This first volume in a three-volume exposition of Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics" explores a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. This is the first volume in a three-volume exposition of Martin Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics"--a term he coined in 1959 to describe the theoretical underpinnings needed for the construction of an economic dynamics. The goal is to develop a process-oriented theory of money and financial institutions that reconciles micro- and macroeconomics, using as a prime tool the theory of games in strategic and extensive form. The approach involves a search for minimal financial institutions that appear as a logical, technological, and institutional necessity, as part of the "rules of the game." Money and financial institutions are assumed to be the basic elements of the network that transmits the sociopolitical imperatives to the economy. Volume 1 deals with a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. Volume 2 explores the new economic features that arise when we consider multi-period finite and infinite horizon economies. Volume 3 will consider the specific role of financial institutions and government, and formulate the economic financial control problem linking micro- and macroeconomics.
From the Nobel Prize–winning economist and former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, a landmark book that provides vital lessons for understanding financial crises and their sometimes-catastrophic economic effects As chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve during the Global Financial Crisis, Ben Bernanke helped avert a greater financial disaster than the Great Depression. And he did so by drawing directly on what he had learned from years of studying the causes of the economic catastrophe of the 1930s—work for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize. This influential work is collected in Essays on the Great Depression, an important account of the origins of the Depression and the economic lessons it teaches.
This volume, dedicated to John W. Kensinger, explores a variety of topics in financial economics, including firm growth, investment risks, and the profitability of the banking industry. With its global perspective, Essays in Financial Economics is a valuable addition to the bookshelf of any researcher in finance.
Do financial derivatives enhance or impede innovation? We aim to answer this question by examining the relationship between equity options markets and standard measures of firm innovation. Our baseline results show that firms with more options trading activity generate more patents and patent citations per dollar of R&D invested. We then investigate how more active options markets affect firms' innovation strategy. Our results suggest that firms with greater trading activity pursue a more creative, diverse and risky innovation strategy. We discuss potential underlying mechanisms and show that options appear to mitigate managerial career concerns that would induce managers to take actions that boost short-term performance measures. Finally, using several econometric specifications that try to account for the potential endogeneity of options trading, we argue that the positive effect of options trading on firm innovation is causal.
Every Economics textbook today teaches that questions of values and morality lie outside of, are in fact excluded from, the field of Economics and its proper domain of study, "the economy." Yet the dominant cultural and media narrative in response to major economic crisis is almost always one of moral outrage. How do we reconcile this tension or explain this paradox by which Economics seems to have both everything and nothing to do with values? The discipline of modern economics hypostatizes and continually reifies a domain it calls "the economy"; only this epistemic practice makes it possible to falsely separate the question of value from the broader inquiry into the economic. And only if we have first eliminated value from the domain of economics can we then transform stories of financial crisis or massive corporate corruption into simple tales of ethics. But if economic forces establish, transform, and maintain relations of value then it proves impossible to separate economics from questions of value, because value relations only come to be in the world by way of economic logics. This means that the "positive economics" spoken of so fondly in the textbooks is nothing more than a contradiction in terms, and as this book demonstrates, there's no such thing as "the economy." To grasp the basic logic of capital is to bring into view the unbreakable link between economics and value.
This dissertation consists of three essays that examine various problems in financial economics. Chapter 1 fills in a gap in the IPO literature by documenting a close connection between IPO underpricing and the long-term underperformance of IPOs. Firms going public in periods of low underpricing do not underperform in the long run, while firms going public in high underpricing periods do. Furthermore, IPOs in later stages of high underpricing periods underperform even relative to their offer prices, which suggests that many of the most "underpriced" IPOs are in fact priced above fundamental value. This result is unlikely to be explained by differences in risk, or to be driven by a peso problem. I also find that firms going public in later stages of high underpricing periods display worse operating performance and profitability, lower asset growth, lower investment rates and higher cash holdings. Finally, I provide evidence that investor sentiment is stronger in high-underpricing periods. These results are consistent with a setting in which low quality firms, in periods in which the average underpricing in the market is high, try to exploit investors' sentiment by going public. Chapter 2 looks at the return predictability information in Single Country Closed-End Fund (SCCEF) discounts. It is long argued that discounts in closed-end funds are caused by differences in sentiment between investors that trade the fund and investors that trade the underlying assets. SCCEFs provide an interesting setting given the clear market segmentation. American SCCEFs are priced by American investors, while underlying assets are mainly traded by investors in the respective country. I argue that if cross-sectional and time-series variation in SCCEFs are linked to differences in sentiment, then the SCCEF discount can be used to predict future performance of SCCEFs, international stock markets, or both. The evidence on international stock markets' return predictability using SCCEF discounts is mixed. A trading strategy designed to exploit potential differences in sentiment by buying and selling international stock indices delivers alphas of around 90bps per month in an International CAPM. Adding three extra factors: value, size and momentum in U.S. equity does not change the result. However, once we control for international value and momentum in stock markets, we no longer observe positive alphas for short-horizon investments. The evidence on SCCEF return predictability from SCCEF discounts is very strong. For all three asset pricing models considered, a strategy that exploits differences in sentiment yields positive alphas, with magnitudes ranging from 2% to 4% per month. In Chapter 3, I investigate how the stock market reacts to earnings surprises announced during major sport events in the U.S. In a rational and frictionless market, investors should not react differently to announcements released during sport events. However, major sport events combine two known psychological biases. First, sports can be distracting, impairing investors' judgment. Second, sports can change people's mood. Hence, through these biases, market prices could be affected. Considering the Super Bowl, World Series of Baseball and NBA finals I find that investors, immediately after sport events, underreact to positive surprises, and overreact to negative surprises in earnings. After this initial reaction, I find that, investors undo their 'mistakes' in the following weeks to the announcement. However, for the most negative and positive surprises, they over-compensate. In this study, I show that non relevant financial events have an impact on market prices. Moreover, I show that the observed impact cannot be explained only by limited attention, as investor mood seems to be crucial to explain investors' reactions.
