investor clienteles, and segmentation is partly overcome...
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Corporate Capture of Blockchain Governance
Review of Financial Studies, 36 (4), 1364–1407
Passive Investing and the Rise of Mega-Firms
We study how passive investing affects asset prices. Flows into passive funds raise disproportionately the stock prices of the economy’s largest firms...
Does Board Size Matter?
This paper uses legal board size requirements to test whether board size affects firm performance and value. Since 1976, the minimum size of German...
