Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution blog), along with Alex Tabarrok, has just launched Marginal Revolution University (hat tip: Graham Brownlow). The first course they are offering is Development Economics. This is probably the most important course any finance or economics students could take as it is all about why some economies have become wealthy whilst others have become poor. The course is a series of short videos, which are well worth watching. The first lecture is below; all other lectures can be accessed at Marginal Revolution University.
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...