Archive
US Pharma’s Financialized Business Model
Price gouging in the US pharmaceutical drug industry goes back more than three decades.
The Functions of the Stock Market and the Fallacies of Shareholder Value
Conventional wisdom has it that the primary function of the stock market is to raise cash for companies for the purpose of investing in productive capabilities. The conventional wisdom is wrong.
The Mismeasure of Mammon: Uses and Abuses of Executive Pay Data
Report to the Institute for New Economic Thinking on the statistical measurement and policy implications of the compensation of the highest- paid U.S. corporate executives
Political Lending
Using a unique dataset provided by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), we document a direct channel through which financial institutions contribute to the net worth of members of the U.S. Congress, particularly those sitting on the finance committees in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Ethics vs. Ethos in US and UK Megabanking
Company law in the US and UK fails to acknowledge that authorities’ propensity to rescue giant banks from the consequences of insolvency assigns taxpayers a coerced and badly structured equity stake in too-big-to-fail institutions.
Labor in the Twenty-First Century: The Top 0.1% and the Disappearing Middle-Class
The ongoing explosion of the incomes of the richest households and the erosion of middle-class employment opportunities for most of the rest have become integrally related in the now-normal operation of the U.S. economy.
Financial Crises, Political Constraints, and Policy Responses
We analyze the political environment in the wake of financial crises and try to infer its implications on decision making and economic policies.
Income Distribution and the Current Account: A Sectoral Perspective
We analyse the link between income distribution and the current account for the period 1972-2007. We find that rising (top-end) personal inequality leads to a decrease of the current account, ceteris paribus.
Method to simultaneously determine stock, flow, and parameter values in large stock flow consistent models
Stock flow consistent macroeconomic models suffer from the lack of a coherent estimation method due to the complicated nature of the modeling process.
Debt Overhang and Capital Regulation
We analyze shareholders’ incentives to change the leverage of a firm that has already borrowed substantially. As a result of debt overhang, shareholders have incentives to resist reductions in leverage that make the remaining debt safer.