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The past three decades have been characterized by vast change and crises in global financial markets—and not in politically unstable countries but in the heart of the developed world, from the Great Recession in the United States to the banking crises in Japan and the Eurozone. As we try to make sense of what caused these crises and how we might reduce risk factors and prevent recurrence, the fields of finance and economics have also seen vast change, as scholars and researchers have advanced their thinking to better respond to the recent crises. A momentous collection of the best recent scholarship, After the Flood illustrates both the scope of the crises’ impact on our understanding of global financial markets and the innovative processes whereby scholars have adapted their research to gain a greater understanding of them. Among the contributors are José Scheinkman and Lars Peter Hansen, who bring up to date decades of collaborative research on the mechanisms that tie financial markets to the broader economy; Patrick Bolton, who argues that limiting bankers’ pay may be more effective than limiting the activities they can undertake; Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote who study the social dynamics of markets and E. Glen Weyl, who argues that economists themselves are influenced by the incentives their consulting opportunities create.

Despite massive investment of money and research aimed at ameliorating third-world poverty, the development strategies of the international financial institutions over the past few decades have been a profound failure. Under the tutelage of the World Bank, developing countries have experienced lower growth and rising inequality compared to previous periods. This book argues that the controversial institution is plagued by a myopic, neoclassical mindset that wrongly focuses on individual rationality and downplays the social and political contexts that can either facilitate or impede development. Drawing on the examples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and transitional European economies, this volume proposes an alternative vision of institutional development with chapter-length applications to finance, state formation, and health care to provide a holistic, contextualized solution to the problems of developing nations.

Who are the agents of financial regulation? Is good (or bad) financial governance merely the work of legislators and regulators? Here the text argues that financial governance is made not just through top-down laws and policies but also through the daily use of mundane legal techniques such as collateral by a variety of secondary agents, from legal technicians and retail investors to financiers and academics and even computerized trading programs. Drawing upon ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Japanese derivatives market, the book explores the uses of collateral in the financial markets as a regulatory device for stabilizing market transactions. How collateral operates, the book suggests, is paradigmatic of a class of low-profile, mundane, but indispensable activities and practices that are all too often ignored as we think about how markets should work and be governed. The book seeks to democratize our understanding of legal techniques, and demonstrate how these day-to-day private actions can be reformed to produce more effective forms of market regulation.

This book is a unique collaboration that looks at derivative finance from the standpoint of the social sciences and the social sciences from that of finance. It joins experts from different intellectual backgrounds with disparate trajectories of application. These include knowledge domains of financial engineering, sociology, anthropology, arts activism, media/cultural studies, design, and philosophy. The social reading of the derivative draws upon discussions of the gift, ritual, play, and performativity while the derivative reading of the social adds concepts like volatility and arbitrage to our social science tool-kit. It creates new juxtapositions to understand the relations between finance and society in our contemporary “derivative capitalism,” like Black and Weber on uncertainty, the gift as a contingent claim, or even the “derivative” nature of skateboarding. The book argues that the breakthrough in derivative finance is the discovery and pricing of volatility, enshrined in the Black-Scholes model. Yet the discovery of volatility is also a cultural phenomenon and this book provides the intellectual framework for understanding it, which is especially important in our “culture and politics of volatility.” The mathematical arcana of contemporary finance often prevent dialog and accessible cross-fertilization among disparate domains. But to avoid the technical leaves us in the dark about how derivative finance insinuates itself into the social. By bringing together diverse authors, the book is a new model for collaboration in which academic disciplines and professional practice work together to understand the social dimensions of the derivative and the derivative dimensions of contemporary capitalism.

The current account deficit of the United States is more than six percent of its gross domestic product—an all-time high. And the rest of the world, including other G7 countries such as Japan and Germany, must collectively run current account surpluses to finance this deficit. How long can such unevenness between imports and exports be sustained, and what form might their eventual reconciliation take? Putting forth scenarios ranging from a gradual correction to a crash landing for the dollar, this book brings together economists from around the globe to consider the origins, status, and future of those disparities. Its collaborators here examine the role of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the history of previous episodes of current account adjustments, and the possibility of the Euro surpassing the dollar as the leading international reserve currency. Although there are areas of broad agreement—that the imbalances will ultimately decline and that currency revaluations will be part of the solution—many areas of contention remain regarding both the dangers of imbalances and the possible forms of adjustment.

Not-for-profit organizations play a critical role in the American economy. In health care, education, culture, and religion, we trust not-for-profit firms to serve the interests of their donors, customers, employees, and society at large. We know that such firms do not try to maximize profits, but what do they maximize? This book attempts to answer that question, assembling experts on the economics of the not-for-profit sector to examine the problems of the health care industry, art museums, universities, and even the medieval church. Contributors look at a number of different aspects of not-for-profit operations, from the problems of fundraising, endowments, and governance to specific issues such as hospital advertising. The picture that emerges is complex and surprising. In some cases, not-for-profit firms appear to work extremely well: competition for workers, customers, and donors leads not-for-profit organizations to function as efficiently as any for-profit firm. In other contexts, large endowments and weak governance allow elite workers to maximize their own interests, rather than those of their donors, customers, or society at large. Taken together, these papers greatly advance our knowledge of the dynamics and operations of not-for-profit organizations, revealing the under-explored systems of pressures and challenges that shape their governance.

Conventional wisdom held that housing prices couldn't fall. But the spectacular boom and bust of the housing market during the first decade of the twenty-first century and millions of foreclosed homeowners have made it clear that housing is no different from any other asset in its ability to climb and crash. This book looks at what happened to prices and construction both during and after the housing boom in different parts of the American housing market, accounting for why certain areas experienced less volatility than others. It then examines the causes of the boom and bust, including the availability of credit, the perceived risk reduction due to the securitization of mortgages, and the increase in lending from foreign sources. Finally, it examines a range of policies that might address some of the sources of recent instability.

Over the past fifteen years, a significant number of industrialized and middle-income countries have adopted inflation targeting as a framework for monetary policymaking. As the name suggests, in such inflation-targeting regimes, the central bank is responsible for achieving a publicly announced target for the inflation rate. While the objective of controlling inflation enjoys wide support among both academic experts and policymakers, and while the countries that have followed this model have generally experienced good macroeconomic outcomes, many important questions about inflation targeting remain. This book explores the many underexamined dimensions of inflation targeting—its potential, its successes, and its limitations—from both a theoretical and an empirical standpoint, and for both developed and emerging economies. The book opens with a discussion of the optimal formulation of inflation-targeting policy and continues with a debate about the desirability of such a model for the United States. The concluding chapters discuss the special problems of inflation targeting in emerging markets, including the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary.

This book bridges the gap between what academics know and what innovation stakeholders— from managers, to investors, to analysts, to consumers—need to know about how new products and services are expected to perform in the marketplace. The book develops a compelling framework that connects the rich academic knowledge on innovation diffusion with that on customer relationship management, thereby marrying our understanding of how consumers adopt innovations with how firms effectively acquire, serve, and retain customers. The result, aptly called innovation equity, is a lens through which to view the commercial potential of innovations. It is a powerful vehicle for placing a dollar value on new products and services that are about to be, or that have recently been, launched. The book further shows how the framework can be used to evaluate the implications of marketing actions, consumer heterogeneity, competition, successive technology generations, and globalization on innovation equity assessments. The exposition is replete with vivid examples from a wide array of domains (such as video games, wireless phone services, computers, tablets, satellite radio, electric vehicles, cloud-based software, pharmaceuticals, and more), which demonstrate how the topics covered apply to real-world situations. A set of hands-on tools for implementing the various topics is provided and, for the interested reader, a companion website features concrete templates that can be adapted to any context. The writing style is highly engaging and the core messages are conveyed using simple, easy-to-grasp language and terminology.

There are certain institutions underlying our modern market-capitalist system that are largely outside the interest and understanding of the general public – e.g., rulemaking for bank capital adequacy, actuarial standards, accounting standards, and auditing practice. In these areas, corporate managers and financial experts such as auditors and bankers possess the technical expertise necessary for informed regulation, enjoy strong economic interests in the outcome, and face little resistance to their lobbying activities from the general public. These areas are known as “thin political markets” to distinguish them from more vibrant and competitive “thick” political processes (e.g., healthcare regulation). This book develops the notion of thin political markets through a vivid exploration of the political processes determining our system of accounting rules upon which depends our ability to reliably measure corporate profits in the economy. The book shows how some corporate interests, in the spirit of increasing profits, have been manipulating the very definition of profit by changing accounting rules. On one level, this corporate behavior embodies the capitalist spirit articulated by Milton Friedman: “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” But the ethics of profit-increasing behavior are premised on the logic of competition, and this logic breaks down in thin political markets. The result is a structural flaw in the determination of critical institutions of our capitalist system, which, if ignored, can undermine the legitimacy of the system. The book closes with ideas on how to fix the problem.

Since banking systems play a crucial role in maintaining the overall health of the economy, the adverse effects of poorly supervised systems may be quite severe. Without some form of vigilant external oversight, banking systems could fall prey to excessive risk taking, moral hazard, and corruption. Prudential supervision provides that oversight, using government regulation and monitoring to ensure the soundness of the banking system and, by extension, the economy at large. The contributors to this volume examine the current state of prudential supervision, focusing on fundamental issues and key pragmatic concerns. Why is prudential supervision so important? What kinds of excess must it guard against? What particular forms does it take? Which of these are the most effective deterrents against mismanagement and system overload in today's rapidly shifting financial climate? The contributors foresee a continued movement beyond simple regulatory rules in banking and toward a more active evaluation and supervision of a bank's risk management practices.

In the fall of 2010 and the spring of 2011, the NBER held two conferences that brought together leading academic researchers, central bankers, and other financial market experts to discuss ideas on measurement and macroeconomic modelling. This book contains a selection of the papers that were presented at the conferences. Existing measurement systems focus on measuring flows and stock variables. However, simply focusing on flow or stock variables is insufficient, especially in a world of derivatives that may divorce initial risk exposures and cash flows. Thus a theme that runs through the measurement scenarios analyzed in this book is the importance of measuring risks to form a comprehensive "risk topography" of the economy. A large part of macro risk is endogenously generated by the system. Systemic crises are the result of a negative shock, or trigger, affecting a fragile or vulnerable economy. While the triggers vary from crisis to crisis, the underlying vulnerabilities have much more commonality across crises. This book informs us about vulnerabilities as opposed to triggers and outlines the issues that might be addressed by a new measurement system that captures the linkage between finance and the macroeconomy. Many of the chapters explain how a given measurement can be used to further understand systemic risk and thus illustrate the potential of using measurement to inform models.

Until about twenty years ago, the consensus view on the cause of financial-system distress was fairly simple: a run on one bank could easily turn to a panic involving runs on all banks, destroying some and disrupting the financial system. Since then, however, a series of events—such as emerging-market debt crises, bond-market meltdowns, and the Long-Term Capital Management episode—has forced a rethinking of the risks facing financial institutions and the tools available to measure and manage these risks. This book examines the various risks affecting financial institutions and explores a variety of methods to help institutions and regulators more accurately measure and forecast risk. The contributors—from academic institutions, regulatory organizations, and banking—bring a wide range of perspectives and experience to the issue. The result is a volume that points a way forward to greater financial stability and better risk management of financial institutions.