I have just spent a week in Ellmau, a picturesque village in the Austrian Tirol. I love visiting Austria. However, it had been five years since I was last in Austria, and the changes in the make-up of my fellow holidaymakers was remarkable. On my visits before 2007, there had been many Irish, English, Scottish, French and Italian tourists. In 2012, 95% of the tourists in our resort were German. What does this tell us about the respective health of these European economies? In addition, I was taken aback by the levels of freight traffic out of Austria and into Germany. Germany (using my extremely unscientific methods) appears to be booming.
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...