Is the continued sluggishness of the world's advanced economies a result of the financial crisis or is it a crisis in innovation? Has the financial crisis exposed a deeper malaise in advanced economies in that they are no longer making technological breakthroughs? Since the Industrial Revolution, economic growth has been spurred on by large technological breakthroughs - think steam, railways, the telegraph, electricity, the combustion engine, flight, chemical engineering, the computer, and the Internet. But have we run out of innovation with the result that economic growth will stagnate? Click here to read an op-ed piece by Kenneth Rogoff on this issue (hat tip: Graham Brownlow). Rogoff argues that the malaise is due to the financial crisis not an innovation crisis.
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...