Some of the
authors at Education News sent me a
neat infographic after reading one of my previous posts on the higher education
bubble. Click here to see it. The
accumulation of debt by US students to pay for their education is such that the
sum of total student debt exceeds the sum of total credit card debt in the
US! My fear is that the UK will
eventually head in the same direction, with ever-increasing tuition fees being
paid for by an ever-increasing student debt.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne...