Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A Crisis of Beliefs
How investor expectations move markets and the economy The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 caught markets and regulators by surprise. Although the government rushed to rescue other financial institutions from a similar fate after Lehman, it could not prevent the deepest recession in postwar history. A Crisis of Beliefs makes us rethink the financial crisis and the nature of economic risk. In this authoritative and comprehensive book, two of today’s most insightful economists reveal how our beliefs shape financial markets, lead to expansions of credit and leverage, and expose the economy to major risks. Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer carefully walk readers through the un...
A Crisis of Beliefs
"How investor expectations move markets and the economy. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 caught markets and regulators by surprise. Although the government rushed to rescue other financial institutions from a similar fate after Lehman, it could not prevent the deepest recession in postwar history. A Crisis of Beliefs makes us rethink the financial crisis and the nature of economic risk. In this authoritative and comprehensive book, two of today's most insightful economists reveal how our beliefs shape financial markets, lead to expansions of credit and leverage, and expose the economy to major risks. Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer carefully walk readers through the un...
Finance and the Preservation of Wealth
We introduce the model of asset management developed in Gennaioli, Shleifer, and Vishny (GSV, 2014) into a Solow-style neoclassical growth model with diminishing returns to capital. Savers rely on trusted intermediaries to manage their wealth (claims on capital stock), who can charge fees above costs to trusting investors. In this model, the ratio of financial income to GDP increases with the ratio of aggregate wealth to GDP. Both rise along the convergence path to steady state growth. We examine several further implications of the model for management fees, unit costs of finance, and the consequences of shocks to trust and to the capital stock.
Legal Evolution and Contract Evolution Under Imperfect Enforcement
We model optimal contracts and the evolution of precedents by introducing imperfect enforcement into a standard incomplete contracts setup. We assume that biased trial courts can refuse to verify novel evidence but are bound to respect precedents, namely to verify evidence that other judges verified in past cases. Despite judicial biases, optimal contracts are innovative (contingent on both precedents and novel evidence). Noisy evidence and judicial biases, however, introduce enforcement risk and cause incentives to be low-powered. The use of innovative contracts is key. Their litigation refines the law and makes it more informative, so enforcement improves. As a result, parties can in turn write more complete contracts, which enable higher- powered incentives and improve welfare. This beneficial mechanism is hampered by judicial bias, which slows down legal evolution and causes enforcement risk to persist for a long time.
Banks, Government Bonds, and Default
We analyze holdings of public bonds by over 20,000 banks in 191 countries, and the role of these bonds in 20 sovereign defaults over 1998-2012. Banks hold many public bonds (on average 9% of their assets), particularly in less financially-developed countries. During sovereign defaults, banks increase their exposure to public bonds, especially large banks and when expected bond returns are high. At the bank level, bondholdings correlate negatively with subsequent lending during sovereign defaults. This correlation is mostly due to bonds acquired in pre-default years. These findings shed light on alternative theories of the sovereign default-banking crisis nexus.
Economics and Politics of Alternative Institutional Reforms
We compare the economic consequences and political feasibility of reforms aimed at reducing barriers to entry (deregulation) and improving contractual enforcement (legal reform). Deregulation fosters entry, thereby increasing the number of firms (entrepreneurship) and the average quality of management (meritocracy). Legal reform also reduces financial constraints on entry, but in addition it facilitates transfers of control of incumbent firms, from untalented to talented managers. Since when incumbent firms are better run entry by new firms is less profitable, in general equilibrium legal reform may improve meritocracy at the expense of entrepreneurship. As a result, legal reform encounters ...
Salience in Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect
We provide a novel account of experimental evidence for the endowment effect using the salience mechanism (Bordalo, Gennaioli, and Shleifer, 2011). The two-stage procedure implemented in experiments implies that the endowed good and other goods are evaluated in different contexts. We describe conditions under which the standard effect occurs, but also account for recent evidence such as a reverse endowment effect for bads and a role for reference prices in modulating the WTA-WTP gap.
Salience and Consumer Choice
We present a theory of context-dependent choice in which a consumer's attention is drawn to salient attributes of goods, such as quality or price. An attribute is salient for a good when it stands out among the good's characteristics, in the precise sense of being furthest away in that good from its average level in the choice set (or more generally, an evoked set). A local thinker chooses among goods by attaching disproportionately high weights to their salient attributes. When goods are characterized by only one quality attribute and price, salience tilts choices toward goods with higher ratios of quality to price. We use the model to account for a variety of disparate bits of evidence, including decoy effects in consumer choice, context-dependent willingness to pay, balance of qualities in desirable goods, and shifts in demand toward low quality goods when all prices in a category rise. We then apply the model to study discounts and sales, and to explain demand for low deductible insurance.
