Last week I was reading about Bitcoin, the open source peer-to-peer digital currency, in a technology magazine. It was predicted that Bitcoins would become an alternative to central bank issued currency as they circumvent the traditional banking and payments system. As a result, their value against the dollar had surged from $20 at the beginning of 2013 to $266 dollars yesterday. However, yesterday, after reaching this high, the price of a Bitcoin fell back to $150. Click here to see price and trading history of Bitcoin. Some experts think that these price patterns signal that there is a Bitcoin 'bubble' - see here and here.
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...